Welcome to Access to J.A.R.V.I.S (Just A Rather Very Intelligent System)! My name is Talia Boiangin and I am a Rising 2L at University of Miami Law School. This blog will take you on a journey of my Access to Justice Tech Fellowship in Orlando.

The Who

My host organization is Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida (CLSMF), one of the largest nonprofit law firms in the state. They serve 12 counties in Central Florida and provide civil legal assistance on consumer, family law, and domestic violence issues to more than 20,000 low to moderate income residents a year. CLSMF’s attorney-staffed helpline receives more than 2,800 calls a month. With over one million people living in the area they serve, it is difficult for CLSMF to serve more residents due to limited staff and resources. The average length of a phone call to CLSMF is about twenty minutes and wait times can be a few hours.

The What

Josh Lazar, CLSMF’s IT Director and my supervisor, wants to reach more residents with the same amount of staff by creating a Consumer Law AI chatbot. The chatbot will streamline the user’s legal aid process and provide a greater exposure to legal resources. Basically, the bot will gather data and send it to an attorney. The attorney will confirm whether there is a valid consumer protection issue.

Our goals for the AI chatbot are the following:

(1) to serve more residents with the same amount of staff;

(2) to cut costs and time on the attorney’s side by having the chatbot intake simple information; and

(3) to streamline and process for the user.

The Why

Did you know that last year there were nearly 2.7 million consumer reports across the country? The 2017 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book uses reports from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to report the top thirty categories of consumer issues. Florida’s top report categories include debt collection and identity theft, and Florida ranks number one among states for fraud reports.

Our J.A.R.V.I.S. is in the beginning stages of changing the world…okay, maybe that statement is a bit grand. While our J.A.R.V.I.S. will not stop the bad guy from hacking into Nuclear Missile codes, it will help the lives of people who need it most. Most consumers do not know that they are victims of debt harassment or fraud, so we hope our AI chatbot will provide the user with useful resources and legal aid.

The “What are you doing about it, Talia?”

I will be helping the chatbot (and helping myself!) “learn” consumer law from consumer protection data given to us by certain stakeholders. I will use these data and structure it into narrow categories. For example, debt collection involves sub-issues of harassment (threats or abuse), credit card collection, and auto loan collection. I will sort the data into these sub-issues and the AI will use this to obtain a specific idea on debt collection. So when a user says they have an issue with debt, the AI will hopefully ask the questions to determine whether the user is talking about harassment, collection, or something else. The more categories we provide the AI, the more efficient the system will be for the user. This initial stage of inputting and structuring our data is crucial because it will create a framework. We are essentially teaching the AI to ride a bike with training wheels; once the bot launches and starts analyzing user data from the “Chatting,” we’ll remove the training wheels. The idea is that this chatbot will grow with each conversation and refine it’s knowledge and scope of consumer law.

Additionally, I am excited because I will hopefully draft the privacy policy and disclaimer agreement. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which gives European Citizens more rights over their personal information collected online, will play a huge factor in my research. With the growing interest in online privacy, we will have to make sure that the privacy policy addresses the rights granted to children under 16 and other parties like EU citizens. I will be researching the GDPR extensively and also making sure we are compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). More on this to come!

I look forward to blogging about my experience as a tech fellow and hope that I can teach a little bit of AI/legal knowledge to anyone who stumbles on my blog!

P.S. Check out this video to learn about a plug-in that shows what data is being collected about you and from who.