As part of its project curriculum, Columbia Law School’s Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic engages in an ongoing collaboration with NYC’s Project FAIR to innovate and implement greater access to legal help and resources for the low-income and underrepresented members of the New York City community.

Project FAIR

Project FAIR (Fair Hearing Assistance, Information & Referral) comprises a consortium of attorneys, paralegals, public benefits experts, legal advocates and law students working to ensure that individuals who seek public assistance, food stamps, and Medicaid are able to effectively exercise their due process rights to access these services. Project FAIR is the sole independent provider of free legal information and service located on the premises of the main hearing site at 14 Boerum Place in Brooklyn where approximately 500 hearings are held each day.

Project FAIR is unique in that it does not have a standalone office. Volunteer attorneys and advocates chair a table at the hearing site, where they “rely on technology as the glue to hold operations together- providing the calendaring system to ensure the help table is staffed by someone every weekday, as well as housing the online database that serves as the primary data collection point from the individuals who go to the table,” says Columbia Clinical Professor of Law Conrad Johnson, who oversees FAIR’s collaboration with the Clinic.

Clinic Collaboration

In addition to creating Project FAIR’s vast knowledge database containing all of its training and reference resources, Columbia’s clinic also created and maintains an online database which contains records and information collected by the volunteers from all those who visit the help table.  This database now contains more than 10,000 entries and enables the volunteers to “track systemic trends in real time,” says Professor Johnson.

Through their work with FAIR, the database, and participating advocates, clinic students learned that for more than a year, those seeking to apply for or maintain their public assistance benefits were forced to wait for hours outside of many of the City’s welfare “job centers”.  Lines at many of the centers often spanned blocks and persisted in rain or shine, summer heat or winter cold. Last October the concern grew that as winter set in, it would be dangerous for individuals, many with children at their side, to be standing out in the cold for hours as they waited their turn.

Technology in Action

Prompted by this growing problem, clinic students Chris Watts, CLS ’13 and Ben Kopelman, CLS ’12, joined Professor Johnson on a visit to one of the centers on Dec. 5^th, 2011.  There, they encountered a long line of individuals waiting outside of the center.  That day they filmed a video of the overcrowding, and interviewed those waiting in line:

The Legal Aid Society used the clinic students’ video as part of its effort to raise awareness about the overcrowding issue.  The Wall Street Journal was the first media outlet to report on the issue when it published an article titled “Welfare Lines Overflow.” Similar stories were subsequently published by New York Magazine, NY Times and Social Service Employees Union.  Shortly thereafter, the WSJ published a follow-up article to its first column wherein NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg acknowledged the pressing issue of the overcrowding at job centers across the city, and stated his pledge to work on improving the problem.

Spurred by the widespread media coverage, the City Council held hearings on the overcrowding problem in January of 2012.  Council member Gale Brewer, who chaired the hearings, showed the Clinic’s video as her opening statement to begin the hearings.

Professor Johnson was asked to testify at the city council hearing.  The day before the hearing, he returned to the job center he and his students had visited on Dec. 5^th.  To his surprise, the line outside of the center was gone.  He called several advocate colleagues who were also working on the issue and they too reported that lines outside other job centers had also disappeared.  It seemed that the HRA had finally enacted measures that eliminated the lines outside of the job centers.  Asked of his impression of the experience, Professor Johnson speaks about the power and importance of using technology in contemporary law practice. “It was a visual story; we were able to alert the media and the public by capturing images that both proved the existence of the problem and conveyed the hardships it created in ways that words alone could not. We also got results far more quickly and effectively than we would have using conventional advocacy.” He goes on: “Using tools of the digital age allowed for relief mechanisms that were not available to people who relied on traditional methods.”

While the story comes with many lessons, the most important is that technology not only creates greater access to our legal and judicial processes: it is used in creative ways to reach and influence the political process and to aid the members of our community who need help most.

Over the past three years, students in Columbia Law School’s Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic have teamed up with the judges at New York City’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings and the Legal Aid Society to create a website to help people who had their cars confiscated during an arrest get their cars back.

The NYC Police Department can seize a car during the course of an arrest for a variety of reasons, including driving while intoxicated, drug possession, and weapons possession.  What many car owners and drivers who have had their cars taken away do not know is that there is a process for asking to have the car returned in a civil proceeding even if there is a concurrent criminal trial for the arrest.

The process by which they can do this is called a Krimstock hearing, named after a plaintiff in a class action brought by the Legal Aid Society specifically to challenge the police department’s practice of seizing a car without providing a prompt hearing.

The website provides a comprehensive guide for people who wish to bring a Krimstock hearing case, whether or not they have a lawyer.  It describes car owners’ rights and guides them step-by-step through the entire hearing process, from requesting a hearing to recovering the car from the police impound.   It includes a detailed description of the process, what to prepare, how to settle during a pre-hearing conference if they want to, what to expect during the hearing, and what to do/how to re-schedule if they cannot make their hearing date. There are also videos on different pages of the site made by the OATH judges that serve as special guides through the site.

The Krimstock hearing site can be found at www.law.columbia.edu/krimstock.

About the Clinic

The Lawyering in the Digital Age clinic at Columbia Law School was created more than 10 years ago to explore the impact of technology on law practice and the legal profession. The clinic is taught by Professors Conrad Johnson and Mary Marsh Zulack along with Brian Donnelly, Director of Educational Technology.

The clinic represents an innovative approach to teaching students to engage in effective contemporary legal practice. Student fieldwork projects are done in partnership with public interest organizations and with judges. A common theme for all of the fieldwork is to improve access to justice. Clinic students have collaborated with several Legal Aid and Legal Services organizations to help lawyers integrate technology into their practice.

The clinic has also partnered with judges on all levels of the judiciary in New York.  The Krimstock project with OATH, showcased in this STLR post, is just one example of clinic students helping to make an adjudicative system more accessible and legal
information more available to under-served communities. The clinic students hope that this innovative effort will be a model for using technology to create other resources and tools to provide greater access to justice in other legal arenas.

To learn more about the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic, visit here.

Google and ITA merger: for better or worse?
On the heels of AdMob was Google’s merger with ITA Software in July of this year. ITA Software is the innovator of the QPX technology, travel search giants such as Kayak, Orbitz, and Expedia all utilize integrated QPX platforms in their air travel search and pricing services.  ITA’s dominance in GDS, or global distribution systems, which serve to link ticket bookers such as airline passengers and travel agencies to the booking systems of travel suppliers such as airlines, will prove to be a valuable asset as Google decides how it will use the software to develop and implement its own flight search tools, which is exactly what has travel search giants and not-so-giants alike up in arms.

While some industry analysts are applauding Google’s entrée into the market, anticipating that it will stimulate the otherwise stagnating field of travel search technology, many more are skeptical, and increasingly alarmed, about the impending deterioration in competition and the threat it poses to other GDS’s.  Robert Birge, chief marketing officer of Kayak, commented: “There are legitimate concerns…about what that deal could mean to competition in the market and how it could affect consumer choice.”  He echoes the sentiments of a growing number of travel site competitors and consumers, and it seems that the U.S. Department of Justice is picking up on the concerns.

The DOJ steps in
Google is alleged to be in violation of the Sherman and Clayton Acts, which make many monopolies or attempts to monopolize a market illegal. The essential premise of the allegations is that Google is attempting to monopolize varying related markets- by acquiring ITA’s specialized technology, it has the potential to use its dominance in web search to become dominant in travel search.

Google announced in late August that they had received a “second request” for information from the DOJ as part of the regulatory review of the acquisition.

The DOJ’s process of review for deals such as the acquisition in question consists of a preliminary “waiting period” review, lasting approximately a month.  During this time the DOJ can ask for voluntary divulgence of information and hold discussions with the companies. At the conclusion of this phase, the DOJ decides whether to give the deal the green light or look into it further during a “second request” stage.

Violating vertical boundaries
So what’s the big deal?  Should we be concerned that Google is leveraging its cutting edge engineering capabilities to enter different but related markets?  That might depend on how you define separate markets. If you contemplate that video-sharing technology, digitized book-scanning and indexing, and travel data aggregation to be related enough to online search, then Google is arguably just doing variations on a theme of its specialty.  But, if you’re beginning to think that Google is getting into a lot of things it doesn’t normally do, you might think it is merging with complements; that is, it’s not buying up competitors so much as it’s absorbing entities further upstream or downstream in the supply chain.

Whereas Google currently scans and indexes travel search information that it acquires from Kayak or Orbitz and display it as a one-box result, with the new ITA software Google can feasibly create its own travel data aggregation platform and be able to offer the same services as Kayak or Orbitz but as a Google product.  This can be a troubling prospect to say, a small travel search site which sees this deal as Google invading and dominating their niche industry.  But proponents of Google, and certain lines of antitrust theories, contend that Google shouldn’t be punished for its well-earned successes—if not for its technological savvy leading to the creation of such services as Google Books, we may not have the many sophisticated products Google offers (mostly free of charge) and continues to create.

What does this mean for consumers?
The purpose of antitrust law is not to impede competitive efficiency, which typically benefits consumers by producing better products and lower prices.  Having previously worked in-house at a technology company, I observe a certain cognitive dissonance: when a company does too well or becomes dominant in its field, we are quick to suspect that bad intentions and certain misconduct are the culprits for such success.  But in my personal experience, it’s common, if not the norm, that companies which fare well do so because they are giving users better choices, higher quality, and lower prices.  It’s difficult for a private company to convince consumers that it has their welfare and best interests in mind—but that is exactly how a company gains respect and earns loyalty from discriminating customers.  Why is it exactly that we use Gmail, Chrome, and Scholar?  Because they’re useful and easy to use.  If Google can develop a better way to aggregate and disseminate travel data, that would be useful, too.  So why should we stop them?