Are you responsible for managing self-help or legal assistance portals? Does your organization offer legal help guides and resources for the public online?
** The Legal Help Cohort has now transitioned into a working group in the Access to Justice Network on Legal Self-Help Websites. Please sign up for the Access to Justice Network and then join the websites working group.**
The Legal Help Online Cohort was a peer-to-peer group that met monthly and communicates regularly, to improve legal help on the Internet.
Who is it for? The Legal Help Online Cohort brought together website administrators, content specialists, technologists, and strategists who are working on websites that offer guides, FAQs, chat, forms, and other tools to people with legal problems.
What does it do? The cohort helps local leaders to get technical assistance and a supportive community from peers who are facing similar challenges. Through monthly meetings, a Slack channel, and regular presentations, Cohort members can improve the technical, design, content, and discoverability of their legal help website. They can also get practical advice on procurement, vendors, SEO, analytics, language access, and other high priorities.
Who runs it? The Legal Help Online Cohort launched in November 2021. Stanford Legal Design Lab ran the cohort, with initial support from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Can I join the Cohort? New members are still welcome to join the Access to Justice Network and then join the Legal Self Help Website working group. It is free, and open to anyone working on public interest legal help websites. Please sign up at the Access to Justice Network.
Join the Access to Justice Network’s Legal Self Help Website Group
The Legal Design Lab’s Legal Help Online Cohort has now combined with the Access to Justice Network’s Self Help Website working group.
This working group meets regularly to talk about strategies, analytics, and best practices on running public-facing legal help websites.
Why a Cohort for legal help online?
Millions of searches for legal information and assistance occur each year. Too often, websites administered by courts or legal aids do not feature prominently in search results.
The Stanford Legal Design Lab created the Legal Help Online Cohort to build a best-practices peer-to-peer network among those who run these court and legal aid websites. The Cohort’s initial goal was to improve the local legal help sites’ search engine optimization strategies, guide site administrators to better design and tech practices, and encourage more public interest results to feature on search engine results pages.
In the Legal Help Online Cohort, our Lab team offers guidance, technical assistance, and a peer network to help you understand your site’s current rankings and issues — and then transform it with new technology, design, and content techniques. You should see your search placement go up, and your content features more prominently on search engine results pages.