SoloSuit Landing Page

In the state of Utah, debt collectors have filed 330,000 lawsuits in the last five years, more than all other types of lawsuits combined. Of those sued for a debt, 98.5 percent don't hire an attorney, which is understandable given that the median amount in controversy is just $874. But as a result, the default rate for debt collection is over 80 percent.

This is more than just a monetary problem, according to Brigham Young University (BYU) law professor and practicing attorney Kimball Parker. It's a direct result of a confusing complaint system that left many receiving notices confused.

“The summons tells you that you're supposed to answer, but there's no instruction on how to answer,” Parker explained. “It just says, 'You need to respond.' So people have no idea how to respond, and it's not intuitive. If somebody doesn't tell you how to do it, there's no way to possibly figure it out.”

So Parker and his class of second and third year law students decided to help. In fall 2017, The J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU in Provo, Utah, introduced the LawX legal design lab, aimed at applying technology to close the access to justice gap. The result of its first semester of work is SoloSuit, an online tool aimed at helping Utahns who cannot afford legal services respond to debt collection lawsuits.

The free website, shown to Legaltech News last week shortly before launch, operates like a streamlined decision tree. The simple interface asks users simple questions aimed to strip away as much legalese as possible, such as “How many numbers are on the paper” as compared to “How many allegations are against you.” Following some initial questions to determine the court in question and the attorney suing the user, the website runs through each allegation by asking users to respond to each complaint (with language such as “This statement is completely true” rather than “Admit”), which is then translated to formal legal language on the backend. Finally, the tool creates a PDF and helps the user identify the correct place to send the printed document.

Parker said that the SoloSuit website itself was created with help from outside programmers, following lessons in design thinking from IBM programmers at the beginning of the semester. The ultimate goal, he explained, was as easy a process, especially after the class interviewed many people facing these debts that felt overwhelmingly helpless.

“We thought about, what situations have we been in where we felt completely overwhelmed? And the one that we came back to was tax. If you're not filing a 1040-EZ, taxes are completely baffling. If I didn't have TurboTax, I don't know what I'd do. … So we said that the surety one gets from TurboTax, that's what we want for people. Because the underlying feeling we found from interviewing these debtors was hopelessness.”

The response has been positive so far. Parker said the class has worked to get SoloSuit listed as a resource on Utah state court websites, and the SoloSuit team is also working with search engine optimization (SEO) experts to make accessing the tool as easy as possible.

“There are essentially no resources that walk someone through answering a debt collection lawsuit. This is going from zero resources essentially to what we think is a good resource,” Parker said.

And crucially, the platform could have applicability outside of Utah as well. Parker noted that Alaska state courts are rolling out the website as a response to its own debt collection issues later in 2018, and an Arizona nonprofit is looking to adapt the website for eviction cases. Parker said, “We think we can apply this to every single state, and with little effort. … It's just a document automation software.”

This platform might be just the beginning for BYU's LawX, however. Parker said the school's administration is excited by the results of the first semester's work, and LawX will be aiming to tackle a different problem this fall.