Team

Kate Gower

Lab Director; Associate Director for ACE

Kate is Lab Director for the Justice Data and Design Lab, and an Associate Director at the Access to Justice Centre for Excellence (ACE). Kate is responsible for the teams working on the JDD Lab research engine and on the JDD Lab prototyping projects.

She loves a good team and has a particular skill for leading interdisciplinary projects. She relishes bringing groups of students into the JDD Lab, guiding them to trust each other, to respect and embrace their different skillsets, and to engage in healthy disagreements. She leads the interns to take a person-centred approach to improving the justice system, based on the evidence, data and user-experience collected and analyzed by the JDD Lab Research Engine. Under her guidance, the JDD Lab is an space to incubate innovative ideas and build them out to show how they could work to improve people’s experiences with their everyday legal problems.

Kate also maintains great relationships with the JDD Lab funders and collaborators, including the Law Foundation of BC, Mitacs, and the Centre for Digital Media. She has completed an LLM at the University of Victoria titled “New Data for Access to Justice: An Assessment of the value of Reddit data”.

Kate came to law after a successful career as a journalist and TV producer. She had a great run in journalism. Kate was an award-winning journalist for CBC, CTV, the BBC in United Kingdom. She met people, listened carefully to their stories and then told those stories in ways stuck with all who heard them. She produced China’s first-ever reality TV show guiding a disparate team of Chinese and English people as they drove a London Black Cab from Beijing, China overland – through Russia, Finland, Germany and the rest of Europe – to London, England, meeting and surpassing the expectations of sponsors by turning in top quality stories on schedule. She knows what it means to use teamwork and hard work to lift a project to success.