The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) and the
Center for Access to Justice and Technology at IIT Chicago-Kent
College of Law (CAJT) will be rolling out the new version of A2J
Author® for the legal aid community this Friday, August 1, 2014 at 12
noon CST.
Almost 10 years ago in December of 2004, we rolled out the first
version of A2J Author. A2J Author versions 1 through 4 were written in
Actionscript and were wrapped in a Visual Basic shell. The viewer was
a combination of Actionscript and some small Javascript. You could
only create new Guided Interviews® on Microsoft Windows PCs, but you
could run a Guided Interview on any machine that had a web browser and
the Flash plugin installed. This was the time of the browser wars.(i)
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released in November, 2004 and it was near
impossible to deliver a consistent and reliable experience on
different browsers. Flash was the best solution at the time. Also,
Apple Mac market share in law schools was below 10% with no
expectation that it would every rise again.(ii) This was before the
iPod, iPad and iPhone.
With this technology, the legal aid community has delivered over 2.5
million interactions with users seeking assistance in a legal matter
for themselves.(iii) Interesting to note, a recent article about
LegalZoom mentioned that they had served over 2 million people and the
company had expected revenues in 2012 of $200 million.(iv) Maybe A2J
Author is the LegalZoom for the poor. The community of authors of A2J
Author Guided Interviews should be proud of this accomplishment. But
we are really only getting started.
Today, however, things are different. HTML, JavaScript and CSS form a
very capable development environment for Single Page Applications
(SPAs). (v) Macs represent over 50% of the PCs visiting the CALI
website(vi) and Flash is persona non grata on Apple iPhones and iPads
and problematic on other smartphones.
The new version of A2J Author is a single page web application
designed to run in modern browsers and does not require a software
package to be downloaded and installed on the author's machine. This
is because the software that runs the application is downloaded every
time you visit the website. This has the advantage of allowing for
rapid and continuous bug fixes and feature enhancements. It also means
that A2J Author will work on your PC whether it runs Windows, Mac or
Linux. The viewer is also a (smaller) single page web application that
runs inside the browser and (will soon) be able to do so on smart
phones and tablets as long as they continue to support modern web
browser standards.
This Friday, we will be throw the switch and a2jauthor.org will point
to the new website and the new authoring system. The old website will
not go away for at least a year and will continue to be accessible at
old.a2jauthor.org while we are updating the content on the new
website. You will still be able to download and install A2J Author
version 4 for at least 6 months (and probably longer) while we work
with LHI to bring up the new Viewer and help everyone transition their
A2J4 Guided Interviews into A2J5 Guided Interviews.
A2J Author Guided Interviews are stored as XML files. The format of
those files is different between version 4 and version 5. This was
unavoidable. We have done considerable work in the background to make
the conversion of A2J4 interview files into A2J5 format, but some
human intervention will still be necessary to make your interviews run
in the new viewer. We will be posting detailed information about this
and holding several webinars that explain the process in the near
future. We are working hard to make this transition smooth, but there
will be bumps along the way.
The next several months we will be shaking out the new system and you
can help by uploading your A2J4 Guided Interviews and testing them in
the new A2J5 Viewer. We crave your feedback so that we can refine and
adjust the new platform for when it goes live with real people on LHI
later this year.
This is not an upgrade, this is a whole, new platform. I want to see
20 million people served per year and even more. Access to justice
isn't just about quantity, but quantity does matter. Our goal is not
to replace lawyers, but to make the limited human lawyer resources
more valuable by concentrating their work where it can have the
greatest impact. Technology vs. Lawyers is not an either/or. The
greatest benefit will come from our strategic and intelligent use of
Technology + Lawyers to increase access t justice.
Thanks SO MUCH to LSC for funding this, LHI as our partners in crime
and the Legal Aid community for their ongoing support.
In Summary
- On Friday, August 1, 2014, a2jauthor.org will point to the new
website and new authoring system.
- Everyone will have to create a brand new account on that website to
be able to create new Guided Interviews and upload old interviews for
conversion into the new version 5 format.
- The old website will still be accessible at old.a2jauthor.org for at
least a year.
- You cannot run A2J5 Guided Interviews at LHI or on your own servers
(e.g. online intake) just yet. We are working with LHI with a Fall
2014 time frame and hope to have a download package for putting
interviews on your own server for the folks doing online intake and
the like.
- The mobile version of the A2J5 Viewer is still under construction.
We hope to deliver that this fall as well.
- We are also working on a basic document assembly subsystem for A2J
Author but do not have an estimate time of completion just yet.
- The new A2J5 Viewer will support Korean, Spanish, English,
Simplified Chinese(vii) and French (in progress) right away.
- The new A2J5's logic will support nested IF and ELSE's too
.. but WAIT, there's MORE. Seriously. We will be talking about this a
lot more in the future. Follow us on Twitter @A2JAuthor and @CALIorg.
As always, if you have any questions, ideas, suggestions, praise or
complaints, do not hesitate to contact me directly.
John Mayer
Executive Director
CALI
jmayer@cali.org
@johnpmayer
ENDNOTES
(i) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#The_second_browser_war
(ii) http://www.theoligarch.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm
(iii) Based on the latest statistics reporting from LHI which hosts
the majority of the A2J Author Guided Interviews available.
http://www.probono.net/dasupport/news/article.519725-LHI_Newsletter_April_2014
(iv) http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/latest_legal_victory_has_legalzoom_poised_for_growth#368486
“... As of August 2012, it had served some 2 million customers,
according to a prospectus it filed with the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission in advance of a planned initial public offering.
In 2011, it brought in revenues of $156 million and was on track to
bring in close to $200 million in 2012...”
(v) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application and
http://www.manning.com/mikowski/ - the latter is an excellent book on
Single Page Web Applications.
(vi) According to my webmaster and our web logs in the Spring of 2014.
(vii) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters