Provo, UT — BYU Law today announced that it has added an Incubator Course to its LawX Legal Design Lab, allocating additional time for law school students to further test and implement their access-to-justice innovations. This fall, the Law School will run concurrent classes that include a new Design Lab project and the Incubator, focusing on water rights and community service, respectively.
“BYU Law launched LawX in 2017 to empower students to address challenging legal issues with innovative solutions in a single semester,” said Nick Hafen, Head of Legal Technology Education at BYU Law, where he coordinates the law school’s technology curriculum, including LawX. “It’s inspiring to see how much our students have been able to accomplish in such a brief time, creating solutions that have made a real difference. Since 2017, student and community interest has flourished, and we’re scaling up LawX to tackle a greater variety of projects and to provide continuing support for students’ solutions.”
LawX Incubator: CourtServe
The LawX Incubator welcomes five new and two returning students from last winter semester to continue work on CourtServe, a nonprofit platform to connect judges, charities and court-appointed volunteers to make it easier for judges to assign community service. When a person commits a crime, judges have the option to assign court-appointed community service in lieu of jail time or fines, which is often a better way to reintegrate people into society. CourtServe stemmed from LawX research that found a lack of resources available to match court-appointed volunteers with appropriate community service opportunities.
The initial prototype received positive feedback from judges as well as adult probation and parole supervisors, who agreed this resource makes it more likely that a judge would assign community service in lieu of fines. The LawX Incubator team is finetuning its CourtServe prototype and plans to begin testing with charities in Utah later this semester.
LawX Design Lab: Water Rights
This fall the LawX Design Lab is collaborating with WETx, a Salt Lake City-based tech company that uses blockchain technology to manage and transact water rights. WETx is working to make it easier to be more environmentally responsible in a state where water is scarce without requiring people to give up their water rights. Historically, rights holders have faced regulatory hurdles to make changes to their rights. The LawX team is working with guidance from Justin Whittaker, WETx CEO and a LawX director, on automating water rights management to help contribute to saving the Great Salt Lake.
About BYU Law School
Founded in 1971 with its inaugural class in 1973, the J. Reuben Clark Law School (BYU Law) has grown into one of the nation’s leading law schools – recognized for innovative research and teaching in social change, transactional design, entrepreneurship, corpus linguistics, criminal justice and religious freedom. The Law School has more than 7,000 alumni serving in communities around the world. BYU Law is consistently ranked by National Jurist as one of the best-value law schools in the country. BYU Law is also one of only six law schools to receive the Bloomberg Law School Innovation recognition. BYU Law seeks to “develop people of integrity who combine faith and intellect in lifelong service to God and neighbor.” For more information, visit https://law.byu.edu.
About LawX
Launched in 2017, LawX is a design-thinking class in which BYU Law students seek to address an access-to-justice legal issue one semester at a time, whether through a change in policy, process, or product. The students utilize design thinking to research, ideate, prototype and test a solution in a fast-paced environment. LawX projects have generated several technology-based legal solutions, including SoloSuit to fight debt collections in court without a lawyer, Hello Landlord to improve landlord-tenant communication, and Goodbye Record to address flaws in the expungement process.