LIT Lab's Lookahead

Bringing the Assembly Line Further

Bryce Willey @wowitisbryce | @suffolklitlab

https://brycewilley.xyz/litlookahead-slides

The Assembly Line Project

The front window of a house under eviction in Boston

March 2020 - Now
200+ volunteers building 30 guided interviews for self represented litigants

Our biggest project by far has been the Assembly Line project, and it's best illustrated with a true story. Last summer (2021), a tenant had just lost their housing case in the trial court, and was being actively evicted from their apartment. The constable was there, and furniture was being moved out. That tenant then found our Assembly Line project, which is a website with a collection of guided interviews, which you've seen a few of so far. Specifically, the tenant found the "motion to stay" interview, which let you fill out a motion to send to the Appeals court to stop an eviction. They filled out the motion to stay using our website, claiming the trial court had never addressed the fact they were protected under the CDC's eviction moratorium, and sent the form to the Appeals Court through our site. Within 15 or 20 minutes, the Appeals court review the motion and granted the stay. The furniture had to be moved back into the house, successfully stopping the eviction.

This story illustrates what the Assembly Line project is: a collection of 30 or so forms, written by 200+ volunteers at the beginning of the pandemic, and reviewed by subject matter experts. Those forms were written specifically for self represented litigants, people in the court system without lawyers. They were mobile friendly so you could fill them out easily on a phone, and we could directly email them to the Appeals court, thanks to an emergency order given at the start of the pandemic. I joined the Assembly Line at the end of 2020, and much of the work was completed before then! I viewed my position as making the Assembly Line easy to use in many different places in different contexts, more than just Massachusetts during the pandemic.

Improvements: E-filing

long-term email filing is burdensome for courts
Same guided interview UI, but:
- puts info directly into court's case management system
- gets info from courts's system to help users file into existing cases

the drawing of a man standing next to a comically large envelope

The first of those improvements had to do with e-filing. As I mentioned in the story, the tenant was able to email their forms directly to the Appeals court. Email filing is good, but in the long term it's a burden for courts. They need to have a completely separate system for handling incoming emails separate from their existing case management system, and if they do accept the case, it needs to be manually copy-pasted into the case management system.

So for the past year and a half, I've been working so that behind the scenes, all of our existing guided interviews are able to directly e-file into courts' case management systems. Additionally, these interviews can get information from the courts case management systems, letting users file into already existing cases, pre-filling information like the names of other case parties.

E-filing Status

Louisiana: ready for Jefferson Parish
Illinois: paperwork being signed
Future: MA Appeals Court, parts of CA

Automating the Tedium

It's hard to get 200+ volunteers: most only have 1 or 2 forms people
tools to remove the tedious tasks those volunteers did

All of the Assembly Line volunteers on a Zoom call

The other part off the Assembly Line project that we've been working on improving is the automating the tedium. So I mentioned that we had over 200+ volunteers for the project, which was incredible. But the downside is that it's really hard to get 200+ volunteers! We were incredibly lucky, starting at the beginning of the pandemic when a lot of people had free time that they wanted to use to help others.

Since not every legal aid or court system can get that many volunteers, we've been working on a set of tools that can take some of the more tedious work that the volunteers did, and make it so one or two people in a legal aid or court system can do a lot of the same work that those volunteers did, but faster.

Discovering: Form Explorer

Look at an entire jurisdiction's forms in bulk
Currently in alpha: https://suffolklitlab.org/form-explorer
Beta with more states coming soon, thanks to work by:

Pavlos Rousoglou
Lera Somova

a drawing of a man looking at a data dashboard over a map of the world

Prototyping: Weaver

turn those forms into ready-to-edit guided interview drafts in one click

Refining: LIT Styler

get actionable feedback on where to improve your interview
prototype out now; alpha in a few months

a drawing of a man, putting together pieces of a puzzle in a GUI window