This summer, I participated in Passport to Practice. The focus was on competencies outside of legal know-how needed for success in the legal profession. It was great! I felt vindicated (I am selfish, I am wrong). But one major take-away? So. Much. Jargon.

For instance: valuation. What does that even mean? According to Oxford Dictionary, valuation is “an estimation of something’s worth, especially one carried out by a professional appraiser.” Since I’m not a professional appraiser, I’m going to think about valuation as: what do I value and why?

Step 1: Choose Your Big 8. Which values from chart below resonate to you when it comes to your career? Initially, I found myself making arguments for adopting as many of the poor, defenseless values as I could. (Note: not a helpful exercise). My Big 8 are:

  • Accountability;
  • Adventure;
  • Compassion;
  • Diversity;
  • Enjoyment/Fun;
  • Flexibility;
  • Generosity; and
  • Learning.
Advancement Competency Enjoyment/Fun Efficiency Security
Adventure Individuality Loyalty Dignity Influence
Aesthetics Equality Credibility Collaboration Learning
Affiliation Integrity Honesty Stewardship Compassion
Artistic Creativity Service Innovativeness Empathy Friendliness
Diversity Responsibility Teamwork Accomplishment Discipline/Order
Autonomy Accuracy Excellence Courage Generosity
Meaningful
Work		 Respect Accountability Wisdom Persistence
Moral
Fulfillment		 Dedication Empowerment Security Optimism
Physical
Challenge		 Improvement Quality Dependability Flexibility

Step 2: Apply Those Critical Thinking Skills, Work Edition. Why do you work? What defines worthwhile work? How does it related to the individual, others, and society? What does money have to do with work? What do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with work?

These questions are basic… and tricky. Why I work? Capitalism means I need resources to obtain Maslow’s staples: food, water, and shelter. I have to work to survive. Oddly, survival is not one of my Big 8. I like to work, too, especially when I get to help someone figure something out. Like when a student and I talked through a math problem. The student needed a different perspective, a translation of the instructions, and someone they felt safe asking for help. Or when I helped someone complete the gauntlet of obtaining their food handling certification (5 hours and $47 dollars later). I work because vulnerable people are being taken advantage of everywhere. It’s just not right and I have the opportunity to try and do something about it.

Step 3: Apply Those Critical Thinking Skills, Life Edition. What is the purpose of life? What is the relationship between individual and others? Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in? What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife in your life?

Step 4: Find the Rub. Where do your views on work and life complement one another? Where do they clash? Does one drive the other (and if so, how)?

I honestly was not expecting such a deep dive. Why aren’t these conversations happening as part of law school? Why is thinking about my life, how my values impact my work, not part of law school?

< Hwang, Ji Hye>

 

Ji Hye is a J.D. Candidate at University of New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce School of Law.

She graduated from Ewha Womans University, South Korea, in 2017. Her undergraduate major was English Language and Literature; she double-majored in Digital Humanities (Scranton Honor’s Program), and also minored in Computer Science and Engineering as a part of SCSC program. SCSC stands for Samsung Convergence Software Course, which was a certification program for non-engineering students to promote software education. Ji Hye also studied Filmmaking at Stephens College, MO, during the 2014-2015 academic year as an exchange student.

Ji Hye is mainly interested in Copyright and Trademarks law. She is willing to learn more about Immigration and Consumer law as well.

 

This blog post is a response to a design-thinking and race-based advocacy challenge for the Access to Justice Tech Fellowship.

“In all too many cases, I had the sense that if only the immigrant had competent counsel at the very outset of immigration proceedings… the outcome might have been different, the noncitizen might have prevailed.”

– Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann, Second Circuit Court of Appeals

Immigrants in removal proceedings have a statutory right to counsel. Unlike criminal defendants, however, indigent immigrants are not given government-funded counsel and instead must obtain representation at their own expense. Without an attorney, immigrants represent themselves in extremely complex proceedings. Even children in removal proceedings are expected to represent themselves if they can’t afford a lawyer or find a pro bono lawyer.

There are amazing organizations that offer free legal services, like Keep Tucson Together and the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. However, Bill Ong Hing, author of this Slate article that calls for government-funded representation, emphasizes that:

“There is simply not enough legal aid and pro bono help available for those who need it.”

So without government-funded representation, most immigrant respondents appear pro se.

The American Immigration Council reports that, based on data collected from 2007-2012, only 37% of all immigrants in removal proceedings had counsel. And just 14% of detained immigrants had counsel during this same period. Immigrants with hearings in small cities were the least likely to have representation.

We know that immigrants with representation have better outcomes.

For example, the same AIC report states that detained immigrants with counsel were 4x as likely to be released from detention than pro se detained immigrants.

In 2011, New York City piloted a pro bono agency that provided free deportation defense. According to the New York Times, “immigrants in the Varick Street Immigration Court are now 11 times more likely to win their cases than before the program began.” This program is now fully funded and, by 2017, the “rate of success — defined as the immigrant’s being allowed to stay in the United States — had risen by 1,100 percent.”

This means that there are wildly disparate outcomes depending on if you can find and afford to hire an attorney.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last several weeks in relation to my fellowship project evaluating the use of video teleconferencing (VTC) technology in immigration courts (for more on this, see my previous post!).

For my project, I’m interviewing attorneys who represent immigrants detained at La Palma Correctional Center about their experiences with hearings conducted over VTC. I’ve heard some horrifying things about their experiences, which will no doubt be the subject of a future blog post. I keep wondering, though, about pro se immigrant respondents. If attorneys are reporting terrible hearings where judges mute immigrants’ VTC feeds or make verbally abusive remarks to the attorneys, what are these VTC hearings like for immigrants without legal counsel?

Pima County must follow New York City’s lead and create an Office of Immigration Representation to ensure that Pima County residents are not forced to go through complicated immigration proceedings alone. 

A system can’t purport to promise full and fair hearings without guaranteeing government-funded representation, especially when we know that outcomes vary significantly based on access to representation.

The Pima County Justice for All campaign reports that last year a staggering 98% of immigrants appearing at the Tucson Immigration Court did not have representation:

“Last year, close to 24,000 cases were processed through Tucson Immigration Court. Of those cases, 98% of people did not have a lawyer to help represent and defend them in court. These are not unknown individuals, these are families, friends, and neighbors who have been in the area, paying into our tax systems and helping build our communities, for years. Our friends are entitled to proper representation and support.”

An Office of Immigration Representation, funded by Pima County, would eradicate the disparities between immigrants with and without counsel. No one should be deported because they can’t afford a lawyer (maybe no one should be deported at all, but that’s a conversation for another day).

When I received an offer to intern for an organization that advocates for the protection of civil liberties, I felt a little like a middle schooler whose mom scored tickets to see the Jonas Brothers circa 2007. My mom never got me tickets to see the Jonas Brothers, something I don’t hold against her, but I knew classmates who went and I’m drawing on their experience here.

Then, adding to my excitement, I also was given the amazing opportunity to be a fellow in the Access to Justice Tech Fellowship program.

I am so unbelievably thankful for the opportunity to learn about lawyering from my host organization and to have the extra fellowship curriculum enhance my summer. As an A2J Tech Fellow, I am spending my summer working on a project for my host organization that centers on access to justice and technology.

My fellowship project focuses on evaluating the use of video teleconferencing (VTC) technology in immigration courts. VTC use has become increasingly common, with Ingrid V. Eagly reporting in her 2015 law review article that one-third of all detained immigrants appear for their hearings over VTC. Proponents argue that VTC makes courts more accessible, speeds judicial processes, and reduces court costs. However, many are concerned that VTC usage raises due process issues, from interfering with the detainee’s ability to confer confidentially with their attorney to technology-related delays to judges making credibility determinations off of a grainy or pixelated video feed (check out this article from the ABA Journal or this report from the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights for more on this).

Side note: this topic has suddenly become even more relevant with courts not holding in-person hearings due to the pandemic. See the below video for a jury trial over VTC!

 

I live in Tucson, Arizona, about an hour from the La Palma Correctional Center (LPCC) where numerous immigrants are detained.

“It’s a dry heat!” – everyone in Tucson

Many LPCC detainees appear at the Tucson Immigration Court over VTC, unlike the detained immigrants at the Florence or Eloy detention centers who appear in person at courts on-site. The detained immigrants’ attorneys, if they have one, must choose between appearing from LPCC with their clients or being in the courtroom with the judge.

Originally, I was supposed to coordinate a court observation program in which volunteers would observe VTC hearings at the Tucson Immigration Court and document due process issues. I was excited to do some preliminary data analysis and write a report at the end of the summer explaining what we’d learned so far. This program was meant to outlive my summer internship and facilitate long-term data collection. Unfortunately, COVID-19 complicated these plans, forcing us to postpone the observation program and pivot for the time being.

Instead, my project took on two new forms. First, I am writing a memo analyzing due process challenges to immigration courts’ use of VTC. Second, I am interviewing attorneys who have represented clients detained at LPCC to learn more about their experiences with VTC. Eventually, when Arizona is no longer a COVID hotspot, hopefully we’ll be able to start the court observation program.

This project will inform immigration advocates of widespread violations and help them ensure that all individuals receive due process. It will help hold public officials accountable and improve courts’ procedures and technology use.

This VTC project is designed to make sure that every immigrant receives the full and fair hearing they are statutorily entitled to. I also want to acknowledge that the fight is bigger than this. Yes, every immigrant should have a full and fair hearing, AND they also should not be detained or subject to deportation at all. This project is at the both/and intersection of the “here we are” and the “not yet.” Massive changes need to be made and systems must be dismantled. And, also, here we are, in the moment, working to ensure that, as these big changes are made, those caught in the here and now are given the rights they are promised.  This summer I’m learning to lean into this tension; to work on improving what is in front of me while also remembering that the fight is bigger.

At the middle point of my fellowship and project, I’ve been reflecting on this: as soon to be lawyers, we must pay attention to the ways in which the legal system dehumanizes and hurts and oppresses. We must bear witness to the atrocities happening every day in immigration detention and courts, and we must use our new power, privilege, and skills to respond.

As all of you may know, divorce is expensive. In Colorado, the average cost of divorce without children is $14,500 (9th highest in the nation) and the average cost of divorce with children is $21,700 (10th highest in the nation). The goal for my summer project with A2J Tech is to make divorce in Colorado more affordable for everyone. But to properly do that, I need to understand my target demographic; the people who are more likely to divorce but do not have the financial capabilities to do so.

Demographic Characteristic of the Target Audience: Class

The socioeconomic divisions based on educational attainment.

Unfortunately, the expense of divorce boils down to a class issue due to the financial barrier many people need to overcome when considering divorcing their partner. The most well-known indicator of financial success depends on one’s educational attainment; the highest level of education completed. Those who completed a bachelor’s degree or higher end up in the lower middle class or higher, while those who had some college credits or only high school experience end up in the working class and lower class. Interestingly, one’s educational attainment also determines the success of one’s first marriage as well.

In fact, people with a bachelor’s degree or graduate degree and people who were fortunate enough to be born in affluent families tend to enjoy relatively strong and stable marriages, while the working class and the lower class are less likely to get and stay married. In a study on marriages and divorces following people born during 1957-1964 until 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that “[t]he chance of a marriage ending in divorce was lower for people with more education, with over half of marriages of those who did not complete high school having ended in divorce compared with approximately 30 percent of marriages of college graduates.” Surprisingly, the people who can afford a divorce attorney statistically do not need one.

Demographic Characteristic of the Target Audience: Race

Although the financial burden of divorce is shared among all racial, ethnic, and religious groups within the working and lower class, it is important to discuss how minorities are disproportionately affected by this burden. In the same study, researchers found that Black Americans married later and at lower rates compared to White and Asian Americans, but those that do end up marrying, about 47.9% of the first marriages result in divorce. For Latino Americans, 45.5% of first marriages result in divorce.

When taking a quick glance at the statistics, there is slight increase for minorities who do end up divorcing from their first marriages. However, this study emphasizes how one’s education level leads to a more stable first marriage, with 29.8% of first marriages of people with a bachelor’s degree resulting in divorce. The group who attained a bachelor’s degree was made up of a majority of White Americans and some Asian Americans.

Today, the composition of Americans who were able to get a bachelor’s degree or higher remains the same. In a 2015 Census study on Educational Attainment in the United States, people who earned a bachelor’s degree or higher is composed of 53.9% Asian, 32.8% White, 22.5% Black, and 15.5% Latino. These statistics show how systematic racism and systematic poverty affect minorities in America; I think it is important to note these as two of the biggest causes for such low percentages of higher educational attainment among Black and Latino Americans.

As you can see from these statistics, lower income minorities tend to be more likely to divorce and are more likely not to afford the legal services to divorce. So, the financial burden of divorce not only affects people of lower socioeconomic status, but disproportionately affects poor Black and Latino Americans.

How Would Our Project Improve the Lives of the Target Audience?

The goal of the Colorado Divorce Project, now in partnership with Hello Divorce, is to alleviate the financial burden of divorce for everyone. We are automating the divorce forms in Colorado, to make it easier for someone to fill out all the legal forms required to file for divorce without the attorney price tag. For more information about the Colorado Divorce Project, please check out my previous blog post. Remarkably, this project will benefit people who belong to lower socioeconomic classes and minority communities the most since they are disproportionately impacted by the legal fees of divorce. It will not only make divorce more accessible to lower classes but make the financial burden easier to overcome for everyone facing such a life changing issue.

If you ask Googs, it says a primer is “an elementary textbook that serves as an introduction to a subject of study or is used for teaching children to read.” An introduction. A place to start. Training. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when there is a lot happening – pandemic, protest, violence, political incompetence. Sometimes it has been a relief to divert my attention to automated document assembly and sometimes it has been just as overwhelming.

Welcome to the world of…

A very poor rendition of a very famous logo.
Tweets flying through majestic digital skies, Quip scales keeping the beast organized, GitHub cat/octopus and Docassemble cat crowding out the forest of Slack chatter.

I may, or may not, have spent an inappropriate amount of time creating a parody logo… out of logos. Why? Because over the past few months, I have been inundated with tools. They are a cluttered mess, just like the abomination above. There has been a distinct absence of primer. Below, I’ve drafted an overview of what the heck each of these things are, how I’ve used them, and what I still don’t understand. Because it’s a lot.

  • Zoom
    • How I’ve Zoomed: video calls, live chat, hand raising, polling, white boards, screen sharing, break-out rooms. It is almost ready to form a committee to solve homelessness.
    • Zoom Success: First Generation Support Group sessions! We’ve been able to continue meeting regularly despite pandemic, relocation, and summer employment. I look forward to seeing everyone each month. We all have no idea what we’re doing and we keep showing up and struggling along. They keep me going!
    • Zooming Questions:
      • Do I currently have end-to-end encryption or not? “We plan to begin early beta of the E2EE feature in July 2020.” So, not yet? Read more on Zoom blog.
      • How do I setup a meeting so that people can add it to their calendars?
      • If private chat messages aren’t viewable to the host, why do my classmates think they are?
      • How did Skype, Hangouts, and all the other virtual conference/webinar platforms whiff so mightily? What happened?
      • Virtual Meeting Etiquette? The Googs returned over 4 million results (versus only 1.4 million for “uranium contaminated groundwater”). People! Prioritize!
Raise the white flag of defeat when it comes to staring at a screen all day.
Zoom Fatigue. Look for it in the DSM-VI.

 

  • Slack
    • How I’ve Slacked: team and group communication, email alternative, access to archive of prior communication, access to network outside of organization roster, managing multiple “workspaces” feels awkward at the user level.
    • Slack Success: I really like having access to the prior communication. Want to catch up on a project? Just read through what Jenny posted last year. Gives helpful context to framing questions, especially when just starting out.
    • Slacking Questions:
      • Why would I ever want to enable notifications? Yuck.
      • Is this an efficient way to communicate or just a different way?
      • Can I have a slimmed down version? Ideally, one feature. A tutorial mode to unlock other features. Otherwise, it’s very much deep end of the pool.
      • How are these communications stored/archived/logged? How are the data used by the company? When am I going to receive targeted adds for Champlain College online?
Beaver drinking Fizze, eating flavored corn chips, and playing a video game console. It is marvelous.
Note: this is not the official branding for the tool. I think they really lost an opportunity. Plus, now I know this beaver also enjoys flavored corn chips.

At this point, I’ve only briefly highlighted two of them. I’m exhausted. I also wrote down Quip, GitHub, Documate, Docassemble, A2J, and Twitter, but this is starting to get cumbersome. I don’t think a blog is the right place for a primer.

Welcome to the Alaska Court System Self-Help Service’s web page. With just one click, anyone can travel back to the internet as it was in the 1990’s (if only it had an animated GIF).

Alaska Court System Self Help Services Webpage

The thing is, they know it isn’t great and they want to change it. But that’s not my project.

Back in 2016, Alaska developed their Justice for All project. It aims to create justice for all Alaskans by building an ecosystem of justice services. My project focuses on automating the debt collection forms, so when I read the report, I paid special attention to those sections.

Close to 99% of the cases involved lawyer representation1.

Great. Why is this a problem?

Almost all the lawyers represented those trying to collect the debts: 92% of the cases had only the debt collectors represented2.

Okay. But, this isn’t necessarily problematic.

Our efforts to positively address the consequences of debt will involve building out the network of resources available to debtors; debtors may be more likely to engage in services in a preventative fashion before the issues result in a debt collection matter, or respond to a debt collection action in court, reducing the likelihood of a default judgment and additional amounts added to the judgment3.

What? Who are these lawyers even collecting debts for?

Most civil cases today are brought by businesses against individuals for money owed. The most recent national data available show that, as the overall volume of cases has declined, business-to-consumer suits, particularly debt collections, mortgage foreclosure, and landlord-tenant disputes, have come to account for more than half of civil dockets4.

Professionals are bringing suit against people without representation on behalf of debt buying companies. The amount of money grows from what is set out in the complaint and may not even actually apply to the person, but default judgment forgoes the need to figure this out. 

Debt collection is out of control. And this isn’t new. If I was swanky enough to afford an HBO subscription, John Oliver could’ve gotten me riled up about this over four years ago:

Hello, Alaska. Welcome to The Now!

Summer Reading:

For our second blog challenge, we were asked to design a solution that would address a gap in legal access for a historically marginalized community of color in our locality. While thinking in the abstract about a complex legal solution is enticing, and perhaps more attractive in academic circles; I wanted to instead take this moment to amplify a current fight for legal access that is being fought in my home state of Iowa. What is being fought for is the most basic of legal rights: the right to vote.

On June 15th, Governor Kim Reynolds made a promise to sign an executive order that would restore the right to vote for people with previous felony convictions. This executive order would erase Iowa’s status as the only state in the country that permanently disenfranchises people with a felony conviction. The calls for this order came after the Iowa State Senate failed to act on a bill that would have done the same. However, despite Reynold’s promises, she has shown no urgency, stating that the order would come sometime between late summer and early fall. And while I’m sure the Governor is very busy, there must surely time to draft an order during her trips to the nation’s capital and throughout the state of Iowa. Des Moines Black Lives Matter (who can be found on Twitter @DesMoinesBLM), have continued to push the Governor, hoping for an Executive Order by this Saturday, July 4th. The following paragraphs are an incomplete illustration of why this order is so desperately needed.

Iowa’s Broken Criminal Justice System

Iowa is a largely homogenous state, with white Iowans accounting for roughly 90% of the population. This lack of diversity has many negative side-effects, including the suppression of the struggles that people of color face. The recent waves of protests that erupted following the murder of George Floyd have brought one of these suppressed struggles to the forefront: the duality of Iowa’s criminal justice system, which operates under different rules, depending on the color of your skin.

One of the most jarring examples of this system is the disproportionate policing of marijuana usage in Iowa. Despite similar rates of usage, a Black person in Iowa is 7.3 times more likely to be arrested than a white person for marijuana possession (see page 32 of the report). And as you might expect, this disproportionate policing is reflective of the broader trends of Iowa’s criminal justice system. As it currently stands, Black Iowans are 11 times more likely to be imprisoned than white Iowans, which is the third-worst disparity in the nation.  Whether this racism is intentionally inflicted by law enforcement (like the video seen below, which resulted in a $75,000 settlement due to the officers’ misconduct), or an unintended result of a massively broken system is a debate that is fruitless for the time being.  Because regardless of the motive of these disparities, the reality is that they’ve always existed, they continue to exist, and they can not be fixed until we acknowledge them.

However, acknowledgment is only the beginning. Once we acknowledge the disparities of this broken criminal justice system, it also becomes our responsibility to listen to the voices of those most affected by the system. In this case, Des Moines Black Lives Matter has made the simplest of requests: that the 1 in 10 Black Iowans who are currently disenfranchised due to a previous felony conviction be allowed to vote. This request needs no further debate nor deliberation.

Addressing the racial inequalities of this nation will be at the forefront of citizen’s minds as they approach the ballot box this year. And in no world does it make sense to exclude the opinions of some of those who have been most affected by these injustices. For that reason, it is clear:

Sign or Resign. 

 

 

Why is this blog titled Three-Point Revolution?

Shortly after the NBA introduced the three-point line in 1979, current Houston Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni called his brother Dan, a fellow coach, and told him: “You might wanna start seeing how valuable that three-point line is.”  About twenty-five years later, Mike D’Antoni would revolutionize the NBA with his “seven seconds or less” Phoenix Suns basketball team.

 

Just one year before D’Antoni became head coach of the Suns, they had finished with an abysmal 29-53 record, despite having generational talents like Amar’e Stoudemire, Joe Johnson, Shawn Marion, and Stephon Marbury. When D’Antoni inherited this roster, he kept it mostly intact, except for one key switch: bringing in Steve Nash to replace Stephon Marbury. In other words, the number of resources available to D’Antoni did not suddenly improve. Instead, D’Antoni made one key player swap and completely restructured how he used the players available to him. 

 

Over the course of the 2004-05 NBA season, D’Antoni implemented a brand-new offensive system that prioritized playing fast and shooting lots of three-pointers. The fast-offensive system played to the strengths of his young, athletic roster, while the three-point shooting capitalized on what analytics has now deemed to be the most efficient shot in basketball. With this forward-thinking approach supporting them, the Suns finished 62-20, in what may have been the greatest single-season turnaround of all time. 

 

Modern-day basketball has proven that D’Antoni was neither crazy nor misguided in his belief that the three-point shot was the most valuable in basketball. However, we must not forget D’Antoni’s willingness to be a trailblazer. If he had not questioned the status quo and considered how he could improve upon it, the Suns, and basketball itself, may have never taken the massive leap that we see today.

 

In a similar, and much more important vein, legal technology presents an opportunity for each of us to be trailblazers. Legal aid organizations have dedicated and talented attorneys. But no matter how dedicated and talented the attorneys are, they cannot outperform the system that they have been placed into. With that in mind, we must channel our own inner Coach D’Antoni, designing new, more efficient systems that help maximize the talents of legal aid attorneys.

 

My Work this Summer

This summer, I will be assisting Legal Aid of Wyoming and A2J Tech with the implementation of a Universal Triage System. The objective of the triage system is to reduce the time that both clients and lawyers spend on the intake process.

Traditionally, a client seeking representation from a legal aid organization spends significant time trying to find the proper organization to take their case. This search often involves the client needing to repeat the facts of their case to several different lawyers, just to ultimately find out that they don’t qualify for representation at the given organization. Since we can assume that clients are in enough stress already trying to live through whatever legal encounter they are facing, the triage system aims to reduce this stress of finding appropriate representation. Once the triage system is created, Wyomingites will be able to fill out one form that will point them to the proper resource to help them with their legal problem.

On the other hand, legal aid lawyers will benefit from this system because they will no longer need to spend as much time interviewing and intaking people who aren’t even eligible for them to represent. While legal aid lawyers would love to represent everybody, the truth is that their time and resources are limited. By reducing the amount of time that lawyers need to spend on the intake process, the triage system will enable more clients to be represented, and more time to be spent on each client’s case.

The ultimate goal of this system’s implementation is to help achieve 100% access to justice in Wyoming. While this system will be solid in its foundation, there will no doubt be problems to fix along the way. To spot these problems, we will be using key performance indicators (KPIs), that will allow the system to be continuously improved. By the end of this project, the hope is to create our own three-point revolution that provides talented lawyers with the systems they need to more efficiently represent the clients they serve.

Hello everyone! Welcome to my first blog post! I will be assigned several blog challenges through the Access to Justice Tech Fellows Program and this blog post is a general overview of my host organization and the project I am working on this summer!

A2J Tech is a social enterprise that creates technology solutions to improve access to justice. From its main office in Denver, Colorado, its team collaborates with law schools, state programs, private firms, and Legal Aid organizations from Florida, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, California, and of course, Colorado. One of its main goals is to create a variety of self-help services to empower self-represented litigants with the confidence to represent themselves.

With the rise in divorce rates in China due to quarantine, we can expect a similar trend to occur in the United States. In fact, a divorce lawyer in Shanghai reported that his caseload “increased by 25% since the city’s lockdown eased in mid-March.” With the legal expenses for divorce ranging from $1,000 to up to $200,000, the A2J team wants be prepared for low income people, who cannot afford such high legal fees, to be able to file for a divorce. Although these people may seek legal organizations to help file a petition, there are people who do not meet the income threshold to be a client or are turned away due to a lack of resources for the organization to take in more clients. Many people may turn to filling out the petition by themselves and may find it daunting due to the number of forms to fill out and may be confused about where to start. That is where my document automation project comes in!

The project I am working on is the Colorado Divorce Project. The same way TurboTax has simplified filing your own taxes, we seek to create a simplified questionnaire to help people who want to file for a divorce without the attorney price tag. To do this, I am creating a questionnaire to take in the client’s information and the interview will input that information onto the relevant divorce forms through a “no code” coding platform called Documate. I just finished the first few forms needed to file a petition for a divorce! They are currently in the testing phase. However, I am not done yet! With how extensive the divorce process is, there are many more forms to automate, and hopefully, I am able to finish this project before my fellowship is over! 😊