Law, Data & Design Lab

Goals

The Law, Data & Design Lab works to increase fairness, efficiency, transparency, and access to justice in the civil and criminal legal systems in the United States and around the world. We use methods from computer and data science (e.g., natural language processing, machine and deep learning), operations management (e.g., process mining, simulation), public policy (e.g., program evaluation, case studies), and design (e.g., human centered design, contextual inquiry, dataviz) to develop innovative approaches to solving justice problems.

Issues Involved or Addressed

The civil and criminal legal systems face a set of complex problems, including inequitable procedures and outcomes, backlogs and delay, and the difficulty of finding and affording quality legal representation, especially for low-income litigants. Better data can offer some solutions, by identifying patterns that suggest bias, or by pinpointing circumstances where cost and delay might be addressed with some intervention. Engagement with the people who are actors in, and are acted upon by, the civil and criminal legal systems is equally important. These include judges and court staff, lawyers, litigants, law enforcement, policymakers, academics, and community members. Leveraging these groups’ knowledge and experience enables better experimentation with and design of solutions. Example projects may be found at lawlab.gatech.edu

Partners/Sponsors

National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator and Proto-OKN programs; potential additional future NSF and foundation funds.