As the legal industry writ large continues to consider opportunities to close the access to justice gap, four state legal aid groups have proposed an unconventional approach: gaming.

Legal aid organizations in Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire a few weeks ago launched “RePresent,” an interactive online game to familiarize pro se litigants with court proceedings. The game, available both online and as a free downloadable game on mobile devices, walks players through the process of preparing for and representing oneself in small claims court.

Game players are responsible for helping the game's main character prepare for his hearing, breaking the process into small steps that help build his confidence for his hearing. Gameplay reveals a surprisingly large number of tasks pro se litigants must complete to prepare adequately, from the information they must file with the court clerk's office down to just printing directions and parking instructions for their courthouse they must appear at.

The game, now in its second iteration, was originally launched in 2016 as part of a partnership between Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut and Northeastern University's NuLaw Lab. The groups, funded by a Legal Services Corporation (LSC) Technology Initiative Grant, aimed to see whether game play could help prepare pro se litigants for small claims hearings.

Kathy Daniels, IT administrator for the Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut, helped put together the original game. She said the idea for the game came from a staff brainstorm about how to familiarize pro se litigants with what tends to be a wildly confusing court experience for the uninitiated.

“We wanted to expose them to the experience in a safe environment where they could practice,” Daniels said.

Dan Jackson, executive director of Northeastern's NuLawLab, explained that the game draws on research around “serious games,” games typically designed for training and skill building.

“There is a body of work that demonstrates that game play is in fact one of the most effective ways for humans to learn. It's how we began to learn things as children, which is how we learn a lot of things like social interactions, but also a lot of actual skill building as well. I think often we make the mistake of thinking that after we move to adulthood that the game part, the play part, is actually no longer important,” Jackson said.

“The goal is to create a gameplay experience that will help people who have to go to court to represent themselves without a lawyer get some basic foundational knowledge, and also some basic foundational skillbuilding they wouldn't otherwise get,” Jackson added.

Nearby states saw a lot of value in the platform. Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut, Pine Tree Legal Assistance in Maine, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI) and Legal Advice and Referral Center each tailored the game to their specific state law for the recent launch of the second iteration.

“Having the opportunity to do something like this that is way more interactive than our educational materials have ever had a chance to be in the past was really exciting,” Jack Haycock, client focused technology innovator at Pine Tree Legal Services, told LTN. “Having a chance to do something I think really innovative like this will work, for people maybe in a way that our text materials or even videos might not work. Being able to interact with the learning process can be a really powerful and different medium for people to learn,” he later added.

The groups are excited about the game's mobile accessibility, a new feature in the recent launch. Both Daniels and Haycock noted that about 70 percent of the traffic on their respective websites come from mobile devices. The migration to mobile also featured heavily in an LSC report released last year examining the online presence of legal aid organizations.

Jackson expects that the mobile component will help far more users access the game. “Not very many people spend time on browsers anymore,” he said.

Both the Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut and Pine Tree Legal Assistance Groups plan to release a version of the game that provides information to renters looking to avoid eviction shortly.

“Our goal is really to demystify just going to court and who the players are and what to do, and those tips really transcend for areas of civil litigation. Our goal is to identify what the pitfalls are, then help pro se litigants prepare for those in advance and know what they are,” Helen Meyer, development director at Pine Tree Legal Services, said.