Self-Help Legal Kiosks Create Adaptable Access
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Carl Rauscher
Director of Communications and Media Relations
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WASHINGTON– Legal aid and tech experts discuss self-help legal kiosks on the latest episode of LSC's “Talk Justice” podcast, released today. Lee Rawles, assistant managing editor at the ABA Journal, hosts the conversation with Ariel Clemmer, executive director of 603 Legal Aid in New Hampshire; Mauricio Duarte, chief operating officer at A2J Tech; and Susan Myers, director of litigation and project manager for the Nevada Legal Kiosk Project at Nevada Legal Services (NLS).
The under-resourcing of legal aid makes it impossible to provide meaningful legal help to every person who needs it. In fact, LSC-funded legal services organizations must turn away half of the eligible clients who seek their assistance. Many providers build and share educational materials and self-help resources online to help fill the gaps, but those without access to a personal computer or smartphone may not be able to access these resources.
Several legal aid organizations, law schools and other community service providers around the country have installed legal kiosks to help provide greater access to information and services. The kiosks that Myers and Clemmer have created feature computers with scanners and printers, and often sit inside privacy walls.
“Nevada does not have a law help site, so there was no central repository for legal aid information,” says Myers. “We have five legal aid organizations across the state, so through the kiosk project, I created a clearing house for all of this information so that people aren't just randomly Googling around trying to find it.”
Nevada currently has 28 legal kiosks housed in libraries where trained staff help oversee them and assist users. Myers explains that libraries are suitable locations because people already instinctively go there to seek help and information, and library staff are trusted helpers.
“We, too, situated a lot of these in libraries for the same reasons, and we also did a comparative experiment and placed [about] half of them in social service providers, so we really wanted to test out and see whether there was a difference in usage at those two types of locations,” says Clemmer. “What we found is that there wasn't, and that the biggest driver of success was actually the investment of the location itself—having somebody, anybody at the location who was committed to telling people about the kiosk, making use of it when appropriate.”
Clemmer launched a kiosk project at her previous role at the Center for Social Justice at Western New England School of Law in Massachusetts. The impetus for the project was to provide people with online access to the courts and legal help when they were physically closed to the public due to COVID-19. They thought that people would mostly use the kiosks to attend court virtually.
“We rapidly found out that that was simply not true, that almost nobody was using it for that purpose and instead they were really using it for self-help resource triage, and so we were able to shift the website interface that we were using and [to better address] that need,” says Clemmer.
Both Clemmer and Myers’ organizations worked with A2J Tech, a public benefit corporation that promotes technology projects for expanding access to justice. Duarte explains that since the computer interface is completely customizable, different organizations provide different options and highlight the information that is most relevant to their users.
“A legal kiosk is set up as a secure environment in which you guide them through the experience: you create a specific interface in which you show them the different [types] of resources,” says Duarte. “In some instances, we have had programs that want to create document automation within their kiosk experience for self-represented litigants, other programs want to refer to the statewide legal help site that they have because they already have valuable resources, but they want to triage some of those resources within the legal kiosk experience.”
Duarte says that legal kiosks are an appealing access-to-justice project because they are iterative and adaptable, new resources can be added and the whole kiosk can even be relocated to a new space.
Talk Justice episodes are available online and on Spotify, YouTube, Apple and other popular podcast apps. The podcast is sponsored by LSC’s Leaders Council.