How software is uniting law students, legal aid and courts with John Mayer

In today’s episode no. 28, I interview John Mayer, Executive Director of the Centre for Computer Assisted Learning Instruction (CALI) since 1994.

CALI is a non-profit consortium of 198 US law schools that conducts applied research in computer-mediated legal education and publishes over 1000 tutorials in 40 different legal subject areas for law schools, law firms and others interested in learning about the law.

CALI also publishes Creative Commons law books at elangdell.cali.org and is the developer of A2J Author which is used by courts, legal aid and law schools to automate legal processes and court forms for self representing litigants.

John explains what it was that led to the initial development of open source document assembly software, A2J Author around 20 years ago now and how it is improving processes for courts, self-represented litigtans and lawyers.

John sees almost unlimited potential in making it easier to compile information for courts but also appreciates the challenges that legal assistance organisations face in doing so. He has some interesting views about the part that commercial legal tech vendors can play in this regard and somewhat curiously, the challenge of marketing a free platform.

We discuss the best use cases for document automation and his views on AI and blockchain and also some deeper issues about social change movements and why innovation thinking is preferable to design thinking.

John has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Northwestern University and a Masters of Science in Networks and Telecomm from the Illinois Institute of Technology and has been working in legal education for over 30 years.

This episode brought to you by Lex Narro and Neota Logic.

Links:

• Centre for Computer Assisted Learning Instruction “CALI”  and elangdell.cali.org
• A2J Author
• LSC grants
• Lex Narro
• Neota Logic

Andrea Perry-Petersen – LinkedIn - Twitter @winkiepp – andreaperrypetersen.com.au

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