Appendixes
Appendix 1
Customer Centered Design: The NCSC/ Chicago-Kent /Institute of Design Access to Justice Project
Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design and the National Center for State Courts worked together in 1999 and 2000 to study the access to justice problems posed by the flood of self-represented litigants in U. S. State and local courts.
11 Using design technology pioneered by Professor Charles Owen at the Institute of Design, the researchers sent 10 teams of law students and design students to observe the customers (self-represented litigants and those who deliver justice to them) and the processes of four different State courts.
Immersed in the reality of these observations, the interdisciplinary team spent 15 weeks in 2001 using systematic design methods to identify barriers, describe problems and propose solutions to address these problems. The fully described results of this redesign project are available at its web site, a2j.kentlaw.edu/A2J/ and in book form.
12
These teams found that self-represented litigants valued the traditional dispute resolution system, our civil courts. The teams found solid evidence in their observations to support the importance of the current dispute resolution system to court customers. Self-represented litigants placed high value on the direct interaction with court personnel, judges and clerks. The utility of our courts as valued institutions for dispute resolution is strong. Most court and clerk employees worked hard to deliver justice and most were aware of the special problems of self-represented litigants. Some courts were more innovative and customer centered than others. Courts and clerks in Colorado, California and Delaware had created self help centers, pro se facilitators, extended office hours and even mobile clerk's offices that motored into remote areas to bring the court's filing services to farm workers. This is the good news.
The project found that even the most service oriented courts and their associated clerk's offices were unable to deliver excellent customer service. Story after story told of bad outcomes, wasted time, confused and error filled filings, long waits and baffling processes only thinly explained and almost never understood by customers. Some of these problems are driven by unnecessary complexity built into current court processes. Some problems come from the knowledge, language and skill gaps that burden many self-represented litigants.
The design team began to develop solutions to streamline the process, to educate the customer and to supplement the existing court system with tools and products that empower the customer and the court personnel alike to resolve disputes with efficiency and transparent fairness. A large amount of the dissatisfaction of court customers comes from the complexity of courts and customer ignorance of their particular place in the complex arena. Other sources of dissatisfaction, like lengthy delays, long waits for court calls and scheduling inefficiency, affected both unrepresented litigants and lawyers. Even the most customer-centered courts are quite poor at reducing these inefficiencies that burden the time of all court customers. The design team was struck by the notion that Wal-Mart was better able to schedule delivery of disposable diapers to its hundreds of stores than were courts able to organize and plan hearings. Many of the information processing and customer relationship management tools of modern business could be applied to the challenges courts face as they struggle to improve customer service to self-represented litigants: reengineering, total quality management, personalized segments of one, supply side value chains and net communities.
Drawing on their observations, the structured design methods of Professor Owen and their own diverse business and educational backgrounds, the teams designed fifty-three solutions - product proposals like Storybuilder, Pursuit Evaluator and Personal Case Account. The guiding principle in each of these solutions was the most palatable of all the change management ideas: start with the customer and drive all processes to meet the customers' needs. Nearly every solution presumed access to modern information technology. The team named this pervasive technology infrastructure, Court Net. The following diagram illustrates the expansive but simply stated mission of the technology infrastructure: digitize all the information that anyone connected to the courts will use and make it available wherever and whenever needed.
This illustration shows all the actors on the left: judges, clerks and litigants; all the information in the middle: case records, forms, law, payment records, facility and personal information, and more; and all the tools that a systematic redesign could deliver on the right; Emediation, Storybuilder, Pursuit Evaluator, etc. All the people and all the information and all the tools are connected by a line, a wire, and a network.
Written small, this network could be the local network of a small, integrated court system. Written large, it could be the Internet with necessary and relevant privacy and security protections. The key insight here, the critical "going forward" assumption, is that court information must be digitized so that modern computing and networking and communication techniques can be employed to solve severe problems of poor customer service, inefficiency, complexity and lack of effectiveness.
In fact, Court Net is an ideal, more of a dream than a reality. State and local courts move paper, not digital information. Court systems are in desperate need of massive infrastructure investment to be able to deliver the type of service that today's customers deserve and expect. "In a period of increasingly tight budgets and ever expanding caseloads, courts across the country have looked at the concept of "electronic filing" as a way to reduce the considerable demands of handling physical case files and to reduce the long term costs of storing official documents."
13 The Chicago-Kent/ NCSC Study and the "e-filing" movement within State courts both point toward the emergence of an electronic infrastructure that will face low-income self-represented. As this infrastructure is built, it is critically important that the special needs of this set of customers are included within the design requirements.
The Chicago-Kent web prototype that is described next, attempts to build an interface from the customer's perspective. The interface has potential to make LSC funded state-wide web sites more accessible to low-income self-represented people. The same interface can be a more welcoming entrance to State court systems as they build e-filing infrastructure that self-represented customers must use to obtain access to justice.
A Prototype "Access to Justice" Interface for Self-Represented Litigants
To test the design conclusions of the Chicago-Kent/ NCSC Study (and inspired by the pilots constructed by I-CAN! in California), Chicago-Kent built a prototype web application to educate unsophisticated customers, to help them prepare pleadings and other court papers and to provide instruction on how to file those papers. The first pilot project was released to customers as the Illinois Joint Simplified Dissolution of Marriage system.
14
The JSDM pilot was launched on the web by the Illinois Technology Center in early 2003. The pilot includes a "soft" graphical interview that is designed to be customer friendly. The interview helps determine client eligibility for the special dissolution procedure and gathers all the data needed to complete all the court papers that both the husband and wife need to sign to obtain dissolution. This data is formatted and sent to a web server running HotDocs Online, a document assembly system donated to the legal aid community by LexisNexis. The document assembly server compiles all the court forms and a set of graphical instructions and sends the packet electronically to the customer's web site. In Illinois, the documents are printed either at home, a legal aid office or at a special Self Help Desk to be installed in the Circuit Court of Cook County in July 2003. The same tools could be used to format and deliver to an electronic filing server if a court were equipped to accept electronic filing.
Sample screens from the Chicago-Kent Dissolution Prototype:
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APPENDIX 2
Participants in the January 16, 2003 Brainstorming Meeting in Chicago, Illinois.
Attendees:
Telephone Attendees:
11 The research reported in this testimony was funded by grants from the State Justice Institute (SJI-00-N-248), the Open Society Institute (No. 20001562), the Center for Access to the Courts through Technology, and the Illinois Institute of Technology. The points of view expressed are those of the author and do not represent the official positions or policies of the State Justice Institute, the Open Society Institute, the Center for Access to the Courts Through Technology, the National Center for State Courts, or the Illinois Institute of Technology.
12 C. OWEN, R STAUDT, T. PEDWELL, ACCESS TO JUSTICE: MEETING THE NEEDS OF SELF-REPRESENTED LITIGANTS (2002). To purchase, contact Ron Staudt at rstaudt@kentlaw.edu, or (312) 906-5326, or Todd Pedwell at tpedwell@kentlaw.edu or (312) 906-5328.
13 Electronic Filing Processes (Technical and Business Approaches) supra, Note 5 at page 9.
14 This prototype is available on the Illinois Technology Center for Law and Public Interest web site at
http://www.illinoislawhelp.org as part of the simple divorce "Guide me." It can also be launched directly from the Chicago-Kent Access to Justice Project website at
http://a2j.kentlaw.edu/a2j/implementation/v40/index.cfm?fuseaction=Intro.screen1& mod=2.
