August 2022 - Legal Help Online Dashboard

Putting Schema markup on legal help websites

As part of the Legal Help Online Cohort, our group at Stanford has been making lots of new schema markup for legal aid groups. What’s Schema markup? It’s computer code that lives on the backend of a website. It tells search engines (like Google) about what’s on a website, and why it should be shown to certain people.

We’ve built a tool that makes it easy for others to make markup for their sites.

And here is a video walking through how to make this markup:

How to Get Started Creating Schema Markup – Watch Video

Here’s an example of markup that we’ve made for a legal help site. This is for Indiana Legal Help, a site that provides free help for people who have civil justice needs.

You can create json code like this using the tool above, and then work with your developer to put it on a ‘hidden’ part of your website. That could be in the ‘header’ part of the homepage code, or across all pages on your website.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://www.schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@type": "LegalService",
      "name": "Indiana Legal Help",
      "url": "https://indianalegalhelp.org/",
      "logo": "https://indianalegalhelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ILH_logo_2020.png",
      "description": "Indiana Legal Help is a project of the Coalition for Court Access. It offers lo and no-cost legal help in Indiana. It has forms, information, and referral information. It also has volunteer opportunities for legal professionals.",
      "email": [
        "info@indianalegalhelp.org"
      ],
      "knowsLanguage": [
        {
          "@type": "Language",
          "name": "English",
          "alternateName": "en"
        }
      ],
      "knowsAbout": [
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/FA-07-00-00-00/domestic-violence-and-abuse",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/BE-00-00-00-00/benefits",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/CR-06-01-00-00/expungement-or-sealing-of-criminal-record",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/WO-00-00-00-00/work-and-employment-law",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/ES-00-00-00-00/estates-and-wills",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/HE-00-00-00-00/health",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/TR-00-00-00-00/traffic-and-cars",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/HO-00-00-00-00/housing",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/MO-00-00-00-00/money-debt-and-consumer-issues",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/FA-00-00-00-00/family",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/IM-00-00-00-00/immigration",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/CO-00-00-00-00/courts-and-lawyers",
        "https://taxonomy.legal/term/VE-00-00-00-00/veterans-and-military"
      ],
      "address": {
        "@type": "PostalAddress",
        "addressRegion": "IN"
      },
      "areaServed": {
        "@type": "AdministrativeArea",
        "name": [
          "Indiana"
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}
</script>

Legal quizzes to build knowledge

What makes for a good legal help website? We’ve been talking about this in our Legal Help Online Cohort. One of the big indicators of success is building people’s knowledge about their rights and the law. Hopefully a person will know how the local law might play out in their situation, and they have a sense of what their options are in the system.

To that end, some websites have put interactive quizzes on their website. These quizzes show a written scenario or a short animated video with fictional characters (sometimes cats). It’s a fact pattern of a life problem — like a grandparent wanting to see grandkids, or an employee worried about the safety of the company truck who then quits.

The quiz asks a multiple choice, yes/no question to the user. Can they apply the law to the person’s situation?

The quiz lets them know instantly if they’ve understood the law correctly, and if they can apply it to a situation.

Minnesota quiz and cat video on legal rights

These quizzes can play a few different beneficial roles:

They help a person build their legal capability. By applying the legal information the website has tried to convey to them, the person will exercise the knowledge — like if they were playing a navigator to a friend. Applying knowledge is a key way to making it stick. Even if they get it wrong, they’re much more likely to retain the knowledge!
They help the website administrators track success. Does the person not just ‘like’ the page — but actually benefit from it? Knowing that they’re getting the quiz questions right is a key indicator that the website is doing its job of building legal capability.
They make the website more lively and engaging. Games and quizzes are enticing — a nice break from paragraphs of text. And they can help make a person feel smarter and more confident, that they know something & are affirmed in this. They might now have more confidence to take on their own justice issue, if they know they can help others.