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. 

Legal Tech Institute CLE: Finding & Formatting Legal Forms

Please join us for the next Legal Tech Institute CLE, Finding & Formatting Legal Forms, on Thursday, October 26th at 12:00 noon. Presenters will guide attendees in using three of the most popular legal databases -- Westlaw, Lexis, and O’Connor’s -- to locate legal forms. In the second part of the program, presenters will edit one of the forms found in one of the three legal research databases to demonstrate the use of various formatting features in Microsoft Word.

PLEASE NOTE: The location of this CLE has changed. It will be held in the Conference Room on the 17th floor of Congress Plaza at 1019 Congress, Houston, TX 77002. Please see the announcement for further details and to register for this program. 

Legal Tech Institute Celebrates First Anniversary

The Legal Tech Institute at the Harris County Law Library launched in October, 2016, with the CLE Social Media for Lawyers. Building on the success of that program, we've expanded learning opportunities significantly with a dozen in-person courses and 5 On-Demand training sessions available on our website. As with all programs at the Harris County Law Library, LTI classes are always free and open to all.

Additionally, each LTI video CLE is accredited by the State Bar of Texas and Texas attorneys can receive credit for watching the videos up to a year after the live program. That means the LTI anniversary also marks the end point for receiving Texas CLE credit for our first program. Watch Social Media for Lawyers and report your credit at www.texasbar.com before time runs out!

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. 

Increase Security and Convenience with Password Managers

Remembering the login credentials for all the websites we use every day can be burdensome and frustrating, but maintaining secured access to the information we rely upon is important and necessary. Websites for financial institutions, retail outlets, and other identity-based portals must be secure in order for us to feel confident in transacting business or when storing personal information on the cloud.

To relieve some frustration and make your online interactions more seamless, consider using a password manager. Password managers vary in their functionality, but in general, these tools will help you generate unique, high-security passwords and then store them for easy access. They will even populate the username and password fields for each site you visit, eliminating your need to remember another password ever again. There are several password managers to choose from at varying price points ranging from free, or just a few dollars a month, up to about $40 for a one-time purchase. The free tools have their limitations, but even without the sophisticated features of their premium counterparts, each product has its merits. To compare the best free password managers, take a look at PC Magazine's comparison chart. Another more recent article, also from PC Magazine, rates the more costly password managers and highlights the features that make each a good choice. Some of the apps recommended by PC Magazine are also endorsed by the folks at WIRED. It's worthwhile to check out their favorite picks.

Once you use a password manager, you may wonder how you ever got by without one. Now, if only these helpful programs would allow you to bypass the CAPTCHA requirement to prove once and for all that you are nor a robot...Is there an app for that?