In this course, students will be introduced to topics on “equal access to justice” and how digital technology can assist to bridge the gap for those who lack access to the resources that could help meet their legal needs. Students will work in groups for one or more legal aid organisations or public agencies in Singapore to design and develop a solution that will improve access to justice or the effectiveness of legal representation. Depending on the type of application chosen for the project work, students will learn one or more of the following areas:
(a) document assembly and expert systems;
(b) chatbots;
(c) machine learning and natural language processing;
(d) data analysis and visualisation;
(e) cloud computing services;
(f) search and information retrieval search and information retrieval.
At the end of the term, the groups will showcase their solutions and compete for the opportunity to represent SMU at the Iron Tech Lawyer Invitational international competition (https://www.georgetowntech.org/irontechlawyer).
Learning Outcomes:
At the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Understand the importance of equal access to justice and some of the common issues faced by both individuals with legal or justiciable problems and the organisations that assist them.
- Evaluate and compare practices and solutions from other jurisdictions or service industries to generate new ideas for improving access to legal services or justice in Singapore.
- Solve specific real-world access to justice problems through iterative design, prototyping and testing of digital applications in a collaborative team setting.