From Flowchart to Questionnaire: Increasing Access to Justice via Visualization

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Abstract

One of the main barriers of access to justice is the lack of awareness of legal rights, procedures, and available resources. In this project, we develop F2Q (Flowchart to Questionnaire), an open-source tool- box for legal experts or staff members at legal clinics or help centers (oftentimes with no programming expertise) to easily design and automatically generate web-based interactive questionnaires. Such questionnaires help guide the clients of these help centers, frequently minorities and underserved populations without legal representation, through a series of questions that help them correctly categorize their legal problems and identify appropriate remedies or solutions. Using F2Q, the questionnaires can be easily modified in case of changes to the law and regulations. These questionnaires serve as a virtual assistant to provide initial guidance to find answers to legal questions and, if needed, to direct the clients to a legal expert at the help center for further assistance. Most importantly, this efficient process could prevent potential clients from giving up their quest for justice due to a lack of awareness or inability to find the appropriate legal aid: when people do not know what questions to ask and where to seek answers, they give up and live with the injustice. F2Q aims to break down, or at least weaken, such barriers.