The problem:

I have great respect for the US judicial system. It is set up as an adversarial system with endless procedural rules and avenues of appeal, all for the express purpose of ensuring a fair outcome for everyone involved. While no human institution is entirely without fault, and the judicial system is in no way immune to pervasive implicit social effects, I am a firm believer that the US judicial system is one of the best approximations of “fair” that humans have yet constructed.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and in the US judicial system, the cost of this fairness is pretty terrible inefficiency. Those endless avenues of appeal have a bad habit of being somewhat costly, which is the main reason that capital punishment is actually more expensive than life without parole in practice.

Some of this inefficiency is intrinsic to the process. For example, we could expedite decisions by limiting the chances of appeal, but this would directly impact an individual’s ability to seek a fair outcome. Such inefficiencies are probably not worth correcting. But there are other inefficiencies extrinsic to the process with can be corrected in ways that would augment the power of the judiciary to affect justice in the community.

In particular, I would like to focus on one particular extrinsic inefficiency in the judiciary: the inefficiency in connecting individuals experiencing injustice with lawyers and resources to pursue remediation.

The solution:

I propose a new website called WebJD, styled similarly to the ever-popular WebMD. The goal is to provide individuals with access to enough information that they may autonomously decide whether their case has enough merit to warrant talking to a lawyer, thus helping these individuals connect with the help they need.

Pursuant to its goal of connecting people with expertise, the site would be painstakingly constructed to be easy to navigate by non-lawyers. I’m still thinking about the best ways to accomplish this, but since most legal questions among citizens tend to involve the legal relationship between some individual or group and oneself, the primary form of organization would likely be by second party. In other words, a user might begin their search by selecting from a list of {Employer, School, Businesses, Family/Friends, Strangers, City/State Government, Federal Government}.

Within each of these options, users could further refine their search. One hypothetical path might be “City/State Government” -> “Civil actions against citizens” -> “Subpoenas.” The user would then be taken to a Wikipedia-esque page on subpoenas with information about them, requirements, what typically results, etc. The website would feature a zip code-powered Lawyer Finder, and a link to the finder would be prominently displayed on the subpoena page.

None of this is particularly new or ground breaking. What would make WebJD unique is that it would keep track a user’s per-visit history to prioritize page results and information (perhaps with a blossom algorithm? Something similar to Akinator). The goal would be to build up a database of usage history that could be used to intuit things about the particulars of a user’s problem. This would enable WebJD to make relevant information recommendations.

To make this process more intuitive, effective, and transparent, the list of previously viewed pages would be included in a UI element at the top of the screen. If a user visits a page which is not relevant to their problem, they may remove it from this list so that it won’t factor into the recommendations. With a well-constructed algorithm and a deep pool of usage data to draw from, this would hopefully allow WebJD to direct users to information that they need, even if they did not know at the outset that they needed it. Needless to say, WebJD would not store any information other than that required to improve the algorithm.

The only remaining unknown is where WebJD would acquire its data. I will be putting some thought into this, but perhaps something as simple as scraping from Wikipedia (with appropriate attribution, of course) would be enough. As long as it is able to provide user with the information necessary to make informed decisions about when to seek legal counsel, WebJD stands to be effective in its goal.