Legal Technology and Innovation

Information technology (IT) has revolutionized every profession. Most impacted are those dealing with knowledge and technical expertise. In Legal Technology and Innovation, a course taught by Dan Linna at the The University of Michigan Law School, we explore how process for decision-making and execution (borrowed and refined from the Industrial Revolution) can be implemented in this current IT revolution to afford greater quality output of legal services.

Our team focused on the issue of access to legal services for small business and entrepreneurship. We hypothesized that a lot of the current offerings tackled the primary issue of legal “work product” like forms and contract templates but left the customer for the services still uninformed about the legal process itself. We proposed a way to complement the current offering of accessible legal products E.g. Legalzoom & Rocket Lawyer with content meant to inform the client and cut down on unnecessary questions about legal details and minutiae.

Our solution is to offer a service where professional legal service providers will be recorded outlining basic legal concepts like indemnity and employment law. In the final implementation, a client will be able to see a notification bubble appear in the document besides a potentially confusing or esoteric legal concept. The notification will be unobtrusive and allow the client to decide whether to engage with the educational material. This action is informed by the design principle of placing client value (in this case time and freedom) at the top of a larger decision-making hierarchy. We want the client to be able to learn if they choose but also skip over if they are short on time.

One (potentially) competing process to this project is Hotshots. While Hotshots focuses on bite-size education about legal concepts (my corporate law firm offered Hotshots last summer) we believe that our solution is unique enough because it can be offered in the same window as the document and is potentially even more basic as it is aimed at clients and not young attorneys.