Page 114 - 2022augustBOG

Top 5 questions types asked on the site:

• Family/Divorce/Custody
• Housing or Property Owned
• Debts & Purchases
• Civil/Constitutional Rights

4) Court Document Automation

For over a decade now, the ATJ Self-Represented Litigation (SRL) efforts have supported a
network of resources for self-represented litigants working with Courts and non-profit
organizations throughout Louisiana. ATJ has provided court documents (domestic forms), and
developed websites on which to place them, for over 26 JDCs (39 parishes) (see attached map).
More recently the ATJ Commission’s Technology and SRL Committees completed a survey from
which a list of priority court documents was created. Some of these documents already existed in
fill-in-the-blank formats.

With the COVID Pandemic requiring more online court access, the recently created Supreme
Court Technology Commission offered to create uniform websites for JDCs. Judge Scott Schlegel
leads these efforts. ATJ-created domestic forms that have been tested for over a decade in various
courts were readily adopted by the Supreme Court as their own to help populate content of the
Technology Commission-created websites. Through an agreement among the Supreme Court
Technology Commission, Suffolk University and with the support of Louisiana-based Lagniappe
Law Lab, an initial group of court documents were automated. The ATJ Technology and SRL
Committees will continue to work on creating and updating the prioritized list of forms. The
roadblock to continued work on these forms it the $40,000 cost for the technical expertise to
automate the remaining eight forms.

4