Developing a legal help schema for the Internet

This weekend we had the pleasure of joining other members of the Legal Technology Lab network of law school efforts, in a Prototype Jam to make forward progress on our projects.

Our team brought our Better Internet for Legal Help project to work on. We came with the mission of getting more refined search engine results page designs, that would show how to provide more actionable and correct info to people who have searched for a legal query (even if they don’t know it’s a legal query).

We did this by going through a brainstorm of questions that people in two different situations would have. First, a person who has come home to an eviction notice. Second, to a person who has just decided to seek protection from domestic violence.

We had pairs and small groups brainstorm what they would want to know in such a scenario. Then we figured out what kinds of information would be needed to answer such a query. This is the information our schema must cover.

Then we did a quick prototyping-sketching session, to imagine what a better search results page would look like to answer these queries. We came together to synthesize the different ideas for content and presentations, to make a more prioritized and easy-to-use sketch.

This prototyping jam helped us to get more input from more legal domain experts, and to also synthesize our work with other law school projects focused on developing structured data schema and smart legal docs/information.

More prototypes, with more developed schema and search results designs to come soon!

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