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Better Justice: Collaborating to help Canadians solve their legal problems

Better Justice is how we titled this Dean’s Lecture on the JDD Lab. The lecture describes the work at the Justice Data and Design Lab, beginning with the work of the Research Engine.

Kate quickly summarizes context for this work. She summarizes the data we have on what help people are asking for to resolve their legal needs. Then she moves on to describe – with obvious enthusiasm – how the JDD Lab Teams have identified the social media platform, Reddit, as an entirely new, rich source of data and information about both the everyday legal problems real Canadians face and what help Canadians are asking for.

She tells the story of how team have designed and built a Research Engine that uses cutting edge unsupervised machine learning and AI technologies to gather and analyze this data and reveal how problems cluster around certain topics. Kate takes the viewer right into the engine where the analysis is underway, and shows what the clustered data looks like.

This lecture “Better Justice: How Data Scientists and Legal Scholars Are Collaborating to Help Canadians Solve Their Everyday Legal Problems” (2021) was given by Kate Gower at the University of Victoria in October 2021. ( Runtime: 44 minutes.)