LSC releases Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice

The U.S. Legal Services Corporation has released Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice (2013).

On 30 December 2013 the corporation issued a press release describing the report.

Here is a summary of the report, from the press release:

The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) today released the report of a national summit on ways to use technology to provide all Americans some form of effective assistance with essential civil legal needs.

More than 75 representatives of legal aid programs, courts, government, and business as well as technology experts, academics, and private practitioners convened at two sessions in 2012 and 2013 to explore the many ways technology can expand access to justice.

The “Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice” presents a number of concrete recommendations to broaden and improve civil legal assistance through an integrated service-delivery system that brings the knowledge and wisdom of legal experts to the public through computers and mobile devices. [...]

The strategy for achieving this goal has five main components:

• Creating in each state a unified “legal portal” which directs persons needing legal assistance to the most appropriate form of assistance and guides self-represented litigants through the entire legal process.


• Deploying sophisticated document assembly applications to support the creation of legal documents by service providers and by litigants themselves.


• Taking advantage of mobile technologies to reach more persons more effectively.


• Applying business process/analysis to all access-to-justice activities to make them as efficient as practicable.


• Developing “expert systems” to assist lawyers and other services providers access authoritative knowledge through a computer and apply it to particular factual situations.

LSC hosted the summit, and formed a planning group to design it that included participants from LSC’s grantees, the American Bar Association, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, the National Center for State Courts, the New York State courts, the Self-Represented Litigation Network, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Access to Justice Initiative.

For more details, please see the complete report.

HT David Bonebrake

Filed under: Applications, Policy Materials, Reports Tagged: "Best practices for legal information systems", Access to justice and legal information systems, Access to justice and technology, American Bar Association, Legal document assembly systems, Legal document assembly systems for pro se litigants, Legal expert systems, Legal information systems for pro se litigants, Legal mobile technologies, Legal portals, Legal Services Corporation, Legal Web portals, Mobile devices and access to justice, Mobile devices and legal information systems, Mobile technology and legal information systems, National Center for State Courts, National Legal Aid and Defender Association, New York State Unified Court System, Online legal services, Online legal services delivery, Online portals for pro se litigants, Portals for pro se litigants, Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice, Self-Represented Litigation Network, Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice, Technology for access to justice, Technology for pro se litigants, U.S. Department of Justice Access to Justice Initiative, Web portals for pro se litigants



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