The Document Assembly Line, created by the Legal Innovation and Technology Lab (LIT Lab) at Suffolk University Law School, helps individuals build open-source access-to-justice tools and resources for court forms, online guided interviews, and e-filing. It provides affordable Docassemble hosting and e-filing tools for courts and legal aid organizations. The LIT Lab has also created free and open-source software for building and e-filing court forms, supported by an active community of courts, legal aid organizations, and volunteers such as:
In May 2025, an eviction sealing law went into effect in Massachusetts. Suffolk LIT Clinic students, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Trial Court, built an online guided interview tool. The tool makes it easy to complete a petition to seal an eviction and e-file it with the court. During the first week, more than 300 people completed the petition using the new guided interview. Learn more: https://suffolklitlab.org/eviction-sealing-tool-launched-with-massachusetts-trial-court/
“A well-designed form allows people to express themselves in a way the court can understand.”
—David Colarusso, Suffolk LIT Lab Co-Director
March 1, 2024
The Judicial Innovation Fellowship (JIF) is an initiative incubated at the Justice Lab at Georgetown Law Center’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy. The JIF is a year-long fellowship for technologists, designers, and user testers to transform justice across state, local, territorial, and tribal courts. It is an exciting new opportunity for technologists, product people, and designers …
February 1, 2024
Pretrial policies have undergone significant change and advancement over the last decade. In 2013, the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ) and the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) endorsed the COSCA Policy Paper on Evidence-Based Pretrial Release. CCJ and COSCA also hosted five Pretrial Regional Summits between May 2016 and November 2018 to facilitate the …
January 1, 2024
Most states do not have specialized family court judges, let alone judges dedicated to delinquency cases. Even in states that do have a family court structure, juvenile justice often gets short shrift compared to child welfare in terms of court attention, resources, and improvement efforts. In addition, most states do not provide juvenile court judges …
December 1, 2023
The Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts (AOPC) is applying the technical and business definitions of the National Open Data Standards (NODS) to resolve enduring, and common, obstacles to collecting good civil and family court data. Developed by the Conference of State Court Administrators and the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), NODS is intended to …
November 1, 2023
The Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School and LaGratta Consulting LLC are conducting a randomized control trial examining the effects of in-person versus remote hearings for self-represented family law litigants in the 3rd Judicial District Court of Utah (Salt Lake County). The project intends to examine case outcomes and litigant experience in both …
October 1, 2023
In 2020, the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) was awarded a State Justice Institute (SJI) Technical Assistance grant to retain the services of Catalis by Court Innovations, Inc. (Catalis) to assist the AOC with developing and implementing an online platform to resolve medical debt disputes in Hamilton County, TN, before a lawsuit is …