Why we need a JusticeHub

##Why build JusticeHub? There is a growing need across the entire legal system for technologies to be used in real time, free from limitations and access barriers created by unintended silos, and with coordinated monitoring to track justice needs, related parties, actions, and possibilities for alternative dispute resolution systems at the earliest possible stages.

Legal aid and other social justice groups have pioneered the creation and adoption of innovative technologies to increase access to the legal system and assist in their advocacy. Client and organizational needs, however, often emerge ad hoc, or pressured by short time frames between first identification and crisis stage, after cases and controversies have already taken root. This means that the legal aid system and the courts often become bogged down in inherently limited reactive modes rather than more strategic approaches likely to produce lasting positive outcomes. Without such realignment of focus, courts and the legal aid system will continue to risk being too overburdened to meet the increasing needs of low-income communities.

Additionally, legal aid organizations are further restricted by the legal profession, as a whole, due to many law firms’ and courts’ tendencies to be late adopters of innovative technologies. The current legal profession faces additional obstacles to timely and cost-effective technology systems due to outdated rules and concepts regarding unauthorized practice of law and other professional regulatory barriers. However, even with such barriers to deal with, legal aid organizations have continued to be leaders in many parts of the country for creating justice-oriented technologies. Nonetheless, the existing environment for legal aid technology development, although impressive, is not yet as robust and efficient as it could be.

The still emerging online legal industry has also been in the forefront of developing new ways for consumers to access legal help. Many consumers have taken advantage of the benefits of this new industry and appreciate the transparency that some companies have helped to provide to the insulated and often opaque American legal system. The online legal industry is consistently raising the level of legal technology, but the two-edged sword of being free from traditional ethical rules causes concern.

We feel that institutionalized "justice systems have largely remained frozen in place, locked into particular geographic places and paper." Further, there is an "immediate challenge for the profession to acknowledge not only that access to justice for the most vulnerable is restricted but also that the capacity of traditional legal institutions is lacking." Therefore, JusticeHub seeks to not only be the catalyst of justice technology solutions to repair this broken world, but create a trusted online collaborative space to begin to consciously, and actively, transform the current mechanisms of justice.