STRAT 5600 - Innovating Legal Services

This project-based course exposes the ways in which America’s civil legal system fails to provide justice for all, explores innovations targeted at addressing that systemic failure, and empowers students to design and launch solutions to the justice gap. The majority of Americans can’t afford to hire counsel when confronted with a civil legal need. As a result, they attempt to navigate the civil legal system without representation, or simply do not engage with the system at all. What are the societal implications of that system failure, and what can we do to change the status quo? In this course, students will engage with various community stakeholders to understand: (1) what the civil legal system was designed to do; (2) the role that legal professionals have traditionally played in that civil legal system; and (3) how we might reform and improve traditional service models using creative and disruptive problem-solving skills. Community participants will be invited to collaborate on problem identification and solution building. Each semester, this course will tackle a new design challenge.