UALR Bowen Legal Innovation Hackathon

Sample Ideas (Our Version of Problem Sets)

This list is a sampling of various ideas related to legal innovation. Participants may use any portion of or the entirety of any of these ideas. Please note that originality is one of the judging criteria.

Suit Finder. You are about to sign a deal to become a business partner with someone you do not know well. Or, maybe you have a blind date or are getting together with a new friend for lunch. Maybe you are about to hire a new employee or sign a new client. You wonder how often your potential business partner, date, friend, employee, or client has been sued. How often has she/he/it sued others? How well has this person done in those lawsuits? With this envisioned app, you would be able to search an existing database of lawsuit filings and case results to quickly find out.

Access to Reduced Cost Legal Services. There is a national-level problem in terms of access to legal services. The wealthy have no trouble accessing needed legal services. A large majority of people who do not qualify for free representation and cannot afford full-time legal services, must fend for themselves. One solution involves “limited scope representation.” Rather than hiring a lawyer to handle an entire case from beginning to end, the client can hire a lawyer as she goes, asking the lawyer to help the client prepare any court filing the client is unable to complete on her or his own. Similarly, a client could hire a lawyer to advise him or her what to say when he or she appears in court or just to handle the court appearance. The lawyer can charge less because the risk and workload is so much less. An app that would make it easy to connect clients who need and want limited scope representation to lawyers willing to provide limited scope representation could prove to be the legal equivalent of the Uber app.

Worker Safety. Employees have a natural reluctance to report workplace safety issues; they often worry their employers will punish them in some way for reporting issues. An app that would make it easy and anonymous for employees to use their smartphones to report workplace safety issues would therefore not only reduce workplace injuries but would, in the long run, save money for employers.

Abuse Recorder. This envisioned, simple app would make it easy for users to take and upload pictures and to record critical information regarding abusive landlords, evidence showing medical, disability and other insurance fraud, evidence of abuse by spouses or parents, accident information and evidence, and other misconduct.

Record Eraser. Everyone makes mistakes and bad decisions, and our legal system understands that and allows one-time convicts, who were convicted of minor crimes to clean up their records. This process, called expungement, can be complicated and expensive, making it hard for many people to avail themselves of this opportunity. A program that walks people through the process of completing the expungement forms, answers common questions, and explains how and where to file the necessary documents would level this playing field.

Self-Help with Court Records. While court records may be available online, people who have had little contact with the legal system have no idea how to access those records—even if they were one of the parties. A self-help tool that walks people through the process of accessing court records would solve this problem and equalize access to the legal system.

Divorce Court Help. In roughly ¾ of all divorces, one or both of the spouses is not represented by an attorney. As a result, when these unrepresented parties appear in court, they do not know what to say or how the judge expects them to act. Judges, who must, by law, remain neutral, can offer only limited guidance. A phone app that provided state-specific guidance on how to behave in court and what to say would not only help the spouses, but also would help unclog the courts and improve the quality of justice.

Test New Laws. Legislators pass laws imagining their positive effects on society. It is common to for all of us to imagine potential effects, good or bad, of new laws. Does a new landlord-tenant law improve tenant living conditions or increase rental rates? Does a new health-related law improve public health or have no effect? This imagined tool would allow researchers to link enacted laws with databases containing regularly collected public data, such as data regarding rental rates in an affected geographic region or obesity rates.

To sue or not to sue? While many factors influence a potential litigant’s decision whether to file a lawsuit, those factors are arguably common enough that lawyers and potential litigants would benefit from a tool that would make it easier for them to create or use an existing decision tree to decide whether to sue. For example, for most lawsuits, important factors would include: direct costs associated with filing and prosecuting the particular type of lawsuit contemplated, such as attorneys fees, filing fees, and witness fees; indirect expenses, such as other, alternative uses of the litigant’s time (i.e., the value of her or his time) and resources; the likelihood of success (at least the percentage of similar cases that have been successful); the range of recoveries possible and the average recovery in similar cases; a factor allocated to the stress of being involved in a lawsuit; and a factor, where applicable, allocated if the litigant is interested in pursing litigation to change the law in a way the litigant regards as important.

Fairness in Sentencing by Judges. Defendants who have committed similar crimes should, absent compelling circumstances, receive the same punishment. Would it be useful, for all judges and for the legal system, to know whether each judge’s sentencing practices reflect this ideal or whether certain defendants (the less wealthy, minorities) receive harsher sentences for no good reason? With this envisioned research tool, we could help judges and the legal system identify and address any conscious or even unconscious biases.

Finding Ways to Stop the Cycle of Recidivism. There are dozens of programs designed to assist ex-convicts in integrating back into society and become productive citizens. Which ones work? There needs to be a way to gather data from all the many programs out there, assess the effectiveness of each of them, and systematically decide which programs to implement.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Drug Courts. Many states have established special courts to keep individuals in treatment long enough for it to work while supervising them closely. For a minimum term of one year, participants: receive intensive treatment and other services they require to get and stay clean and sober; are held accountable by the Drug Court judge for meeting their obligations to the court, society, themselves and their families; are regularly and randomly tested for drug use; and are rewarded for doing well or sanctioned when they do not live up to their obligations. Do these courts make a difference in reducing drug use?

Lawyer Public Service App. In every state, lawyers swear oaths promising to provide free legal services (pro bono work) to those in our society who cannot afford to pay for such services, and, in fact, most experts believe lawyers provide more free services than all other professions combined. The proposed app could accomplish two important objectives. First, the app could be used by lawyers to identify pro bono work projects suitable to their expertise and availability. Second, the app could be used by lawyers to record the pro bono work they do, and the resulting data could be used by state bars as a tool to convince recalcitrant lawyers to also contribute free legal services and to give the public an understanding of the contributions lawyers make to society.

How appealing is my case? Lawyers regularly tell their clients that most appeals fail, leaving clients to decide whether their appeal warrants the cost or is an example of throwing good money after bad. The proposed app would mine databases of results on appeals looking for patterns in terms of the types of cases that succeed on appeal, the types of arguments to which appellate courts are sympathetic, and the grounds (and frequency) of courts dismissing appeals on procedural grounds. The app would therefore enhance informed decision-making by potential appellants.

Litigation Strategy Assist. Individual judges and even regions of judges vary greatly in terms of their openness to resolving disputes short of a full trial and their receptiveness to particular types of motions commonly filed by lawyers. Some judges seldom or never grant motions to decide cases without a trial, such as summary judgment motions and motions to dismiss; others welcome such motions and regularly grant them. Similarly, judges vary in their receptiveness to motions to exclude evidence (such as hearsay objections) and to constitutionally-based objections to evidence (e.g., illegal search and seizure). With this envisioned app, you would be able to search an existing database for each judge and gauge the judge’s likely receptiveness to a proposed motion or objection.

Email Scrubber. Privacy and other laws have been designed to protect information from being seen by others. For example, colleges and universities promise their adult students that their school records are confidential, and health care providers promise patients that their medical records will only be shared with authorized personnel and designated recipients. This email scrubber program would make it easier for those entrusted with private information to avoid inadvertent disclosure. A set of trigger words (such as, for students, “grade” or “grades,” “financial aid,” “exam,” “paper,” etc.) would cause the program to scan in depth for potential problems in the email and in any attachment and prompt the user to make sure the confidential information is protected before the message can be sent. Right now, all business can do is include the ubiquitous warning that the message may contain confidential information; the proposed app would promote genuine privacy while also reducing risk.