For all the pomp and circumstance in legal technology around quantifying and measuring change, the industry has yet to really take a data-first approach to one of the legal sector's biggest areas of need: access to justice.

Chad Burton, co-founder of legal technology development group CuroLegal, is hoping to change that. Burton, along with attorney Billie Tarascio, Ohio software development company Two Mile, and small firm online community Lawyerist is launching a new venture studio, CuroStudio, intent on cracking the issues behind the increasing access gap in legal services.

Over the years, Burton has seen bar associations, legal aid organizations, law firm partners and other legal leaders talk at length about the need to help bring legally underserved communities into the fold. Yet for all the talk, “it seems to be getting worse,” Burton said. “It doesn't seem to be resolving.”

The studio intends to define some quantifiable goals by which it and other bar association, law firm, and legal organization partners can assess its efforts to bridge the access to justice gap. “Let's create a set of metrics and build and create and innovate against those metrics,” he said.

CuroStudio is adopting the 'venture studio' model popular in Silicon Valley, where multiple different startup projects are developed and housed under one roof, in hopes that decoupling technology development from traditional legal institutions may better guide the process.

“We're doing it in a way that is maybe easier because we're not trying to fence a concept into an institutional model and go through years of board approval to get an idea to see the light of day. We can act quicker,” Burton, also the CEO of CuroStudio, said of the structure.

One of the major problems that technology efforts around access to justice often face is a lack of coordination with other groups or funding sources. “Those projects are often siloed, and so you don't get the benefit of scaling different ideas. Maybe there's not a lot of grant money, or maybe it gets built half-heartedly and doesn't go anywhere,” Burton said.

CuroStudio is part of an attempt to coordinate efforts in meaningful, data-driven ways. “Now we can make decisions on what is really helpful for consumers based on data-driven decisions, versus, 'Well, I got $50,000 in grant money, let me see how far I can stretch it and let the project die off somewhere.' That's just not helpful,” Burton added.

There are a few projects that Burton and his team hope to tackle early on in CuroStudio's career. The studio will begin working through and developing some potential applications of both blockchain infrastructure and cryptocurrency in the legal sector, as well as working toward a kind of “plug and play” law firm technology structure for solo practitioners and small firms.

Though CuroStudio is starting out with a fairly small founding group, Burton is hoping to onboard partners across the legal industry, from the business sector all the way to the nonprofit sector. “There are other partners that are going to be involved. We're not thinking we're going to do this without others,” Burton added.