This project (in conjunction with the Legal Specification Language Development Project) involves two main objectives: (i) to define a standard schema that online legal help providers can use to encode the content on their websites so that it is more structured and machine-readable, and (ii) working with the Internet search-providers to adopt these standards and create more directed, correct, and actionable search results design.
The goal of the project is to improve access to justice on at one of the most important junctions in which lay people seek out legal information and services: the internet search. This project will both increase the ability of the search engines to identify legal issues in people’s queries, and to direct them to relevant, jurisdiction-specific, actionable information to deal with these issues.
News/Updates
The project team has begun creating a tool for website administrators to properly code their metadata in order to be recognized by search engines and scrapers. Google and Microsoft have become involved and they as well as the leaders and members of the development of the project held a workshop earlier this summer to aid in the progression of the project.
News/Updates
The project team is currently rolling out a new data standard for Legal Services groups and courts, on schema.org mark up. This should improve their placement and jurisdiction correctness on searches. We have run a large-scale audit, to document the current problems on Google search, when it comes to people seeking legal help and getting misinformation. We will do a second audit, after the mark-up has been applied, to see how this affect the algorithms placement of legal help resources.
The team is also developing a taxonomy of legal problems that people experience in the US. This is being used to build natural language classifiers to automatically spot people's legal issues, in their posts or in their searches. This is in collaboration with Suffolk University's lit lab and Pew charitable trusts.
