MassAccess - Online Court Filing Platform

Visit the MassAccess Court Filing Platform Here: https://massaccess.suffolklitlab.org/

MassAccess was created and is maintained by the Document Assembly Line Project. The project is run out of Suffolk Law's Legal Innovation and Technology Lab in cooperation with the Access to Justice Commission's COVID-19 task force. It is staffed by a collection of volunteers, and operates as an assembly line to rapidly create mobile-friendly accessible versions of online court forms and self-help materials in multiple-languages for key areas of urgent legal need during the COVID-19 crisis.

Though we are focused on MA specific content, we are sharing our work on GitHub in the hopes that our efforts can be replicated in other jurisdictions. All novel code we generate will be licensed under an MIT License, and we're intentionally building on the open source docassemble platform.

---

In early 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of courthouses across Massachusetts–effectively terminating access to justice for many pro se litigants dependent on court services for motions concerning areas of law such as housing, domestic violence, family Law and immigration. In response, the Suffolk University Legal Innovation and Technology Lab organized a group of volunteers to design and develop a novel civic technology solution for online court filings.As a volunteer, I primarily worked on two features of the online court filing system.

1.

First, I worked to convert paper and pdf court paperwork into digital forms. Using Adobe Acrobat, I parsed court filing paperwork into computer readable formats.

2.

Second, I worked to develop a novel solution for automated court assignments for the Boston Municipal Court (BMC) system. Before the launch of this platform, the BMC system had no means of digitally assigning litigants to a BMC court. I worked to implement custom python scripting paired with geojson data to provide seamless court assignments and jurisdiction information to litigants using the MassAccess Court Filing platform.

Below is the code that, when paired with the DocAssemble platform, automates the court assignments.