Author: writer

Future Kamloops Mental Health Court … With Apps?

Becca Dickson

There are more than 20 designated mental health courts in Canada, none of which are in BC. Mental health courts are typically available to people who have been charged with a crime and who have mental health issues that relate to the criminal behaviour. TRU Law Professor Ruby Dhand and Kamloops lawyer Michelle Stanford are working on a proposal for a mental health court in Kamloops.

Mental health courts intend to divert people with mental health issues away from the criminal justice system and towards treatment and various supports in the community. To be sustainable, the court must be inexpensive to run, and have a measurable impact on the individual/community that it serves.

The future Kamloops mental health court could benefit from an app which streamlined its admission process. Below, I use the Nova Scotia mental health court’s admission criteria and statistics to outline why.

The Nova Scotia mental health court (now called the Dartmouth Wellness Court)  has been around for 10 years. In order for someone to participate in the court, they must be referred and deemed elibile to participate. The eligibility criteria include:

  • Being over 18 years old
  • Living in the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM)
  • Having a substantial connection to the HRM (for example – attending school in the area)
  • Having a mental disorder that is a recognized serious and persistent mental illness and is substantially connected to the offence.
  • Crown attorney consent

In the first four years of the program 687 individuals were referred to the mental health court, and 232 of them were deemed eligible to participate. Individuals who were referred waited an average of 50.58 days before hearing whether or not they were admitted to the program.

An app which asked the user basic eligibility questions could help streamline the process. It could ask plain language questions to determine preliminary eligibility (like “How old are you?” “Do you live in the HRM?” “Do you have a mental health disorder that is clearly related to your charge?”) The app could then create a report to be emailed to the next person who needs to see it to make further eligibility determinations.

In this unprecedented era of forced justice system reform, ideas like this that would have seemed really “outside the box” before might now be pretty much “inside the box” and have a realistic chance of being implemented, if designed well.

Court: A Click Away!

The “slow to change, uphold tradition” mindset has hampered the use and uptake of technology in the justice system. Pre-Covid, court participants had to go to a physical location, wait for the allotted time, then present themselves in their role. Videoconferencing and audio call-ins were underused, and the profession claimed not to have its strengths in IT.

Covid-19 changed how we see large gatherings of people and thus critically impacted the court system. Moving forward, there will be pressure to grow the online adjudication of uncomplicated civil and criminal matters. Zoom cases that have already been conducted should not be seen as temporary, but also, they should not be seen as permanent. The adjustments in the pandemic should be a stepping stone in developing a standard tool that will be utilized throughout the justice system.

I’m simply a law student who has never done a “real” trial, but there are some suggestions and procedures that may assist in setting the standards of virtual court. This is simply a discussion on how things may change and the benefit of those suggestions.

The Courtroom (or “Courtzoom”) 

Zoom and similar platforms have provided a service to many during the pandemic, having created a place to go when it could be anywhere but physical. In the near future, our virtual courtroom should be on its own platform with a custom interface that eases the process and maintains the decorum.

  • There could be a set position in gallery mode, where the Crown (or Plaintiff) and Defence (or Defendant) counsels’ video box would always appear. Which could be set by logging in as such. The judge would appear in a box at the top of the screen.
  • The room would be open 20 minutes before without the judge enters to allow for “tech testing” time (more on that later). This would also allow the judge to come in afterwards, which would provide an opportunity for counsel to bow and show respect.
  • The witness view box could be moved individually.
  • Judges and clerks would be given additional controls to mute other participants, record cases and create private breakout rooms.
  • There would be a forum portion or “hub” that would have court listings that would allow the public to enter as passive viewers.

These ideas only skim the surface of what could be implemented to better the courts. I think there should be a focus on creating a system that is easy to navigate, and allows for each participant to seamlessly go through the process, while conserving some of the dignity that surrounds the court.

The Participant Set-up

Due to the accessibility of the internet and technology, set-up could easily be satisfied by having a quiet space, internet connection and a laptop (or smartphone). Though far from ideal, it would allow for those with less funds to be able to contribute and participate. I find myself interested in the “access to justice” aspect of such a change. In one view, this would help those in rural areas without transportation get the opportunity to be “in” court. Another view may see this as increasing the divide between those that have and those that don’t. As with many things, there are positives and negatives. Much of the brainstorming of ideas in this post is about highlighting those benefits and finding ways to lighten the load of the downside.

  • The “courtzoom” should be accessible to smartphones to widen the scope of participation. It could use a one-time log in, to allow for people to feel safe borrowing tech to use for their hearing.
  • A link could be shared to family and friends that would easily allow them to join as passive viewers. Allowing for the support of having someone you care about in your corner.
  • For those without the means of technology, there should be public buildings with rooms set up for videoconferences. These could be found in places like libraries and universities and could be used on a reserve basis. Firms could be encouraged to bring their clients into their conference rooms, so they have the benefit of working technology. I know that this opens up a world of other issues, but to think that we are given the opportunity to bring the “court” and “justice” to those that are vulnerable is an opportunity we should jump on.

How do we help?

This question needs to be present for all those that put their mind to connecting technology and the court. Tech has the opportunity to be the support that so many need. Those outside the profession of law need to come first when visualizing what a new system could look like.

It’s about making steps in the right direction.

Counsel & Advocacy 

I believe a lot of lawyers will be able to adapt to the changes of virtual court and continue to serve their clients in whatever new medium may appear. It may take some time though.

This point of the conversation has been something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Due to the criminal moot that I’m competing in having moved to a virtual medium, I’ve begun to wonder how to advocate over my laptop. Below I’ve compiled some of my thoughts, using my current understanding of technology, advocacy lessons from the moot and Professor Jones’ class. To ground all my ideas in how practice is going now, the podcast “The Lawyers Lounge” has an episode on virtual hearings where the hosts helpfully explain their own experiences in online court.

I’m interested in how advocacy at the trial level will change and grow as things are added and removed from how we view virtual hearings. What can lawyers do to increase their presence in such a courtroom?

  • Multiple screens will be pivotal to managing the balance between the video boxes that are watching (passive), video boxes that are speaking and being spoken to (active) and the documents required to conduct the trial.
  • There should be an “eye-contact” screen that has the webcam attached with the video of the person you’re speaking to, and the documents required at the moment on the same screen.
  • Good lighting and mic quality are important as well. As advocates you’d want to present the best case as possible without having dark rooms or muffled voices distracting viewers.
  • A podium set-up may be ideal if the advocate is better on their feet.
  • A good knowledge of the platform being used, and a 20 min tech testing period before the trial begins will reduce tech stumbles that may slow the process.
  • It is possible that due to the distance often felt with virtual communication, it might be beneficial to be slightly (and I mean only a tad) more theatrical when presenting your case. It might keep those involved more “dialed in”, when it’s so easy to “tune out”.

These suggestions are simply the thoughts of a law student excited about how things may change. There will always be a need for a physical court as some issues require it, but to think about using technology to further your field and alter the profession has value. There is this opportunity to make a tough situation into a lasting change that will benefit all those involved.

If anyone has ideas to add or advocacy suggestions, I would enjoying reading them. Thanks!

Michael Noguera

Citations

Professor Craig Jones’ advocacy lessons helped how I though about what alterations may be successful.

Lisa Jorgensen & Danielle Robitaille. “Inside the Courtroom: Virtual trials and the Sharma decision”, (2020), online: The Lawyers Lounge Podcast <http:// www.emond.ca/the-lawyers-lounge-episode-archive>.

 

Changing the Foundation for Innovation, Collaboration and Creativity in Law

Innovation, collaboration, and creativity are characteristics that are becoming a focal point of the current demands of those hiring legal counsel. Gone are the times of hiring a lawyer for one specific task with one specific requirement, and ushered in are the times of multi-faceted approaches to solving problems. It seems that because the legal world is starting to recognize that the lawyers being pumped out of law schools with a cookie cutter education perhaps isn’t the best way to stimulate innovation in the field, programs are being designed to help lawyers with their “soft skills”. While these programs are well-intentioned and certainly useful to those who have left law school behind decades before current, it simply doesn’t address the problem at a foundational level. The level I’m referring to is the ground level of fresh candidates being accepted into law school as we speak. Canada’s  top-tier law schools are not known for their holistic hiring process, and in fact usually require simply two documents upon application: (1) undergraduate transcripts, and (2) LSAT score. To me, requiring only these two items is inviting your new class of soon-to-be lawyers to set innovative thinking and real-world acquired soft skills aside for a spotlight focus on the robotic functioning of a fundamentally flawed grading system. If we want to fix what will soon be a profession-wide problem of lawyers who are being asked to perform in ways they’ve never been asked to before, the way to do so isn’t to address the problem years into a lawyers professional career, but rather at ground zero before they’ve learned the outdated and entrenched ways to approach the practice of law.

Upon discovering that perhaps law school was something I would like to pursue, I began the arduous process of looking into the requirements each individual school listed for their applicants. Not only did I leave the process disheartened as a student (I am the first to admit that working during my undergraduate degree did not fare ostentatiously well for my grades), I left it disheartened as a human being (dramatic yes, but also true). So many of the institutions I looked into did not have any kind of holistic framework in place to make sure that the applicants they were admitting were well-rounded in both academic pursuits and real-world experience. To me this screamed: “We want you! BUT with the caveat of it being the “you” only in relation to your grades and LSAT score.” Creating an environment comprised of academic superstars that were only admitted on the premise that their grades were high, and their LSAT score higher has created this strange utopian environment of legalese using human-like robots who read textbooks for sustenance and oil their joints with their regurgitated and unhelpful word-for-word caselaw.

That being said, there are always exceptions to the rule. There are certainly those who have been able to work, live lives, and achieve outstanding grades. In consequence, these people will have some of those soft skills that innovation, creativity and collaboration in a professional setting require. However, I do not think it wrong to say that most of those being accepted to the top tier law schools whom only weigh grades and LSAT scores are those students privileged enough to have been able to focus on school and only school in their undergraduate degrees. For some reason, this seems to be a fundamental flaw in our legal education system that is rarely discussed.

To tie this together, it is my extremely humble and overly simple second-year opinion that if we indeed want to encourage innovation, collaboration, and creativity in our legal profession, then why not try to fix the foundation that it was built on.  True innovation, collaboration and creativity blossoms from experience and practice in the real world with a variety of personal interactions. Why not include holistic evaluations country-wide in our law school applications to ensure that students coming in have a solid understanding of what personable communication is like and how to do it? Why are we encouraging, as institutions, students to only value grades and numbers that do not accurately translate to the legal skills required in the actual practice of law?

I am not trying to discount the importance of reading the material and being able to apply the knowledge. Reading comprehension and application is important and shouldn’t be taken for granted, especially in a profession where reading is a heavy component of the work. Showing your future law school that you are able to retain information at the undergraduate level is also an important indicator of being able to retain information at the law school level. However, this can be shown just as sufficiently through grades that live in the 80 percent range in tandem with outside-of-school work and experience, as it would be shown through grades in the upper 90 percentages with only an academic life focus. At the end of the day, the law profession is a service industry, and it’s no wonder clients are asking for more innovative and creative lawyers than the professionals they’re currently receiving. Many of the lawyers we’ve seen in this practice before us lack major service industry skills because of their purely academic focus, and I too as a client would want more soft skills present in my counsel.

In summation, I believe the key to truly endorsing innovation, creativity, and collaboration is changing the things that we as students are taught to value (i.e., grades). Institutions need to foster and appreciate adaptable thinking, people skills and real world experience. Adopting this mindset early would eliminate the need for lawyers to later on take courses to essentially learn how to talk to human beings on a human being level. This is arguably a skill we should all value as residents of this planet, instead of treating it like an abnormal characteristic that isn’t found abundantly in the regular functioning of society. I would argue even, that offering these courses as learning tools is simply affirming to lawyers and students that all the skills they need to know come from a classroom. These skills are easily achievable through interactions in the world by simply stepping outside of your front door and into an assortment of diverse social situations. I agree that the three aforementioned characteristics of collaboration, creativity, and innovation are necessities for those working in this current legal world, and are not consistently present at this time. My agreement on this issue also concludes that I acknowledge there is a problem that has not been properly addressed, managed, or cared about. Hopefully as I continue my journey through law school and then (hopefully, COVID-19 willing) into the practice of law itself I will see the institutional focus on grades and LSAT scores diminish in lieu of a focus on holistic application requirements. It is a hopeful outlook, but one I think is certainly achievable. The law itself is known to be an incredibly complex grey area for interpretation, so why are we making our recruiting requirements and expectations so black and white?

Bridging the Gap, Doing More, and Doing it Better

As Satya Nadella so simply put it, technology enables people to do more.  Personally, I have to agree with Nadella, and I can see so many places where technology can make lawyers’ lives easier.

I am a little older than the majority of my classmates at law school, so I remember when phones were attached to the wall, information came from books, and the internet was a cutting-edge thing, only available by dial-up – where the little blinking light on the front of a modem was exciting, because it meant that you were now connected to the world.  Each technological advancement has undoubtedly enabled people to do more, and legal expert systems will be no exception.

The legal profession is notoriously slow to embrace change, and law schools suffer from largely the same adoption rate.  A lot of pressure is put on law students to take a traditional set of courses and to keep with the tried and true.  However, whether law students are aware of it or not, what they really learn in law school is how to use their brains like lawyers.  Law students learn how to comprehend a focused area of law, in a relatively short amount of time, by synthesizing the relevant legislation and cases along with any additional situation-specific information.

In September of 2017, I decided to break from the larger herd when I chose to take a class on Designing Legal Expert Systems. This is a class where law students design and build their very own (legal) expert systems; I don’t mean in an abstract sense, I mean I signed up to build the expert system that would be capable of being used by its targeted user group. Admittedly, it was a last-second transfer in to the class, which required me to rearrange my entire schedule and join other classes two weeks into the semester, but I am so happy I did. By making the change to get outside the box of conventional law school classes, and outside my own comfort zone, I pushed myself to learn so much more. I made a few posts about my experiences in Designing Legal Expert Systems both on my LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/faymehodal/) as well as on our class blog (https://lawinnovation.trubox.ca/) as the semester went along. Like any new adventure, there were ups and downs, and for anyone reading this who has ever ventured outside their comfort zone, you will likely be familiar with how some of those downs can look like nearly insurmountable challenges.

In order to design an expert system, you need to understand the subject matter at a level where you can explain it for an average or lay person to understand. While an expert system is not generally designed to explicitly explain the law, it must work in the background in such a fashion that anyone can use it; this means taking the law and presenting it to the user in a way that the user will understand. The notion of presenting the law so any user can understand sounds easier than it is. I posted to our class blog earlier on about thinking you understand the concept you are trying to explain, and as my group worked on building our expert system, I found our group running into the issue multiple times – where we would have to stop and ask ourselves, ‘but will a regular person understand what that means?’

Law students learn to think like lawyers, but what we often do not learn is how to bridge the gap between the legal framework or infrastructure and the general public. Now, at the end of the holiday break, when law students have been home to see friends and family, is an excellent time for law students to evaluate the differences in thought process between those in law, and those not in law. For those of us that are first-generation lawyers, the differences are likely to be far more obvious. This is by no means to say that people in the legal profession are in some way smarter than everyone else, just that our brains work differently, sometimes very differently, and unless you take the time to actually interact with people who are not in the legal profession, these differences may remain hidden.

The expert system can bridge the gap and assist the lay person with some fundamentals or basics regarding their issue, as well as make the life of the lawyer easier. It is worth noting that, despite many concerns, the expert system does not replace the lawyer, but that is a topic for a different post. To do these things effectively, the expert system needs to be easy to use, and easy to understand – remembering that we expect the lawyer to understand the lay person’s situation, but that we do not expect the lay person to understand the law.

By integrating expert systems into the legal practice, there exists the potential to unleash the brains of lawyers on higher-level problems to solve, nuances to find, and creative solutions to be discovered. I think I am safe in saying that applying a legally trained mind to an issue that an expert system can answer, is not a good use of anyone’s time, money, or other available resources.

Many industries have already experienced changes from technology, and will continue to experience many more in the future. There is no question the tide is changing for the legal profession too, and the time to pivot into efficient law practice is upon us.

When clients seek out a lawyer, they are looking for a solution to their problem. Clients call upon us to find a solution, hopefully the best solution, to their issue, and we as the lawyers seek out all the options available.

For what is likely to be my final blog post for the class, I leave anyone reading with this: the legal profession is about customer service and problem solving / solution finding, so if technology can help us be better at those things, we should, at the very least, consider how technology can enable us to do more.

Lawyers, embrace the new and different, reconsider the things you do simply because you have always done it that way before and ask yourself: is there a better way?

 

by @Faymester