Online Legal Resources Research Articles

A legal dispute resolution intervention for patients with substance use disorders: a study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

BackgroundSubstance use disorders (SUDs) represent major public health concerns and are linked to enhanced risk of legal consequences. Unresolved legal issues may prevent individuals with SUD from completing treatment. Interventions aimed at improving SUD treatment outcomes are limited. Filling that gap, this randomized controlled trial (RCT) tests the ability of a technology-assisted intervention to increase SUD treatment completion rates and improve post-treatment health, economic, justice-system, and housing outcomes.MethodsA randomized controlled trial with a two-year administrative follow-up period will be conducted. Eight hundred Medicaid eligible and uninsured adults receiving SUD treatment will be recruited at community-based non-profit health care clinics in Southeast, Michigan, USA. Using an algorithm embedded in a community-based case management system, we randomly assign all eligible adults to one of two groups. The treatment/intervention group will receive hands-on assistance with a technology aimed at resolving unaddressed legal issues and the control group receives no treatment. Upon enrollment into the intervention, both treatment (n = 400) and control groups (n = 400) retain traditional options to resolve unaddressed legal issues, such as hiring an attorney, but only the treatment group is targeted the technology and offered personalized assistance in navigating the online legal platform. To develop baseline and historical contexts for participants, we collect life course history reports from all participants and intend to link those in each group to administrative data sources. In addition to the randomized controlled trial (RCT), we used an exploratory sequential mixed methods and participatory-based design to develop, test, and administer our life course history instruments to all participants. The primary objective is to test whether targeting no-cost online legal resources to those experiencing SUD improves their long-term recovery and decreases negative health, economic, justice-system, and housing outcomes.DiscussionFindings from this RCT will improve our understanding of the acute socio-legal needs faced by those experiencing SUD and provide recommendations to help target resources toward the areas that best support long-term recovery. The public health impact includes making publicly available a deidentified, longitudinal dataset of uninsured and Medicaid eligible clients in treatment for SUD. Data include an overrepresentation of understudied groups including African American and American Indian Alaska Native persons documented to experience heightened risk for SUD-related premature mortality and justice-system involvement. Within these data, several intended outcome measures can inform the health policy landscape: (1) health, including substance use, disability, mental health diagnosis, and mortality; (2) financial health, including employment, earnings, public assistance receipt, and financial obligations to the state; (3) justice-system involvement, including civil and criminal legal system encounters; (4) housing, including homelessness, household composition, and homeownership.Trial registrationRetrospectively registered # NCT05665179 on December 27, 2022.

Access to Justice Online: Are Canadian Court Websites Accessible for Users With Visual Impairments?

Steps taken to make legal information available online have resulted in access to justice benefits for many. However, these benefits may not extend to everyone equally. As scholars have cautioned, the adoption of new technologies that purport to improve access to justice may perpetuate the exclusion of vulnerable and marginalized individuals and groups from the justice system. This article applies this insight to legal information made available online by Canadian court websites and CanLII.It does so through a two-part study. First, we used an automated testing tool to determine whether the websites noted above comply with accessibility standards. Second, after having secured research ethics approval, we worked with Access & Diversity at the University of British Columbia to recruit persons with visual impairments; these participants evaluated the same websites and provided feedback. Our results showed that while largely accessible, the tested websites fall short of best practices, presenting challenges to users with visual impairments. We recommend that Canadian courts correct the deficiencies identified by our study, that other online legal resources be tested for accessibility issues, and that future research focus on the extent to which online legal resources are accessible to other vulnerable or marginalized individuals or groups. Implementing these recommendations will ensure that the access to justice benefits of online legal information are extended to everyone.

Cases, statutes, law review, and more: A guide to free online legal resources

Cases, statutes, law review, and more: A guide to free online legal resources

Online legal information system for Indian environment: a user’s perspectives

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore legal information requirements of the legal community in India for a proposed online legal information system tailored to the Indian environment. Design/methodology/approach A needs assessment survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire circulated among 750 respondents from eight institutions in Delhi. A total of 397 filled-in questionnaires were personally collected by the investigator, showing a response rate of 52.9 per cent. All these questionnaires were selected for analysis and interpretation of data. Responses to 45 questions were analyzed and presented in the form of tables and figures using various statistical techniques. Findings The findings of the study show that majority of the respondents felt they faced a number of problems in using online legal resources such as accessibility of legal information in legal resources, lack of online help features, description of legal information sources, search screen too confusing and poor website design. In addition, respondents highlighted that access instructions on the online resources are not clear. Lack of expertise and insufficient knowledge of information and communication technology in using legal databases are also major hurdles. Majority of the respondents are somewhat satisfied in using open-access and commercial legal information resources and not aware of open-access resources in the field of law. Model online legal information system (OLIS) was designed and developed based on the findings drawn in the needs assessment survey to empower the common man with legal resources at no cost, and foster research in the field of law. Research limitations/implications The model OLIS contains only a sample collection. It is expected that the proposed system will be implemented on a wider scale, so that lawyers, research scholars and common people can benefit. Practical implications The findings of the study will help libraries to subscribe to legal information resources and to design robust OLIS suitable in the Indian context. It is anticipated that the needs assessment survey of OLIS will help government agencies and law libraries to understand the problems of the legal fraternity in accessing legal information. Originality/value The present study designed a model OLIS for the Indian environment (www.olisindia.in) to aid the legal community in India, enabling them to save their valuable time. This system will help and foster interdisciplinary research learning and can be used as a tool for learning the basic concepts, as well as help deliberate on the emerging areas in the field of law.

Accessing Legal Information in Catalonia: Open Access to Legislation and Case Law

This article outlines free online legal resources to conduct research on Catalan and Spanish legislation and case-law. Most of these resources are primary sources made public by government bodies. The list shows how the Spanish and Catalan governments, in their attempt to promote equal access to legislation and case-law, cover the different jurisdictions. The text also mentions some resources to conduct historical legal research about legislation and case law, and some free legal private websites.

President's Page:What Sets the IADC Apart?

In his recent book, Imagine--How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer studied the characteristics that have helped to make Pixar Animation Studios one of the most successful movie companies of all time. Since 1995, when Toy Story was first released, Pixar has created thirteen feature films, and each one has been a major commercial success. Along the way, Pixar also earned critical praise with twenty-six Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and eleven Grammys. Why has Pixar been so successful? Lehrer believes that it stems from its commitment to providing maximum opportunities for meaningful personal interaction between its writers, artists, animators, and computer engineers. Rather than isolate each of those groups in their own areas, Pixar encourages candid discussions of problems and ideas across disciplines so that new approaches are more readily discovered and implemented. Fostering these random interactions is so important to Pixar that it actually designed its headquarters building with only one set of bathrooms so that its employees are literally forced to see and interact with each other every day. As noted by Alvy Ray Smith, one of Pixar's co-founders, wanted people to want to learn from each other. That's always when the best stuff happens: when someone tells you something you didn't already know. While the IADC is not a movie studio, when people ask me what sets our organization apart from other legal associations, I almost always point to the opportunities we provide for meaningful personal engagement among our members. While many organizations offer access to excellent CLE programming and on-line legal resources, the IADC really distinguishes itself by providing our members with multiple ways in which they can directly engage and learn from each other. By leveraging opportunities for meaningful personal interaction, our members' lives are enriched not only professionally but personally. IADC's Midyear and Annual Meetings provide multiple opportunities for our members to interact and learn from each other in ways that go well beyond traditional legal conferences. At early morning Committee Business Meetings, our members focus on cutting edge topics in their particular fields of interest. More importantly, they also have the chance to engage each other in exchanges that might never take place over the internet or through a telephone conversation. While our Major CLE Presentations are not designed for open debate among all the attendees, they are intended to present subjects that will promote additional discussion outside the walls of the conference room. We encourage spouses, partners and significant others to attend Foundation Forum and General Interest presentations at all of our meetings. This serves to further enhance the overall quality of our interactions and gives each of us a chance to share ideas and know each other better. Our Annual Meetings also provide unrivaled opportunities for our families to engage with each other. The meeting locales take us to places that we might have never visited if not for the IADC. More importantly, when our families get together and share these experiences, it enhances all of our lives. We begin to see that although we are geographically diverse and may not have identical views on all issues, we still share certain core values and beliefs. While the internet, email, and social networking sites are wonderful tools, they will never be an adequate substitute for a face-to-face conversation with someone who is truly interested in what you have to say. …

Tricks of the trade revealed

‘A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?’ (Samuel Johnson) This section is dedicated to the review of ideas, articles, books, films and other media. It will include replies (and rejoinders) to articles, the evaluation of new ideas or proposals, and reviews of books and articles both directly and indirectly related to intellectual property law. Most lawyers are adept at navigating online legal resources. Younger lawyers have most likely hit ‘control F’ more often than they have thumbed through bound volumes of legislation. This book is specifically directed to this generation of lawyers: lawyers who might be wondering what they can find in a guide book that they cannot find online. In this case, the answer is ‘plenty’. An Associate's Guide to the Practice of Copyright Law provides readers with context in which...

When is case law on the web the "official" published source? Criteria, quandaries, and implications for the US and the UK

Online legal resources in the US are starting to become the sole official published source for the law. This demands attention to authentication procedures, as well as appropriate long-term preservation methods, to ensure those resources are reliable. This article explores the concept of "official" published source as applied to US and UK law material. The web shapes that concept and gives new significance to the citizen perspective on legal resources. That perspective raises special concerns about new developments in the UK that confer official status on proprietary reports not freely available on the web.Article by Richard J. Matthews published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. Richard J. Matthews JD, MLIS has served in various academic, court, and law firm libraries in the United States. He was a 2006-2007 Visiting Fellow in Law Librarianship at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. As Chair of AALL's 2005-2006 Access to Electronic Legal Information Committee, he led the American Association of Law Libraries' fifty-state authetication study and is Editor-in-Chief of the final report.