Justice Innovation | Blog
Access to justice is still not widely available for everyone in society. Usually people with a low income, frequently uneducated, have more difficulties in obtaining legal help. There do already exist organizations that aim to tackle this problem by coming up with new innovative ideas to increase accessibility of justice. The Centre for Justice Innovation in the US is an example. This organisation thought of several solutions like providing free access to legal information, partnering people with legal service providers, etc. To make this more efficient, the idea has come up to create an online platform/ network that would guide people through the entire process of figuring out they have a legal issue and how deal with it. This would save time and costs while making justice more widely available to the public, especially those who have limited access to justice for reasons like low income, language deficiency, etc.
Having a tool or platform to assist litigants, especially those from impoverished backgrounds, will allow these people to have easier and quicker access to the justice system; a platform that is normally reserved for those whom are on the privileged side of society.
Innovation in Justice is essentially needed as It has the capabilities of narrowing the gap between those whom have it difficult to find legal service and those who provide them.
What the Center Court for Innovation seeks to do is narrow this margin, making justice and legal services freely and accessible to all. The potential for such innovation is tremendous as minority communities that would have previously found it incredibly difficulty to find legal aid and equal justice now have these tools in their hands, especially with the creation of an online platform to facilitate this process.
Not only will this allow them to be well informed over the rights and the legal services at their disposal, but would empower these unrepresented communities.
Although an online platform is a great way to address a lot of people, individuality will have to make way for common issues. Almost every case has its differences, which makes it difficult to compare cases. This results in platforms/portals with very common issues, which in itself destroys the purpose of the platform itself. Even worse, non-professionals can try to link cases to their own, what could result in false believes.
Online legal portal are mainly focused on people who want to do things themselves. The portal provides great resources to use, but lacks the professional support that is needed to deduce the useful information out of all these resources. As stated earlier, the platform is created for people with a language deficiency; for those people is a platform even harder to use. Justice related articles use a lot of jargon that isn’t commonly used. Hence, without proper elaboration, most articles are quite useless for these kind of people.
It can be concluded that access to justice is still not widely available for everyone in society and although many believe that innovation in the Justice system is needed, this will take a long time and will have to face many issues and obstacles. The idea of an online platform like mentioned above will help minority communities get access to justice, what normally would be unreachable for that side of society. But at the same time, narrowing this gap is not a guaranty for professional and comprehending legal service. The platform is still lacking necessary coverage and depth and will still have to develop itself to be able to make a realistic and positive impact on the accessibility to justice and legal services for everyone in society.