Justice Data and Design Lab
Justice Data and Design Lab
Data Innovators Innovating Justice!
At the Justice Data and Design Lab, we bring fresh eyes and skillsets to the access to justice problem. We designed and built a Research Engine that uses unsupervised machine learning to identify legal needs. Students from law, data science, computer science, and public administration collaborate and use the Research Engine to collect, aggregate and analyze data and user experience on people’s everyday legal problems.
Currently, we are scraping and mining Reddit data to reveal insights on how we can make people’s lives better when they seek justice in their daily lives. This is new and innovative work. The volume of, and information in, our data is already illuminating different possibilities and catalyzing what we see and how we think about what help people need.
As our teams identify opportunities to improve the justice system, JDD also works with teams of students from faculties outside law to collaboratively create prototypes that demonstrate how technical innovation can make people’s lives better.
Ultimately, we are testing how an interdisciplinary, user-centred approach can tell us where to focus our work so that technical innovations may help the most people.
The Access to Justice Problem
When someone breaks a bone, they generally know they need medical help and know what steps to take to get it. But research shows that when people have a legal problem, they do not know what to do and where to find the help they need.[1] There is also a remarkable lack of data available on what help those people need and ask for, and that data deficit makes it extremely hard to make evidence-based decisions on how to improve justice so we help the people the most people in need.
JDD innovates in that data gap. JDD’s work with Reddit data is the first step in our exploration of how to gather and analyze user-experience and data to support an evidence-based approach to improving the justice system.
Justice Data and Design Lab’s Approach
The Justice Data and Design Lab (JDD) is testing how an interdisciplinary, user-centred approach can tell us where to focus our work to help the most people.
To do this, JDD runs two experimental projects: both populated with interdisciplinary teams of university students. One project uses the Research Engine to identify opportunities for improvement. The other project supports teams of students - “rapid response teams” - who generate prototypes in response to those opportunities in a single university term.
The Research Engine team is currently exploring the value of Reddit data from the subreddit r/legaladvicecanada. The Reddit data is first-person descriptions of help people need with legal problems, or help people need which they *think* might have a legal aspect. We use an inductive approach to the data analysis, letting the data guide our research. This data is showing us what help people are asking for with housing, employment and family problems. The data and analysis to date can also identify problems as they happen in real-time: for example, a bubble of car insurance issues that coincided with a change in car insurance policy in BC.
To undertake this work, the Research Engine team is harnessing skill sets outside of the law. Data Scientists have successfully built an automated data aggregation process, a google cloud computing and machine learning infrastructure with data capture and analysis capabilities. So far, we have used Latent Direchlet Allocation and Intertopic Distance Mapping to see what further information can “bubble up” as our datasets grow. We are excited to use other data analysis techniques to uncover further insights in the data.
The Research Engine uses Latent Direchlet Allocation and Intertopic Distance Mapping to analyse what help people are asking for with their legal problems.
For more information, watch the UVIC’s Dean’s Lecture “Better Justice: How Data Scientists and Legal Scholars Are Collaborating to Help Canadians Solve Their Everyday Legal Problems”
Justice Data and Design Lab’s Future Plans
We have big plans for our Research Engine. We look forward to collecting and analyzing an even more robust set of data from Reddit and to harness other social media sources. We have also built our data base so it can accept data in other formats. Our goal is to become an innovative and vibrant source of the data for others working to improve access to justice in BC.
Based on our data, we are currently shaping two opportunities for improving access to justice, and we hope to uncover many more. Our other future plans include giving these opportunities along with people with first-hand experience in how the work would help average people, to interdisciplinary Response Teams.
An earlier iteration of this Lab successfully engaged students at the Centre for Digital Media as a Rapid Response Team, and they created a Pilot Project– called the Equity Evaluator - for the Property Assessment Appeal Board of British Columbia. The Evaluator provides the power of Artificial Intelligence to residential homeowners.
JDD is grateful for funding from the Law Foundation of BC and matching funding from Mitacs.
For more information, please contact Kate Gower, Lab Director at kate@gowermodernlaw.com.
[1] This comparison of people with medical versus legal problems came from Andrew Pilliar, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University, and we thank him for letting us use his idea to explain the Access to Justice problem.