Legal Resources and Services for Veterans

Veterans Law Resource Month at the Harris County Law Library is coming to an end. All month long, we've featured legal research materials throughout the Law Library, including the following:

• Federal forms for veterans
• Code of Federal Regulations (Title 38: Veterans Affairs) 
• 2017 Veterans Benefits Handbook from the Department of Veterans Affairs 

We've also spotlighted a few of our online resources including the Veterans Legal Aid Portal from TexasLawHelp.org and military law titles available through HeinOnline.

All of these research tools will continue to be available in our collection and online. In addition, veterans can find a variety of services from organizations such as Lone Star Legal Aid, the Texas Veterans Commission, the Texas Legal Services Center, the State Bar of Texas, the Houston Bar Association, and the Texas Veterans Legal Assistance Project.

Being thankful for access to legal information

Our staff celebrated this week's holiday with a Thanksgiving potluck in our break room/historical statute room. We're posting this photo for anyone who would like to know why our decades-old statute books are so aromatic.

The time we spent together gave us a moment to reflect on all the many things for which we are thankful. As law librarians, we see the positive impact access to legal information can have on individuals' lives each day, so we are always grateful for the partnerships that allow us to make information available to our patrons. We are thankful for the partnership between the Harris County Attorney's Office and the Houston Bar Association. We are grateful for the Houston Volunteer Lawyers to whom we refer many self-represented litigants seeking to connect with a licensed Texas attorney for free, accurate legal information. We are also grateful to work with TexasLawHelp.org to be a point of access for Houstonians who are in need of the legal information posted there. And we are thankful for the great many community resources, from Houston Lawyer Referral Service to TexasLegalAnswers.org to AVDA, we refer our patrons to each day when the best information we can provide is a specialized service to help connect them with a licensed attorney. Finally, we are grateful for the publishers, including Westlaw, Lexis, O'Connor's, the State Bar of Texas, HeinOnline, and many more, who work with us to make their wealth of legal information open and available to all within steps of the courthouse. We are thankful to work with so many to ensure open and equal access to legal information.

The Rise of the Legal Chatbots

Hello, I’m Lawson, your legal robot assistant. How can I help you?

This is the kind of prompt you might encounter on a website that offers customer service by chat. Friendly avatars greet you on retail websites, ready to sell you everything from appliances to vehicles. A virtual concierge, for example, might help you plan your next vacation. Even tech support is often provided via a chat or messaging feature. And now in law, chatbots or “robot lawyers” are facilitating access to the legal system and helping users handle simple legal matters.

Perhaps the most well-known legal chatbot is DoNotPay, a tool that guides users through a series of questions designed to dispute parking tickets. In recent months, the DoNotPay chatbot has expanded considerably to address a variety of legal concerns including consumer rights, employment law, and landlord-tenant disputes. Soon, the creator of the site, Josh Browder, hopes to offer a chatbot that will handle your divorce. 

Hate Crime Help is a newer addition to the army of chatbots ready to help people who have been victims of hate crimes, including violence, verbal attacks, property damage, and harassment. The app lets you specify that the crime was motivated by discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, immigration status, gender, or sexual orientation. It then provides contact information for local resources linked to your zip code that will help you get the legal relief you need. Additional information about what the law says regarding hate crimes at the state and national levels is provided, along with a point-by-point comparison of hate crimes and bias incidents. 

ProTechMe uses a chatbot to quickly and efficiently collect information needed for securing a protective order in Harris County. Its design is based on the Texas Attorney General's Protective Order kit (which can be found here on TexasLawHelp.org). Information that is gathered via the chatbot auto-populates a pdf document that the user can then print out and submit to the district attorney or to a legal aid office. Victims of family violence are often closely monitored by their abusers, and using the Internet to search for help may not be a safe option. Although ProTechMe is still in development, it may, eventually, become a safer and more practical way for victims to get the help and information they need.  

Robots are unlikely to replace lawyers any time soon, if ever, despite media reports that sometimes sensationalize the impact of chatbots and related AI technologies. However, there is no doubt that technology will continue to shape the practice of law and change how clients interface with the legal system. Embracing technology as a tool for facilitating access to justice is advisable, for, as the robot overlords always say, resistance is futile. 

A Better Legal Internet

When you search Google for something like heat rash, Abraham Lincoln, or the Eiffel Tower, the list of search results is accompanied by a Knowledge Card, which contains brief, supplemental information about your search term along with relevant facts. Symptoms and treatment (for a medical term), biographical data (for a historical figure), or geographic information (for a national landmark) is presented in a box to the right of your search. Pictures, bits of trivia, related search terms, and links to official websites are also included, providing a snapshot, in plain language, of the topic you are researching.

This information is all very useful when it's available, and having this kind of easy-to-access, user-friendly content on the same page as your search results can be a very helpful starting point for your basic online research. For legal terms, however, no such equivalent exists. A search for the terms unlawful detainer, emancipated minor, or protective order do not offer the same benefits. A definition, or a featured snippet from Google, drawn from Wikipedia or FindLaw, may appear at the top of your search results, but no other value-added content is likely to be provided. Knowledge cards simply do not exist for legal terms, nor do so many other search engine features that could improve the user experience for those in need of legal information.

Fortunately, the Legal Design Lab is taking steps to introduce just those kinds of improvements. A Better Legal Internet is the name of the project that seeks to improve the search experience for Internet users, particularly lay people looking for legal information. The goals of the project are to (1) increase the ability of search engines to identify legal issues in people’s queries, and (2) direct them to relevant, jurisdiction-specific, actionable information to deal with those issues. Overall, A Better Legal Internet will provide a seamless, intuitive, user journey for people who rely on the internet for legal information. As users search for help, they should be able to find legal information (i.e., what the law says), legal service providers (i.e., people who can help), self-help tools and forms to complete legal tasks, and paths for accessing the courts system. 

Underlying the goals of A Better Legal Internet is a semantic system similar, in some ways, to the Google Knowledge Cards. Creating a taxonomy of legal terms used by lay people, including words and phrases that describe a person's case details and legal objectives, would be an important first step in developing a semantic foundation for A Better Legal Internet. Next, linking the taxonomy of legal terms to a directory of available legal options and their associated eligibility factors would need to follow. Providing action steps and the sequence of tasks to complete for each step of a legal process, along with accompanying forms and self-help documents, would be another important part of the equation. Finally, finding people in your geographic area who can help provide legal assistance, including free service providers and legal clinics, would round out the options available. 

Mediation at the Harris County Dispute Resolution Center

Alternative Dispute Resolution can be a helpful way to handle conflict between two parties in a disagreement. It's often a good and less expensive alternative to hiring an attorney and taking your case to court.  The Harris County Dispute Resolution Center (DRC), which is sponsored by the Houston Bar Association and funded through the Harris County Courts System, offers mediation for general disputes, divorce, and active civil cases, free of charge to Harris County residents. (For examples of the kinds of disputes handled in each category, please refer to the list at left.)

Mediation for general disputes typically involves money, automobiles, landlord/tenant issues, or property damage. The DRC mediation program for general disputes is for resolving disagreements before a lawsuit is filed.

Divorce mediation is for all issues related to divorce either before or after a suit is filed. Child custody, child support, and visitation can be addressed through mediation, along with related family law matters such as property division, common law separations, and LGBT divorce issues. 

For mediation in active civil cases, the DRC can only mediate for parties with a court pleading or disputed dollar amount of $100,000 or less. Also, the Dispute Resolution Center does not mediate suits involving more than three named parties.

Other types of disputes that can be resolved through mediation typically involve Children’s Protective Services, juveniles, special education, or truancy. To speak with a Case Manager and request mediation for any of the issues mentioned above, please contact the Dispute Resolution Center at 713-755-8274 (8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday) or email email@drchouston.org and briefly explain the nature of your dispute.