Access to Justice Projects

A scale resembling the classic scale of justice scale

In 2019, I started working with my graduate students at Bentley University on applied user-experience and access-to-justice research with the Massachusetts Trial Court. The projects below focus on improvements that can make legal information, forms, websites, and court procedures easier to understand and use.

AI Legal Assistant Improving the Experience of Pro Se Litigants Improving Legal Forms and Self-Help Material What should the Trial Court do to improve its online capabilities?

AI Legal Assistant

A digital illustration of a book, paper, and gavel

Created by Alghozy

As a proof of concept, I created a custom GPT to answer typical legal questions in Massachusetts state courts. It illustrates what a state-of-the-art model can do when given four pages of detailed behavioral instructions, even without an additional knowledge base.

You can interact with the Legal Assistant in all the most common languages used in Massachusetts, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, Chinese, French, and more. You don’t need to select a language – just start typing in the language you prefer.

Try it out! This legal assistant is available to anyone with a free or paid personal ChatGPT account at the following URL: Open the Massachusetts Legal Assistant

This is a prototype. It has not been thoroughly tested, it may sometimes give inaccurate information, and it is not a substitute for legal information or advice from a lawyer.

April 25, 2025

Improving the Experience of Pro Se Litigants

What can the Trial Court of Massachusetts do to improve the experience of pro se litigants? I concentrated on changes the Trial Court can make that will have a substantial positive impact and yet are relatively easy to implement. Although the focus was on the Probate and Family Court (PFC), many of the recommendations apply to multiple court departments, systems that are used by all court departments, and many of the large courthouses that contain multiple departments.

Methodology

I interviewed litigants, court staff, and attorneys. I observed in courthouses, analyzed court forms and materials, studied websites, and reviewed relevant literature.

Download

April 30, 2021

Improving Legal Forms and Self-Help Material

There are over 500 legal forms used throughout Massachusetts, and many are difficult to understand and fill out, especially for self-represented litigants with little education. It is easy to evaluate court forms and self-help material via usability studies and what are called “expert reviews.” I present the details on how to do this.

Download

January 6, 2023

What should the Trial Court do to improve its online capabilities?

At the request of the Massachusetts Court Management Advisory Board and the Trial Court, John Huitema and I set out to answer this question using multiple techniques: we interviewed more than 50 attorneys, court employees, and self-represented litigants (SRLs). We made dozens of visits to courthouses, looked at the judicial websites of other states, examined court forms and other documents, studied recent research reports, and made use of data from court surveys and online feedback. As a result, we also identified answers to a secondary question: How can the Trial Court improve the experience of self-represented litigants, thereby improving access to justice?

Download