FrontlineSMS:Legal
This entry has been selected as a finalist in the
Property Rights: Identity, Dignity & Opportunity for All competition.
FrontlineSMS:Legal uses mobile technologies to extend, improve, and coordinate dispute resolution systems, increasing access to justice in the areas that need it most. FrontlineSMS:Legal designs locally appropriate tools that enable legal service providers to remotely create digital legal records, automate client intake and management workflows, and extend information distribution.
About You
Section 1: About You
First Name
Sean
Last Name
McDonald
Country
United States, DC, Washington
Section 2: About Your Organization
Is your initiative connected to an established organization?
Organization Name
FrontlineSMS:Legal
Organization Website
Organization Phone
Organization Address
Organization Country
United States
How long has this organization been operating?
Less than a year
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
Your idea
Name your project.
FrontlineSMS:Legal
Describe Your Idea
FrontlineSMS:Legal uses mobile technologies to extend, improve, and coordinate dispute resolution systems, increasing access to justice in the areas that need it most. FrontlineSMS:Legal designs locally appropriate tools that enable legal service providers to remotely create digital legal records, automate client intake and management workflows, and extend information distribution.
Country your work focuses on
Colombia
Innovation
What makes your idea unique?
FrontlineSMS:Legal is the only organization that is actively exploring the ways that mobile technologies can improve legal systems. We are developing and adapting open source tools to extend access to the legal services and systems. These tools will empower more stakeholders to communicate more quickly, cheaply, and effectively, then any other legal platform. FrontlineSMS:Legal does not directly lobby governments, provide legal services, or adjudicate land claims. Instead, FrontlineSMS:Legal enables those who do to do their jobs better.
Do you have a patent for this idea?
Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Tell us about the social impact of your innovation. Please include both numbers and stories as evidence of this impact
Legal systems, perhaps more than any other government service, rely on in-depth communication. It makes sense, then, that a lot of the challenges involved in accessing justice are communications problems. According to a seminal report issued by the United Nations’ Commission on Legal Empowerment for the Poor, 4 billion people lack meaningful access to the legal resources they need.
There are a number of incredible people, organizations, and governments working to fix this problem in different ways. Many of these systems have had limited success among great challenges, but none have had scalable success in reaching the “last mile.” At the same time, the UN estimates that there are (currently) 5 billion active mobile phones in the world, making them the single most popular communication platform ever.
FrontlineSMS:Legal builds tools designed to lower the barriers to communication between legal systems and the people they serve. At a quantitative level, FrontlineSMS:Legal will pilot at a Justice House that processes 65,000 cases a year. During that time, we expect to lower costs, reduce the processing time of each case, and improve satisfaction, all while increasing case volume. Colombia currently has almost 70 Justice Houses, with plans to build dozens more. With Colombia's population of 43 million people, in this one project alone, FrontlineSMS:Legal could bring access to justice to millions of people.
Admittedly, legal systems are local processes and so scaling will be a gradual process. Still, if FrontlineSMS:Legal improves access to even 1 percent of the target population, we will have reached 40 million people.
Problem
According to the UN, 4 billion people are forced to endure abuse and neglect because they have no other recourse. In Colombia, conflict and natural disaster have resulted in some of the highest internal displacement rates of any country in the world. In addition to the problems caused by conflict, the IDP situation highlights the inadequacies and inefficiencies in the record keeping systems in Colombia's land titling system. In addition, a lack of record redundancy and security, has forced thousands of people to surrender their property to violent, wealthy, and/or simply opportunistic claimants. Both Colombia's government and citizens face enormous barriers to sustaining effective legal and land titling systems, including limited financial resources, a lack of physical infrastructure, uncertain public sentiment, and complex processes. These are complicated by barriers to communication such as distance, time, cost, and lack of efficiency. Many people, believing that legal systems won't be able to deliver the help they need, simply never engage. Yet, those who never engage are likely to remain without claim and, thus, displaced.
Actions
Our approach is to develop easy-to-use software that meets the needs of local stakeholders. I'm writing this from Colombia, where I'm meeting with representatives of formal and informal justice systems, as well as talking with regional leaders about land titling issues.
Our next step is prototyping the tool set, which combines an SMS gateway, customizable digital forms, a back-end database, and case management software, to facilitate and coordinate land titling processes. As part of that, we'll be testing the ability to: create real-time maps; create redundant, digital land records; improve communication and satisfaction with citizens; automate and standardize fragmented workflows; increase participation; and decrease the costs of service provision.
We expect our main challenges to be infrastructure, change management and political will.
Results
As FrontlineSMS:Legal is still in the pilot phase, our results are largely speculative. However, at a social level, concurrently improving both administrative land registry systems and the dispute resolution systems associated will foster the evolution of the entire system.
Year 1: Pilot in a Municipality/Departamento
Standardization of Information Gathering
Digitization of Titling Records
Creation of an Online Map of Property Titles
Establishment of Dispute Resolution Workflow
Year 2: Scale to Region
Increasing Standardization/Digitization of Records
Expansion of Online Map of Property Titles
Centralization and Redundant Server Storage of Titling Records
Creation of a Consumer-facing SMS Query System
Extension of Dispute Resolution and similar digitization of process
Year 3: Scale to Country
This step involves moving each of these initiatives to the national level
How many people will your project serve annually?
More than 10,000
What is the average monthly household income in your target community, in US Dollars?
$100 ‐ 1000
Does your project seek to have an impact on public policy?
Yes
If so, how?
Our intention is to affect public policy indirectly. We have no specific agenda, nor is there any wish to insert our own perspective into the local political process. FrontlineSMS:Legal recognizes, however, that in order for any technology platform to be successful in the provision of government service, certain things will need to be addressed (i.e.- the legal significance of structured SMS). Additionally, FrontlineSMS:Legal supports standardization of process and information, toward efficient decentralized and centralized governance. Recognizing that standardization is not an apolitical process, we expect to foster that type of impact, however, we will not provide substantive guidance, outside of technological impacts of various decisions, in order to influence those decisions.
Sustainability
What stage is your project in?
Operating for less than a year
Does your organization have a board of directors or an advisory board?
Does your organization have any non monetary partnerships with NGOs?
Yes
Does your organization have any non monetary partnerships with businesses?
Does your organization have any non monetary partnerships with government?
Please tell us more about how partnerships could be critical to the success of your innovation.
Initiatives and system design must be led by the people who will use them. FrontlineSMS:Legal only designs and builds tools. Our partners are our customers, and they will determine the success of both their own systems, as well as the tools that facilitate their operation.
We would like to learn more about how your initiative is financially supported. Please explain your business plan/revenue model
We essentially provide three core services: Consulting, Customized Product Design, and Support. As many organizations need help understanding technology, workflow adaptation, and change management, FrontlineSMS:Legal derives revenue from organizations who wish to gain the most from our tool set. Our driving value proposition is the efficiency gains, both quantitative and qualitative, available through a successful implementation of the tool set. FrontlineSMS:Legal's business case is simply that paying us to design and implement an installation of our tools lowers the overall cost of service provision while improving efficiency and volume. This is an argument that is both applicable and appealing to a wide range of legal service and land titling organizations.
The Story
What was the defining moment that led you to this innovation?
It's tough to say that there was a moment, or one explosion of inspiration. This idea is the accumulation of my entire life's work and interests. I've grown up around conflict resolution innovators, and so have always been invested in how people resolve disputes, both through formal and non-standard means. The first panel I ever organized in law school was about the intersection of law and conflict resolution structures, essentially new applications of Alternative Dispute Resolution. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
I was a journalism major in college and became fascinated with the way that information moved throughout a society. Afterward, I worked in the Senate for a year, watching how our government provided services to individuals at the local level. Learning that I needed to learn more, I began a joint law and conflict resolution master's program, where I immediately began exploring their intersection. I went on to found a self-organizing, inter-campus network of graduate level conflict resolution student groups that meets to this day. While in school, I worked for a law firm that specializes in peace processes and constitution drafting, doing massive amounts of comparative analysis of governance structures and adjudication processes. I wrote my master's thesis on value of applying of emerging information technologies to journalism in Armenia, in order to avoid soft censorship while working for an international development company. Convinced that they weren't interested in technology, I went to a technology company. There, I was involved in the technology community response to the Haiti earthquake, where the cohort I encountered helped me explore the breadth of what is possible through mobile technologies. Learning that my employer wasn't interested in international development (despite hiring me under those auspices), I left.
The idea for FrontlineSMS:Legal is essentially the combination of all the things that I've done to this point. We build technology tools focused on developing countries that improve governance by leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple dispute resolution mechanisms.
Tell us about the social innovator—the person—behind this idea.
I think that's my above answer. In case I'm off-base, here's a bit more:
I'm someone who believes strongly in incentives and their power to influence behavior. I care more about success than credit, and I'd rather be engaged in doing something I love than getting rich doing something I hate. I went to law school for the frame of reference, but I was never going to be a litigator. That being said, my perverse sensibilities think that litigating on the side might be a lot of fun.
I view my business kind of like a case, I suppose. I've compiled a lot of evidence and I know the issues, both in fact and in law. But what resonates, what I think will carry the day for this idea is the moment when you feel it. Not me, you. When it dawns on you, I mean really hits you, how galling it is that 4 BILLION people don't have access to the system that determines how we live. It's poverty, but it's not just poverty- it's excommunication. The kind of isolation that offers no solace for children forced into homelessness, women who can't escape lives of systematic abuse, or men who suffer for refusing to take up arms. And then, when the second idea lands: that for the first time in history, there is no good reason that it has to be that way.
How did you first hear about Changemakers?
Through another organization or company
If through another source, please provide the information.
Approximately 50 words left (400 characters).
Additional
Which (if any) of the following strategies apply to your organization or company (check as many as apply)
Formalizing and documenting property rights (i.e. titling, leasing or certification), Legal education and awareness, Developing/applying technology for surveying, mapping and documenting property rights.
Please explain how your work furthers one or many of the above strategies (if you selected “other”, please explain your strategy)
 | 17 weeks agoAlejandro Caicedo Torres said: I dont get it, How is that they are categorized by COLOMBIA??? about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 59 weeks agoMatt Guttentag said: On February 2, 2011, the judges reviewed entries for the Changemakers Property Rights: Identity, Dignity, and Opportunity for All ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 71 weeks agoKen Banks said: Great project which will significantly extend the reach and access to legal services through the mobile phone. mLegal is an exciting, ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 72 weeks agoEmily Jacobi said: In many of the countries where my organization Digital Democracy works, poor & marginalized people have very little access to legal ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 72 weeks agoAaron Voldman said: Very exciting project! about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 75 weeks agoBen Wikler said: Huge potential -- really exciting stuff. about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 76 weeks agoRobert Munro said: Nice to see that as mobile technology improves we are also moving into more sophisticated services like this. about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 81 weeks agoSean McDonald updated this Competition Entry. |
| 81 weeks agoSean McDonald submitted this idea. |
