About + Feedback

Hi!

Thanks for checking out this working prototype of a book. I've written it to sum up the process I use and the things I've learned in bringing a creative, user-centered, collaborative way of solving problems into the legal system.

I hope it's of use to lawyers, court professionals, paralegals, judges, and beyond -- to find new ways to solve problems, and to improve the dignity of the people using and working in the legal system.

In the spirit of design, I'd also love your feedback, thoughts, and ideas for collaboration:

• Is something unclear, or too jargon-y? Let me know what I should rewrite.
• Want to help translate this into other languages? That would be terrific.
• Hungry for more examples and cases? They're coming -- that's the next scale-up of this working book. I'm writing a chapter on strategies for bringing this approach into legal organizations, how to lead design processes yourself, and cases of how it plays out.

You can reach me at mdhagan [at] stanford [dot] edu.

A little about me

My name is Margaret Hagan, and I work on bringing the design approach to the world of law. I'm a lawyer who was allergic to law school and its approach, and I ended up at the design school to start thinking through what other strategies and tools we could use in law to serve people, clients, and ourselves better.

Now I direct the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School and the d.school, Stanford's Institute of Design. We use a human-centered, agile design approach to teach students (law and otherwise) how to solve problems in the legal system with more creative methods. Much of our work is around access to justice and self-represented litigants.

Projects I'm working on

• Justice Innovation -- the Lab's hub of research, guides, and initiatives for a more human-centered justice system.
• JusticeBench -- a community platform for evaluating and building AI for civil legal help.
• Legal Help Commons -- shared infrastructure so legal aid groups and courts can build AI together instead of from scratch.
• Eviction Innovation -- case studies, guides, and data to help prevent evictions.
• Legal Design and Innovation -- our Medium publication, with dispatches on designing a better, human-centered legal system.
• Justice Technology Review -- a journal I co-founded.

A few more:

• Law Dojo -- an app I built for studying legal doctrine in quick, fun games, which some wonderful developers and designers have since helped grow. A new version is coming soon.
• Razblint -- my art portfolio, where my law drawings are available for purchase.
• Open Law Lab -- my original blog, started in law school. It's now archived and no longer updated.