Page 121 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

clients to seek out patterns of legal issues and identify opportunities for mass mobilization and broader legal action . Such an approach can use data analytics that seek to identify and then address common problems that call out for common solutions . Indeed, this is one of the potential promises of commoditization: that as patterns of legal issues begin to come into focus, astute, alert, and agile providers of legal services can mobilize a response that is efficient and effective . By having the ability to reach more consumers and have “antennae” seeking out patterns, it is possible that new modes of legal services delivery will identify more opportunities for collective legal responses, simply because more patterns will emerge from more communications with more consumers, made possible by a digital and easy-to-access customer interface .
By no means is such an outcome foregone, or even likely, but, legal services providers in a new era of legal services delivery should seek opportunities to apply new models of marketing, data collection, analysis and service delivery in ways that identify common problems . In turn, such common problems may call for a commoditized response, one that is more efficient than representing individual clients to address their individual—yet shared—problems . Indeed, if the commoditization of the delivery of legal services holds out any significant promise, particularly for access to justice, it is that the more often a problem presents itself, the more likely a legal services provider will develop expertise to address that problem and construct a method of responding to it that is more efficient, more effective, and less costly than alternative approaches .
To date, social justice advocates have not used data mining and “Big Data” analytics to advance social causes . The closest thing to such an approach is the way that these techniques have found their way into electoral campaigns .19 The delivery of legal services through a commoditized, high-volume approach will likely help generate data on trends, common problems, and legal and geographic “hot spots,” much the way large cities like New York City are relying on data from citizen complaints to isolate and address problem issues and areas .20 Advocates can harness the information gleaned from contacts with clients to identify areas for systemic change; as similar patterns surface, targeted strategies can be deployed to address them . And with such problems coming in at such a high volume, advocates can deploy different tactics to try to solve them, see which ones are the most effective, and take them to scale .
Will devoting resources to technology-enabled and commoditized services divert funds from traditional legal services providers or call into question the need for the services they provide?
The last concern I will address here in terms of the potential downsides of disruption in the legal services industry is the possibility that devoting attention, and resources, to expanding access to justice through disruptive, digital, commoditized, and technology-enabled services will not just result in a decrease in funding for traditional legal services programs that presently help close the justice gap, but will generate calls to defund such programs because new models provide “just enough” justice . These are, of course, legitimate concerns . By providing some degree of services to low-income consumers (we will put aside moderate-income consumers because there is virtually no governmental or philanthropic support for such efforts at present), will this end up undermining efforts to provide full funding, or even funding at present levels, for traditional legal
19 On the evolving use of data analytics in political campaigns, see David Nickerson and Todd Rodgers, Political Campaigns and Big Data, 28 J. econ. PersPecTiVes 51 (Spring 2014).
20 For a description of how New York City government is using big data to identify and address problems requiring city attention, see Alexander howard, How New York City Is Using Big Data to Serve Its Residents, huffingTon PosT (Nov. 13, 2015), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-new-york-city-is-using-big-data-to-serve-its-residents_5 6461423e4b08cda34887f1a.
Alternative Models
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