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ACE – Introducing the JDD Lab and New Data on BC Legal Needs

Welcome to your first data update from the Justice Data and Design Lab (the JDD Lab) at ACE.

The JDD Lab is based at the Access to Justice Centre for Excellence (ACE) at the University of Victoria. At the Lab, Director Kate Gower works with a team of graduate students from the faculties of law and data science. They have found new data on British Columbians’ legal needs on the social media site, Reddit1. They use unsupervised machine learning to learn more about people’s legal needs.

This data update gives you access to the results of the JDD Lab’s analysis of the Reddit data gathered up to January 2024.

Today, we are sharing two things:

An Interactive Display

An Interactive Display of what legal problems people in BC are asking for help with on the social media site, Reddit as of January 2024. As of January 2024, the Reddit dataset includes 2622 Reddit posts regarding British Columbians’ legal problems. The analysis showed that problems clustered around two different types of housing problems, and employment and family-related problems.

We encourage you to have a look at the display, the five clusters of problems it identifies and the keywords in each cluster.

We recommend using Google Chrome for optimal compatibility. However, Safari should also work seamlessly. Note that the interactive display does not work on smaller screen. If you are using a mobile phone, consider rotating your phone.

Video Explanation

A Video Explaining the Data which the JDD Lab is collecting, what we are learning from it and what the interactive display shows about the legal problems of British Columbians — Watch It Here! (Video runs 44mins). In the video, the JDD Lab team reports to Rob Lapper, K.C. (acting Director of ACE) about the data and analysis and answers his questions.

You can learn more about the JDD Lab’s work in UVIC’s video of a Dean’s Lecture on the Lab, and at ACE’s website.

We are grateful for the support of the Law Foundation of BC and Mitacs. We could not do this work without them.

  1. The most recent Everyday Legal Needs survey undertaken by Statistics Canada in 2021 shows that most people take action to resolve their everyday legal problems, and the top two things most people do are to ask their family and friends and to look on the internet. The JDD Lab used programs that show where people go online when they look for legal advice, and found that the top place people go is to the social media platform Reddit. ↩︎