Photo: Jason Doiy.

This spring, Silicon Valley powerhouse law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is teaming up with students at Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School to help design a program that will simplify the asylum application process.

It marks the first time that BYU's three-year-old LawX legal design lab is partnering with a law firm to create a new tool to address the access-to-justice problem. In addition to Wilson Sonsini, LawX is also working with SixFifty—the law firm's software subsidiary—to support the technical side of the asylum project.

"We have been impressed by LawX and SixFifty's work in tackling important legal issues through design thinking and its ability to bring pro bono solutions to people who do not otherwise have access to legal representation," said Wilson Sonsini managing partner Doug Clark.

Project leaders are hopeful that the resulting free asylum tool will prove as popular as earlier LawX-designed resources. In its first year, LawX students created an online tool to help assist people who have been sued over unpaid debt. It followed up last year with an app that helps improve communication between tenants and landlords, with the goal of reducing evictions. Usage of both programs, which are free, has since far exceeded expectations.

"[Wilson Sonsini] is the perfect firm for this," said LawX co-director Kimball Parker, who is also the president of SixFifty. "They really care about asylum. When they heard we were doing asylum, they wanted to be involved. There are asylum experts at the firm, which means we can tap into some of the smartest legal minds in the nation on asylum. Then we can lean on the engineers and designers of SixFifty, with it all driven by these law students."

The LawX legal design lab is among a growing number of programs at law schools that task students with harnessing technology to address legal problems. The courses require students to evaluate the legal issues at play and the barriers that clients face, and to conceive apps and tools that help close that justice gap—placing them in the dual role of attorney and engineer. Stanford Law School has an interdisciplinary Legal Design Lab and offers several courses for students. Suffolk University School of Law's Legal Innovation and Technology Lab functions as a consultancy and research and development lab centered on legal tech. And Georgetown University Law Center has since 2013 hosted the Iron Tech Lawyer Invitation, in which student teams from around the country present their technology solutions to legal problems, just to name a few.

In the LawX course, students begin by researching the legal topic at hand, which this spring is asylum. They will speak with immigration judges, advocates, attorneys who represent clients in asylum cases, as well as people seeking asylum, Parker said. Next, they will brainstorm how best to help asylum seekers before creating prototypes of technology solutions, then perfecting them. SixFifty helped create last year's landlord and tenant communication app, but never before have the BYU students had access a law firm to help them work through the legal issues.

"This is like no other class they've ever had," Parker said. "There is almost no syllabus. We know, generally, what steps we're going to go through, but I don't know what we're going to do each day."

Asylum was a natural topic for LawX to focus on, given that the law school already does work on the immigration front, said law dean Gordon Smith. Teams of law students and faculty travel to the country's largest detention center in Dilley, Texas, several times a year to interview women seeking asylum. Additionally, the school's Law Community Legal Clinic offers direct representation to clients in immigration matters, thought a partnership with Deseret Industries.

"There are hundreds and thousands of people in the U.S. who are here, and maybe have good cases for asylum, but they can't afford an attorney or don't know how to fill out the paperwork," Parker said. "I think we can make a really big difference for them."