Non-lawyers writing words like Petition and easy in the same sentence? You got to be kidding me!
Everyday I come to my home office in Eastern Washington looking forward to opening our LawHelp Interactive inbox support box. Why? Because I want to read emails from end users and staff at libraries, self-help centers, and clinics that tell us what a difference being able to create legal documents online makes. I feel that from here I connect to the world via these emails. And I do mean the world, since LawHelp Interactive creates forms for people in Germany, India, UK, and by people living or serving abroad. From being here over 6 years, I know the LHI statistics intimately – I am a self described data hawk. For example, I know that each day we support over 3,000 sessions, and that people are creating 1,300 documents per day using our system—including Saturday and Sunday. I am also acutely aware that the number of users keeps increasing thanks to the creativity of our legal aid partners and their outreach efforts – including greater use and adoption of LHI-powered forms in self-help centers, brick and mortar centers run by courts, legal aid, or libraries, and also in remote clinics. We also recently confirmed that 70% of our users want to create their forms and go—they don’t want to create accounts and come back to edit a long interview. We also know that shows that 15% of the documents are created by lawyers and court accounts working through pro bono events, run by legal aid staff attorneys, or pro bono lawyers. So, I got the numbers down—and I love the numbers.
But numbers are not enough. At the Goldman School at Berkeley, I learned that good policy looks at both qualitative and quantitative factors. In an effort to look at qualitative feedback from a different perspective, I went into our user inbox and pulled emails from 8/30/2014 to 9/15/2014 and stopped when I had 100 words. I used the feedback to create a word cloud. This is how it looks!
It amazes me to see words like “helpful,” “Thank,” “Divorce,” “Support,” and all in relative similar sizes. The email forms asks “was this useful”—“Yes” is almost always in the emails we get—and also “Thank you so much.” Some people use the word awesome; “easy” is another word that comes up a lot. Seeing this word cloud, confirms to me that online, easy-to-use forms, and the platform that serves them play an indispensable role in the access to justice continuum. Without the forms or LHI to serve them, save them, store them, and allow people to edit them when they need to, many legal aid, court, and access to justice initiatives would not be able to provide such high quality assistance to so many who are in need.
Personally, to me this is reaffirmation that contributing to LawHelp Interactive, and being part of the Pro Bono Net team—is meaningful. My great grandma used to tell me in Spanish, “Tiempo perdido, hasta los angeles lloran,” which roughly means even angels weep for the time that they lose. Or in other words, wasting time is terrible. Time is the only resource in life we control absolutely – how we spend our time, what our mind and body do with the time we have, and how we share it with others. I spend everyday in the Pacific Northwest connected to NY, the South, and the Midwest and supporting LHI and the projects the amazing legal aid and Justice community run through LHI; it does not get any better than this. Seeing the word cloud—and seeing the words our end users use to tell us if the LawHelp Interactive forms were helpful makes my day many times over. I hope it makes your day too. If anyone wants to talk data, numbers, and LHI statistics for their projects and initiatives, and/or have me pull a word cloud from feedback on their online form projects, reach out to me. I would love to share our feedback with others.