Taking a Business Approach to Access to Justice

Currently, nonprofits, legal aid organizations, and funders like the Legal Services Corporation are the backbone of the access to justice ecosystem; their work is absolutely vital to helping those in need. Given how under-resourced and over-stretched these organizations are though, there’s limited room for them to develop their own tech or pursue innovation. If we’re serious about creating sustainable, modern, and network-effect driven technology, the legal industry must help ATJ entrepreneurs tackle barriers to entry and growth.

Home, LatestKristen SondayFebruary 20, 2019Comment

How We Can Promote Women Founders in LegalTech

In tech, female founders traditionally produce greater investment returns, decrease design bias, and build more diverse teams. Last year, we celebrated an unprecedented number of women in legal tech getting acquired, winning awards, and earning promotions.

Yet, even though women are making strides, female founders currently account for less than 15% of legal tech founders overall — even below tech startups more broadly. If technology is the future of the legal profession, then those who build it, will shape it. Considering that women now outnumber men in law school, and client demographics are skewing more diverse, this number is alarming.

LifestyleKristen SondayNovember 9, 2018Comment

How to Reduce Design Bias and Increase Access to Justice

We are at an access-to-justice tipping point in the United States. The justice gap continues to grow, particularly for women, immigrants, and minorities, and it now affects a staggering 86% of low-income individuals in need. Yet, we are also now building and consuming far more legal technology than ever before.

The dichotomy comes down to two things: people and processes. In order to build well-informed solutions and get them in the hands of the right users, it’s essential that founders — the creators of those solutions — be intimately familiar with, or come from, the communities they’re trying to serve. Unfortunately, the demographics that the justice gap most affects are also those least reflected in legal tech entrepreneurship: women make up only 14% of founders, and Black and Latinx entrepreneurs only 5%.

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