University of Arizona and Brigham Young University (Photos: Shutterstock.com)
|

Last year, the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University (BYU) decided to try something new: a design-oriented course through a new program, LawX, aimed at tackling access to justice initiatives. The result? After one semester of work, the program designed a document automation tool for Utah debt collection cases, which LawX director Kimball Parker said has already exceeded double the clicks he expected for 2018.

So what to do for an encore? This year, it's a new focus—evictions—with a new partner to help out.

This fall, BYU's LawX is partnering with Innovation for Justice, a new program at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law, to develop parallel classes that explore solutions to reduce evictions in Utah, Arizona and beyond. Through the classes, 12 Arizona students and up to six BYU students will gather research, collaborate on findings, and explore technological and non-technical solutions to the eviction problem in both jurisdictions. Parker will lead the BYU class, while the Arizona class will be led by Stacy Butler, director of the Innovation for Justice program.

“We can get a lot of data on two different places, which hopefully can tell us a lot more,” Parker told Legaltech News last week. He added that the solutions the BYU and Arizona classes come up with may be different, but if they end up being similar, “we can pool resources” and create a framework that can apply a number of places.

Of course, LawX already has a foundation for solving access to justice problems with its debt collection tool. Parker said the document automation piece can be easily adjusted for something like evictions—he's even used a version in private practice for automating GDPR documents—but it's ultimately the students' choice if that's the route they want to travel. Another option, he explained, would be to work on legislation or other non-technological remedies that could best solve the problem.

All he asks is that there is something in place at the end of the semester or shortly after. And for the LawX students, that will likely mean hard work, especially as the class size is shrinking from nine students last year. “It's going to be a smaller class, which means that people are going to have to take ownership of a bit more of things, which I think will push it along a bit better,” Parker said.

So why evictions? Parker called it “a different type of problem than debt collection,” mostly because “there's less of them, but the impact is great—it's a much bigger impact per person than debt collection.”

He said that he's heard tales of evictions filed on a Friday with the need to respond within three days by Utah law, an almost impossible task for somebody already facing financial difficulties. “The small amount of time, combined with nobody hiring a lawyer, is troubling. And the fact that there's maybe some game playing here, where people file it on days that they know are the least likely for people to see it, is also troubling.”

He said that students will be asked to approach the problem from all sides, including interviewing landlords. He added that there needs to be some sort of remedy for people who abuse the lease or destroy the apartment, but in current practice, “it seems like the balance is a little out of whack.”

If Parker could change one thing from LawX's first run, it would be focusing on go to market strategies earlier in the semester. He said the tool is spectacular, but it could have three times the reach if he and the class had done more research into how to actually get it into the hands of those that need it.

“We have to do something to get it into people's hands, so I think we're going to focus on that from the very beginning, whatever we end up doing,” he said, later adding, “I think that's often the thing that's the least thought through.”