This is a reminder to complete two important surveys affecting access to justice in British Columbia: The National Action Committee’s annual survey – deadline extended to January 17th. This is your opportunity to have your A2J initiatives included in the 2019 Report on Canada’s Justice Development Goals. The Law Society of BC’s Futures Task Force […]
In the summer of 2019, the Lab received a very warm invitation to work with a group from Ulster University in Northern Ireland. Led by Professor Gráinne McKeever, the group was eager to use a human-centred design process as part of their research project to create and test supports for litigants in person (“LIPS”) in […]
I watched “To Kill a Mockingbird” again recently. As most of you know, Harper Lee wrote the novel, and the 1962 Academy Award–winning movie features Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, a small town lawyer who defends a black man accused of the rape of a white girl. There are so many important themes in this […]
In our last post we highlighted the need for any justice design (or reform) initiative to start with a deep dive into the user experience and to involve users throughout the process. The image of the flashlight on a dark night is a stark reminder of how opaque and terrifying the current system can be […]
This recent blog post from IAALS (Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System) caught my eye and my imagination. It begins by noting the 2016 Cases Without Counsel study (Note 1) which highlighted the struggle of people trying to navigate the family justice system without their own lawyer and includes the following comment […]
The BC Family Justice Innovation Lab employs an approach we call “systemic human-centred design”. The first phase of the model is “discovery” of the experiences of the users (the people the system is intended to serve), in our case the human beings who are involved in separation and divorce in BC. We have written before […]
This article is re-posted from our recent contribution to Slaw dot ca, Canada’s wonderful national online legal magazine. The BC Family Justice Innovation Lab is focusing on improving the well-being of BC families and children experiencing separation and divorce. One of its ‘home-grown’ initiatives is called “Youth Voices” as it focuses on the experience and […]
We held our sensemaking and ideation workshop on the Youth Voices Initiative on January 28, 2018. We will be publishing more detailed information in this page soon but, in the meantime, we are excited to share some of the tools we used for the workshop in case they are useful for other designers. First, huge […]
Building on our previous post, we are thrilled to welcome Woody Mosten (the “father of unbundling”) as our special guest for an interactive and practical workshop in Vancouver on unbundled legal services on January 31, 2018. You can take advantage of early registration discounts until December 31st! Click here for more information and registration details. […]
Almost two years ago, our Lab received a wonderful invitation to contribute a paper to a Special Edition of the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice focusing on “access to justice & innovation”. Jane Morley QC and I (with help from many others who kindly read and re-read the article) dove into the task of […]