Extract from Gina Jurva’s article, “How Technology Can Help Solve the Access to Justice Crisis.”
The statistic is startling: 92 percent of the legal problems encountered by low-income Americans get no or insufficient help. It’s a figure both Bridget McCormack and Verna Williams cite without hesitation, and it defines the crisis they’ve spent their careers trying to solve.
McCormack, CEO and president of the American Arbitration Association (AAA) and former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, frames it bluntly. “The civil justice system is a massive market failure. If folks don’t see it that way, then they’re not looking.”
Williams, CEO of Equal Justice Works, the nation’s largest facilitator of postgraduate legal fellowships, sees the human cost daily. “Some scholars estimate that 150 million legal issues go unresolved every single year,” she said. “We’ve got to do something about that.”
