Still Waiting for Disruption - Understanding Barriers to Access to Justice Technologies

Still Waiting for Disruption - Understanding Barriers to Access to Justice Technologies A Strategic Foresight Research Project

Exploring opportunities in legal technologies to foster Access to Justice for today and into the future. Legal technologies today are disrupting law firms and how they work, creating efficiencies, new services and new ways of working. However, Canada is largely still waiting to see this innovation address the deep access to justice challenges of people facing everyday legal problems. This project focuses on understanding the opportunities and challenges facing legal tech entrepreneurs in access to justice. At this point in the research project, we are interested in the perspectives and insights from the following: Legal professionals Professional intermediaries who assist others with legal questions and issues Legal Tech Innovators Members of the public who are or have been self-represented litigants.

Goal:

The goal of this project is to open up new opportunities for positive legal tech impact on the access to justice crisis in Canada, by exploring the existing barriers to innovative entrepreneurship and building future models that support increased access to legal conflict resolution.

Background:

Tech disruption has arrived in the legal sector and has started to make a significant transformational impact. Legal tech innovations are creating customizable products, challenging the service monopoly historically held by a small number of large firms, introducing machine-driven contract review, case research and AI-supported legal analysis. For the most part, these innovations have been developed for law firms and in-house corporate legal departments with many big firms purchasing and embedding start-up technologies into their operations. While legal tech is improving lawyers’ workflow and business model, it is not yet improving people’s lives or access to legal conflict resolution on a larger scale.

This project is a partnership between: Super Ordinary Laboratory, OCAD University, and CALIBRATE Solutions. It is funded by The Law Foundation of Ontario. For more information, please contact stillwaiting@ocadu.ca.

Creator: 
Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - 10:00am