Want People to Follow Your Instructions? Use Clear Fonts

When writing instructions, your word choice isn’t the only factor that determines whether people follow through. The font that you choose also plays an important role. Lifehacker reports that using clear fonts, like Arial, makes instructions seem easier to follow and the tasks more likely to get done. – K

Arkansas Access to Justice Commission Launches EqualJusticeWatch.org

The Arkansas Access to Justice Commission today announced the official launch of EqualJusticeWatch.org:

The goal of the new Arkansas Equal Justice Watch website is to encourage action by state leaders to support equal access to justice for all Arkansans.  The Watch is a project of the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission created by the state Supreme Court to expand civil legal justice.  This website is designed to provide legislative decision makers with the latest information about civil legal aid in their districts as well as enable constituents to easily research civil justice issues in their communities.  Data for each of the 75 counties in the state include population demographics on poverty, education, disability, divorce, foreclosure, bankruptcy in addition to the 2008 numbers and types of cases handled by civil legal aid.  Through this website visitors can easily locate and contact their Senator and Representative to express support for justice legislation.

Congratulations to the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission,  Center for Arkansas Legal Services, and Legal Aid of Arkansas on launching this innovative initiative to help ensure access to justice for all Arkansans! -M

Announcing @accesstojustice!

In December 2008, Kate and I launched a twitter profile to report news and information on access to justice issues in the United States and abroad. In less than a month, we’ve grown to almost 180 over 200 followers and have posted more than 200 updates. If you have a twitter account, you can follow @accesstojustice here. Alternately, you can subscribe to the RSS feed here. If you want to learn more about how attorneys and legal professionals are using twitter (and what they’re saying), check out LexTweet, a great new service from Kevin O’Keefe (@kevinokeefe) and his crew over at LexBlog.  -M

More people acting as their own lawyers

A timely AP article on the growing number of self represented litigants in U.S. courts, which includes a nod to the role that statewide websites play in providing legal information and forms. -M

NCSC Releases 20th Anniversary Edition of Future Trends in State Courts

The National Center for State Courts just released its 20th Anniversary Edition of Future Trends in State Courts, which includes an article on online document assembly by Kate Bladow and Claudia Johnson, as well as an article by Richard Zorza on a judicial curriculum and leadership package developed by the Self Represented Litigation Network. Other topics in this edition that may be of interest include website disability access, language access, cultural competency and several articles on court technology. – M

Interactive Court Forms now Available on WashingtonLawHelp.org

The Northwest Justice Project just announced new online interactive court forms for pro se users to file a divorce petition with no minor children of the marriage. Future forms available on WashingtonLawHelp.org will include interviews for finishing your divorce, a domestic violence protection order and a demand letter for return of a rental security deposit. This work is funded by a grant from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) and the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC). They use the A2J Author, developed by the Center for Access to Justice & Technology (CAJT) at Chicago-Kent College of Law and the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), LexisNexis’s HotDocs Professional, and the LSC-funded national document assembly server (NPADO), a project of Pro Bono Net. -M

National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty Launches Street Lawyer Wiki

Today the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty launched a new wiki called “Street Lawyer: Legal Tools for Economic Justice,” which provides fact sheets, Q&A, statutory materials, litigation documents, model programs, policies, legislation, and articles. Topics include the criminalization of homelessness, domestic violence, hate crimes against homeless persons, education for homeless children, right to housing, voting rights and many others. -M

Kate’s Court Solutions Conference Highlights

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Court Leadership Package was launched at the Court Solutions Conference. By my count, around 180 people from across the United States and Canada as well as several other countries attended the Court Leadership and Self-Represented Litigation track.

This was a great conference with ample time for networking and learning. For me, highlights from the conference included the following:

• Being reminded by Joseph Abbate, Senior Management Analyst at the New York Office of Court Administration, that plain language isn’t just used or needed in the legal world. Plenty of other jargon needs to be made readable. He used Google’s promotional materials for their new browser, Chrome, as an example.
• Listening to Jeanette Fedorak, Senior Policy Counsel for the Government of Alberta, assert that most Canadians, low-income and otherwise, can’t afford to hire an attorney. Her argument: In Alberta the cost for a divorce ranges between $16,000 and $128,000 with the average being $44,000. The average income for the lowest 40 percent of Canadians is less than $44,000, and as expected, this group doesn’t have a lot socked away in case of emergencies. The next 20 percent of Canadians aren’t much better off. They make only $54,200 per year, and while their net worth is higher, most of their savings are invested in their house.  Her statistics paint a dismal picture.
• Supping with a group of document assembly enthusiasts at the Rusty Scupper.
• Attending a panel called “Agenda for the Future,” which featured Robert Baldwin, Executive Vice-President and General Counsel of the National Center for State Courts; Chief Justice John T. Broderick, Jr. of the New Hampshire Supreme Court; and Justice Laurie D. Zelon, Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. It was an inspiring session that I’ll talk more about in another post.
• Lunching post-conference with Richard Zorza, Justice Zelon, and Bonnie Hough, Supervising Attorney for the Center for Families, Children & the Courts for the Judicial Council of California.  All three are amazing access-to-justice advocates. Our conversation reminded me that no significant change happens overnight. It takes work and patience.

For those of you who weren’t able to attend, the materials are now posted on SelfHelpSupport.org. Each of the modules includes slides with speaker’s notes, project profiles, video clips, and activity and resource books.  Also, thanks to Vince Morris, who kindly took on the role of videographer, all of the plenary sessions were filmed and, I hope, will be made available shortly to those who couldn’t attend.

If you only have a little bit of time, I recommend checking out the document assembly module – Deploying Automated Forms for Access. Granted, I might be biased considering my role in pulling the module together, but I think that one is the best. – K