Ep 251: Cofounder Jason Tashea on the First Year and Uncertain Future of Georgetown's First-of-Its-Kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship

Jason Teixe
So, you know, in law school, we pretend like civil and criminal never meet. As far as people's lived experience is concerned, that's entirely inaccurate, especially for the populations that need the most support. There's so much that the civil justice world can learn from what criminal justice reform folks did in the last decade to be able to move the ball forward on really important issues that affect every side of the court. Docket.

Bob Ambrogi
Today on Law Next, a look at the Judicial Innovation Fellowship, a program launched 18 months ago to bring experienced technologists and designers into state, local, and tribal courts to develop technology based solutions to improve the public's access to justice.

Housed within the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law center, the program will soon wrap up its pilot cohort, which placed fellows in courts in Kansas, Tennessee, and Utah. My guest, Jason Teixe, is founding director and co founder of the program, as well as an entrepreneur, educator, and award winning journalist. As for me, I am Bob Ambrogi, and you're listening to law next, the podcast that features the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what's next in law.

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Now on to today's conversation.

Jason, welcome to Law next.

Jason Teixe
Thank you very much for having me, Bob.

Bob Ambrogi
Always a pleasure to talk to you. It's been a while since we've talked, so it's good to see you.

Jason Teixe
It has. Good to see you as well.

Bob Ambrogi
So we're here to talk about the judicial Innovation Fellowship program that was, I guess, launched about 18 months ago or so towards the end of 2022 and which is just about wrapping up its pilot class. And we'll talk about all of that. But before we get to any of that, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are and what your background is.

Jason Teixe
Sure. I'm someone who went to law school that learned they didn't want to be a lawyer, and it has been a path of figuring out. Then, you know, what do you do with that skill set? And the genesis of the tech and justice work I've been doing for the last decade actually starts in Kosovo. That was my first job after law school. I was there doing juvenile justice reform with a program through the State Department, through the Fulbright program, and I was doing traditional law and development work, talking to judges and prosecutors and figuring out how. How the system works and where the gaps were in regards to how children were being prosecuted for crimes. And in the corner of my eye, I saw a civic technology scene, which is, this is 2012. It's not a thing I'd ever seen before. It's not a thing they talked about in law school. And Kosovo, for people that don't know, is a very young country on account of the war that they had in the nineties. The population is young, but because of the international development work that'd been going on there since the nineties, they have an Internet penetration rate that looks like that of Switzerland and Germany. So you have this young, online savvy population in a country with a government that doesn't work so great. And so you had these motivated people trying to bridge service gaps that the kosovar government wasn't able to do. And I thought that was super interesting things around pollution, knowing when the bus comes. Like, these were all local hacks that people had put together.

These weren't services provided by the government. And so when I came back to the United States, continuing traditional juvenile justice reform work now in Maryland and Baltimore City, I was curious, like, where does this Venn diagram of civic technology overlap with this need for better justice systems in the United States? And so that was the jump off. And I started in expungement. The first thing I ever launched was this expungement app. It was a super simple webpage. It asked you binary questions about your criminal record, and if you could likely expunge the record, we handed you off to a legal aid provider in the state of Maryland. And if you couldn't, we tried to provide you with other resources, and it's slowly grown out from there. I've been a law professor, a journalist, which is when you and I met, initially covering topics in the space. I've been a product manager.

Bob Ambrogi
When you were at the ABA journal. Right.

Jason Teixe
When I was at the ABA journal. Yep. Shout out to Molly and Victor and Kevin and everyone else there.

Yeah. And so it's just continued to grow. And I've done consultant work for the World bank as well, and now I'm at Georgetown Law working on this judicial innovation fellowship program.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah, you were doing that substack for a while, too. Are you doing that still, or.

Jason Teixe
I am trying to figure out what the next generation of the justice tech download is going to be. I ran that for about five years. It grew out of the course I was teaching, which was criminal justice technology, policy and law at Georgetown with Keith Porcaro. And I just got underwater trying to build this new program and run it, and so I had to start cutting things from my task list. So that was sacrificed about a year ago. But now, as I'm coming up for air again, I'm trying to think about what a good version of that, like a next version of that would be. So hopefully something soon, maybe by the fall, I'll have something figured out.

Bob Ambrogi
You're probably the only person in the world who's ever done a speculative fiction podcast about the criminal justice system.

Jason Teixe
Yeah. Black Mirror goes to jail.

Yeah. So the 40 Futures project was one of the pandemic era projects where I wanted to build off of kind of the crazy stories I was hearing when I was doing journalism. You know, I was covering tech and law topics and journalism. So you're writing about the news. You're something that's currently going on. And when you talk to these technical experts, at the end of the interview, they're like, if you think this is bad, just wait five years until. And then they tell you something crazy that's not happening yet. And so I had this bank of insane what if scenarios that I wanted to do something with. And so 40 futures became kind of the landing pad for these what ifs about how technology is going to push and pull on people's constitutional rights in the justice system.

Bob Ambrogi
So you're the co founder and the founding director of the Judicial Innovation Fellowship program. How did those experiences lead you to the doorstep of this program? And why did you want to focus in on judicial innovation as opposed? I mean, the access to justice issue in this country is broad. There are a lot of all sorts of issues in the justice system. Why focus on courts and innovation in the country? Courts?

Jason Teixe
Sure. I'll answer those in two parts. So the first is like, why did I think that this was a good idea? So at the start of the pandemic I had taken a job at a new justice technology startup called Quest for Justice. I was their pm. And the idea was it was going to be an end to end platform for people, self represented litigants handling small claims cases at the time. And, you know, one of the things we wanted to be able to do was help people file. And I quickly learned, to my shock and awe, that courts don't really have APIs. I remember we had a conversation about this, like, four or five years ago, and you're like, that doesn't exist, Jason. I'm like, no, it'll be fine. It turns out it wasn't fine at all.

And so a lot of the functionality that we were looking to create was not being hamstrung by us thinking about how to solve the problem. It was an upriver problem with the courts. They don't think about open APIs that allows other software to port into it and to share information and to share data.

And that was a, that was a limitation. And so during the pandemic, Tanina Rastain, Corey Zarek, Jamison Dempsey, they reached out because they'd been kicking around this idea of a judicial innovation fellowship program, which would put technologists and designers and cybersecurity experts in state, local, tribal, and territorial courts to the benefit of the public. So not only are you improving internal function, but that function then has outputs that benefit the way that we access and interact as public members with courts. And that made a ton of sense to me because, like, at this company, one of the biggest problems was that courts, their own tech stack, was not at a place that we wanted it to be, to be able to get real functionality out of the product that we were building. So it made perfect sense. And they had initially reached out to me to help them write the white paper. This idea had been kicking around.

And really what it was to your other questions, like white courts, is, it's the overlooked third branch. I mean, for state courts, every year, see, about 75 million cases come through its door. You assume two parties per case. That's 150 million people, businesses and government agencies that have to interact with these institutions, which is an astonishing number, and making it really the front door of the democracy for millions of people every year. And that door is very much broken. And so we've seen over the last decade, really, since the Obama administration, a lot of emphasis go into executive branch functions and trying to improve and modernize those. And we've seen a little bit in groups like tech Congress trying to focus technical expertise in the legislative branch as well. But the judiciary was the last frontier. There were no programs trying to bring technologists into this really critical branch of government. And so we were really building on the shoulders of these other programs, think of code for America, presidential innovation fellowship, coding it forward, that were placing this type of talent in other government agencies. And we thought we could probably take that idea and make it fit for the needs of both the courts and the public. And so that is what we sought to do.

Bob Ambrogi
I used to think about the courts as an obstacle to innovation in the legal profession. Not an intentional obstacle, necessarily, but an obstacle because of the fact that they just simply didn't have the resources, didn't have the talent, maybe didn't have the bandwidth to deal with.

They're so busy whacking the moles of all the matters coming through the system that they just don't have time to innovate. Do you think that's changing at all, or are courts somehow becoming more open to the idea of the need for innovation?

Jason Teixe
We were working on this idea during the pandemic, which was the right time to be pitching this idea. Right, because courts had to go online in a couple of weeks, and they learned the hard way exactly how broken a lot of their systems are. They learned about the need for interoperability between systems.

They learned that their data wasn't what they thought it was.

And so the idea was at the right time. I think in a lot of ways, I think that's why we initially got funded to run this pilot was because it was just on the backend. We got funded in 22. So it was like things are just beginning to open up. People are, life is looking a little bit normal, and the courts are assessing, do we keep or jettison these things? And if anything, the pandemic proved that the courts can go through this transformation. They can go through it pretty fast. All said and done. Where I think the challenges are, I think the challenges you point out are correct. I think there's, you know, we're calcitrants. It's a, you know, we're a profession based on precedents, so we're always looking backwards as opposed to looking forwards.

But also, I think two things. When I started this project, I think I would have put a lot of blame at the foot of the courts. And now having the opportunity to work with courts really in the weeds in what they're trying to do, in the ways that they're trying to improve, is the courts have some agency in this? Of course. But there's two other major things that I don't think we're talking about in regards to what hamstrings courts and court innovation. And the first off is budgets. Courts don't create their own budgets, right? These are created by legislators. And since the great Recession in 2008, budgets have been slashed dramatically for courts. It wasn't until the pandemic aid the courts really saw an return to normal as far as funding was concerned. At the same time, during that period, you're seeing more and more people coming through state courts and with less and less representation. So they are higher. You have more people with higher needs because they don't have attorneys. And the courts are struggling to catch up with that. So that's a failure of imagination on the legislative side by hamstringing budgets. The other thing that's really undercut state court budgets specifically is the federal courts have really begun to eat the big award litigation that used to go through state courts that would have helped cover operating costs. And I don't think that's a story that gets enough attention either. And there's some need to create parity in regards to what the fed courts have taken up, where they have more jurisdiction now, or they're taking more cases out of state jurisdiction that used to have money that would go to the state through Cypre awards or things of that nature.

The other thing that I don't think we talk about enough is the role that private vendors play. So, you know, I was talking about, we would have been a private vendor in the space, right? Selling to customers at the time and not to courts. I think that has changed for them. But at the time, we were direct to consumer. But, you know, the big companies like Tyler, that sell Tyler Technologies, that is the main case management provider for state courts around the United States, creates really terrible technology.

And that's not on fault of the courts. Like, if you've ever had to interact with a Tyler website, the buttons aren't where you expect the buttons to be. The functionality is not there. They charge to have their API opened and then they charge for polls after that. From what I understand of how those contracts work, and that is hamstringing court innovation. And when there is not competition in the space, the courts don't have an option to go to a better player, a more resilient company or dynamic company that's been building user centered products that benefit both court administration and the public. They're just stuck with this one major monopolistic player and that really hinders court innovation as well.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah, I just had a couple of weeks ago, Mike Lisner from the free law project on here talking, well, talking about a lot of things. But one of the things we were talking about was their project to create a kind of an open source, e filing, docketing platform for court systems so that there can be some standardization, you know, open access across different court systems to kind of try and break the grip of that monopoly to some extent. But, you know, that seems a long way off. One other thing I just want to ask you about in the courts, we'll get to the fellowship program, but what about the cultural aspects of the courts? I mean, what, you know, one of the things we've heard for years is that courts were designed for lawyers and the systems are designed for lawyers. And I think there certainly, obviously there, there are court administrators and court leaders and jurists who are interested in innovating systems, but there are probably also a whole lot of them that are quite happy with the way things are in the way things have always operated and don't see the need to change. I mean, do you think that that's a factor inhibiting innovation in the courts?

Jason Teixe
Sure. I mean, you have your leaders in the space, the people that really want to adopt things. You have Scott Schlegel in Louisiana, Bridget McCormick, who recently retired from the Michigan Supreme Court, Dino Jimonis from the Utah Supreme Court. These were people that are really advocating for not only innovative change, but innovative change that also benefits the public. Right. And then you have laggards as well. We hear from people all the time that have what I would consider very retrograde views for 2024 in regards to how a court should function. But I'm not convinced that courts, like everything, has an adoption curve. Right. And I'm not sure that courts are any different than the public at large in regards to. You have early adopters and you have late adopters, and then you have kind of a fat middle that will kind of adopt all at once. Right. So, I don't know. I've never seen anything that has convinced me that courts are somehow uniquely late adopters as compared to the general population. And, you know, I think the folks that we work with this year, we're in three different courts around the United states, and their staff are phenomenal. They get it. You know, there's people within their institutions that may not be as forward thinking as the people we're directly working with, but, you know, people are coming around. And I think that's just what institutional change looks like generally. I don't think that that somehow unique to courts, nor do I think courts need to be uniquely maligned for this particular problem.

Bob Ambrogi
So with regard to the fellowship program, what are the kind of the broad parameters of it? What's the idea? How does it work?

Jason Teixe
The idea is that we can offer a type of talent to a state, local, territorial or tribal court that they usually don't hire for to work on some type of finite project of some variety, while proving the value of that type of talent. For us, the gold star is not only that the project goes well and the deliverable gets delivered, but afterwards, the court looks at what the fellow is able to do in the year that they have and say, we need that permanently and work towards creating a new full time position within that court for that particular type of role. And so that's the theory of change. You provide a new perspective, a new talent, and show value in that talent and that perspective, and then courts will see it and they will want to do it again in the future after the fellowship is over. So that's the theory of change. We can both have technical and cultural wins in helping courts just move the ball forward.

Bob Ambrogi
And are you looking for projects that are portable, transportable, you know, that, that are not just innovated in a specific court, but that can be carried over to other courts?

Jason Teixe
Yes. So one of the things that we spent a lot of time doing early on in this process, so I had about eight months building the program before we launched it. And one of the things I was looking for were for common headaches across courts that would allow us to be able to scope projects that would create either scalable or replicable outcomes. So every court and every judge wants to tell you that their situation is very unique and that there's no way that there's some off the shelf thing that could work for them. And that is, for the most part, entirely not true. At most, it's a last mile problem. The core technical issue that they're having is probably replete across the 10,000 some odd courts that we have in this country. And so we were really focused on finding where are those common headaches? And so what we identified were data infrastructure and interoperability, user testing and prototyping, cybersecurity, calendaring and scheduling. And then, and this was kind of a dream project that we weren't able to do this year. But there are courts that are developing their own software that other courts are interested in, but because they're developed for local jurisdiction, they're very much built towards whatever that local jurisdiction's laws are. And so we think that there's an opportunity to take that software that functions really well and write it in a way that's white, labels it so that other jurisdictions can take it off the shelf, apply their local laws and process, and then it just for them becomes a last mile problem as opposed to a start from scratch problem.

And that was the other area that we looked at. So that was what our call for proposals looked like from courts. We said, here are five areas that we are interested in working in. What do you have for us?

Bob Ambrogi
So in the first year of the program, what kinds of programs did you get and what. What kinds of programs did you select?

Jason Teixe
We had 19 applications come in from every region in the country.

We saw a lot of design data and a few cybersecurity and calendaring projects. We went through a pretty aggressive vetting process to figure out not only what projects make sense, but who are the courts that are going to play well with us. They needed to understand that we were a new program and so everything that we were doing was based off of some pretty educated assumptions. But still, at the end of the day, they were assumptions. And so not only were we looking for courts that had already been investing in the project as they're describing, they understand the scope of the problem. They've been putting resources towards the problem. There's dedicated staff looking at the problem, but also that they were dynamic. And one of the ways that we figured we learned whether they were dynamic or not is that the shortlisted courts, we co developed the statement of work together. And so we went back and forth in an editing process to make sure both that they were getting the outputs that they needed as far as completing the next chain and link that they were looking to build, but also that we were getting outputs that made sense for this replicability and scalability point that you. That you just asked about. And through that editing process, you learn very quickly who plays well with others. Right? Like, if they won't take your edits, then they're probably not going to be very dynamic once the product program gets underway. So that turned out to be a really valuable process, both for the projects we did pick but also invetting the projects that we didn't.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah. In the projects you did pick, do you want to talk about them a little bit or, you know. Well, okay, let me stop you right there because before we do that, let's also talk. Let's talk about the fellows and then we'll talk about the projects because I'm curious who the fellows are in the big picture sense as well as specifically and how are you choosing and making decisions about them.

Jason Teixe
So similar to the call for proposals we did for courts, we did a national call for fellows as well, and we pushed into every civic minded affinity group that you can imagine and every other tech affinity group that the country has to offer. We ended up the number, I think we wound up with 64 applicants, if I remember correctly, from around the country. We only had three spots, so that was a pretty good balance. Who are these people? They were from every imaginal background. You know, we were hiring primarily for designers and data scientists, but we had people that worked at Microsoft, at IBM looking to make a change into a more, you know, civic minded, less money driven application of their skills. We had folks that came out of technical and community organizing backgrounds.

We had new graduates. We had people well into their careers. We had people with JDS majority, the vast majority did not have jds that applied designers, technologists.

It was a very diverse pool of applicants in every sense.

Bob Ambrogi
And those that get selected are select. They're matched to one of the specific projects that have been approved. Is that how it works?

Jason Teixe
Right. So we had the projects decided before, like as we started the application process with the fellows.

Bob Ambrogi
So you're looking for some fits with the project.

Jason Teixe
Exactly. And someone that was willing to move. You know, we're in the Utah and Kansas state courts, as well as Hamilton County, Tennessee, which is the Chattanooga area. And, you know, we did not have a lot of local applicants in any of those jurisdictions.

People came from all over, so that's what we were looking for. And by that point, we had that scope of work that I was talking about. So the fellows could read it or the applicants could read it, and some people read it and said, this isn't what I thought this was, and I don't want to do this. And I said, great.

And we all moved on.

And then for other people, it was super exciting, and they saw it and they're like, this is exactly what I had in mind. And those people did very well in.

Bob Ambrogi
The application process, and these are real things for them. I mean, they get paid, as you say, they move. This is not just something they're doing their spare time. This is a commitment of a period of time. It's a. It's a career move, in a sense, for a lot of these people, I guess.

Jason Teixe
Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of people going back to who are the people that applied? A lot of people were at inflection points within their career. Either this was the start of a second career, or they like what it is they did but they wanted to do it somewhere else or in a different capacity. And so that was very much a common thread for a lot of folks that applied. And to your other point, yeah, we went out of our way to pay folks well. We did not want this to be some poorly paid internship or externship. We pay a real salary that's a little bit better than, I think, a lot of similar positions if you were working in government, with the idea being that you're taking this risk, right, you're uprooting yourself, you're going somewhere for a year with no opportunity for an extension on the contract. So, you know, there was some economic incentive there that we built into their salary. And they're all, we're housed at the Institute for Tech Law and Policy at Georgetown Law center. And so they're all employees of the institute, so they get those benefits as well.

Bob Ambrogi
So, as you say you did the three programs, Kansas, Utah, Tennessee. Can you kind of give us the nutshell version of what those programs were?

Jason Teixe
Sure. So two of them are design projects, and that's Utah and Kansas. In the case of Utah, Utah courts tends to build all their tech in house, which makes them unique as far as state courts are concerned. And they've never had a designer on staff. And so they wanted a designer to help them work on not only form design, but they have a tool for the public to help manage their cases if they're not represented. And this tool is being built now, and they needed somebody to help them just understand, like, how do we make this more functional and responsive to user need? And so Veronese Ramirez is our fellow there, and she's done a fantastic job of not only getting things like button hierarchy, like the idea that all the buttons make sense and they look the same, and they're the same across the entirety of the website.

But she's also done things like helped the office get on project management software like notion, and start using that to be able, and using Kanban boards to be able to integrate some process, some more technical process to how they function as an office.

And they're excited enough about the work that they're now looking to see how do they keep a designer on staff, because she's been able to prove her value in the time that she's been there.

Similarly, in Kansas, it's another design project. Kansas is one of eight states that does not allow self represented litigants to electronically file. You still have to do it either in person, by mail, or by fax. And they know that has to change. And so they're working towards procuring or building an e file platform that would work for self represented litigants, but they don't know what that should look like. So they wanted a designer there to help them test and iterate design that would inform them either on how to build or how to buy the software for their next generation of e file. In Kansas and then Tennessee, Hamilton county is our data project. It is a general sessions court, so it's a local court, and they have a, it's unique there because we're in courts like we're placed in administrations of the courts in both Kansas and Utah. In Tennessee, they applied as the county mayor and the county court system because the county mayor wants to work on issues around homelessness and eviction, civil debt and criminal recidivism. And the county court has two case management systems, one for its criminal system and one for its civil system. And they do not talk to each other, so searching across them is not possible. Pulling data that's more holistic to tell you what is. The relationship between criminal recidivism, civil debt, and eviction isn't easily done. It would take a long time to clean and be able to manipulate the data and start getting those answers. And so Kat Albrecht, who's our fellow there, has been working tirelessly to kind of not only build coalitions across these various agencies that come in contact with the criminal with these databases, but also coming up with technical solutions and documentation that makes those systems work better and become more interoperable.

Bob Ambrogi
This was the first year of the Judicial Innovation Fellowship, which wraps up its inaugural cohort in August, but the future of the fellowship program is uncertain.

After the break, Jason Teixe shares his thoughts on the programs first year and explains why its second year is in question.

But before we get to that, please take a moment to learn about the sponsors who so generously support this podcast.

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welcome back to Law next. This is Bob Ambrogi, and I'm speaking with Jason Tache, the founding director of the Judicial Innovation Fellowship Program at Georgetown Law.

We've heard how the program came about and how the fellows and projects were selected. As we get back to the conversation, I asked Jason for his thoughts on and how it all went during this first year and about the future plans for the program. As it turns out, that future is up in the air. Let's get back to that conversation.

So this is, as we're speaking, it is June, and you're wrapping up this first cohort, as I understand it, in August.

Given that this is something new, that you put this together and embarked on it without having done it before, what, you know, what are your thoughts so far? How is it turning out? How is it working in terms of what you wanted to accomplish?

Jason Teixe
The proof of concept is there. Right? So we had three big questions that we wanted to answer within the first year. The first question was, would courts want this? The second was, would technologists apply? And the third was, if you made a marriage of those two, what would happen? And so not only are more courts and more fellows applied, high caliber ones that we had to turn away.

And then as I was mentioning, in Utah, that court is a court that now wants to see a designer on staff full time as a part of the Utah court system. Similarly, our project in Tennessee, there's looking like there's going to be kind of ongoing work there between the fellow who is a, when she's not working for us, she's actually a tenure track professor with a PhD and JD from Georgia State. So she'll be going back to being a professor at Georgia State but will be continuing to work alongside Hamilton county because, again, she, like, she, she proved her value. Right. She insight, that perspective is something that's missing in these agencies. And, like, when good talent shows up in an environment that's really welcoming, I don't want to, like, keep all the praise on to the fellows who've done really great work, but also we found courts that were really open to being told there's another way to do it. Right. So to your point about, like, where people are at in the adoption curve, we very much vetted for folks that not only were able to pinpoint what the problem is, but we're also willing to say we don't know what we need to do to fix it. Like, we need help. And, like, I think that's the extra step that we were really looking for. And, like, why these projects have worked so well is because you have, like, really good leadership in these institutions that just need the assistance and they're not getting the assistance from their legislature or even from the court administrative body in some instances.

And so we came in with outside resources to be able to help them. We were no cost to the courts except for time.

Bob Ambrogi
Are you doing it again? And if so, what are you doing the same? What are you doing differently?

Jason Teixe
We don't know is the answer. As of right now, these programs are expensive, they are hard to fundraise for. And that is what I spend most of my time doing, is trying to shake money from trees. How has this been funded? Up until now, we were seeded with a million dollar grant from the new venture fund, which was primarily a benefit of working with Schmidt Futures and the Ford foundation. And then the state Justice Institute, which is a federal funder, helped us in Tennessee and Kansas, and then the Utah bar Foundation helped us in Utah. And so that rounded out our budget that's covered us for the last a little over two years now.

But these programs are expensive. I mean, there's all sorts of things that we could talk about in regards to the challenges in fundraising in the space. One is that there's really no one that funds court work. It's just as far as a vertical is concerned, like the Pew Charitable Trust State Justice Institute, kind of end of list, right? Legal services corporation will sometimes do work in the space, and it's looking like they'll increasingly do work in the court space, which is exciting, but that's the network. So I then have to look for folks that are interested in government modernization, that see fellowships as leverage for change, that are focused on public data issues. But even then, these philanthropies are very much focused on what's going on in the executive branches. And they don't think about the judiciary.

It's just not a thing that they consider. And if they do think of the judiciary, they think about it in terms of judges, which misses 99% of what's going on in a state court. Right. Like nothing goes to trial anymore, for one. And so you're likely not going to see a judge. And two, the off ramps in state court are replete before you even get done with filing. Right? Like, you know, there's, you staple it wrong, you put the wrong information in the wrong field because the form is confusing, you submit the wrong form. These are the types of things that we need to be thinking about that have nothing to do with judges. Like you need judge buy in. But at the end of the day, this is like in the purview of the clerk, more so than it is in the purview of the judge.

So that's just an educational thing that we need to work on. And I don't think we as like the court modernization movement, as nascent as we may be, does a good job communicating that, because people with these philanthropies know a lot about government, and all they do is think about economic mobility, and they don't think about courts when they think about those issues, which is wild. Right? Because state courts are a dumping ground for every single inequality that this country has to offer. Its economic, its gender, its racial. And so to overlook that is to overlook just a major facet of our democracy, and its a disservice to the branch of government that were looking to make better.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah. So what do you do about that? I mean, if there isnt a lack of, I mean, if there is rather a lack of funding or maybe even a lack of understanding by funding sources about the courts, is there a role for your program?

Is there a role more broadly for the bar, the legal profession, to be raising awareness around some of these issues or educating around some of these issues?

Jason Teixe
Absolutely.

And I think the bar, especially the bar foundation, is an interesting place. Like, we have a really great relationship with Kim and the folks at the Utah Bar foundation. They got our theory of change super fast. They wanted to see us come to the state. They wanted to see us do the work that we were doing. And we saw other interests in other, with other bar foundations as well. And because of interest rates, they have a ton of extra money right now. So I think helping bar foundations think beyond legal aid in ways to be able to help these populations that they're looking to support through their funding is a key funding path forward, especially at the local level.

But I think more broadly, and I'm talking primarily to national foundations or regional foundations, and we need to be telling better stories. Our stories suck, really?

Why courts matter.

When I started out pitching this, I'd say the first dozen funding meetings I went through, I thought my job was to convince people that the fellowship program was a good idea. And after that dozen conversations, I realized that is not what I am there to do. I'm there to convince them that courts are a vector for social change because they don't believe that. If they don't believe that, then it doesn't matter how good they think my program is. Right. Because they don't think I have a leverage point in the judiciary. So that is where we have to start. Right? We got to go back to school in that regard. And some people get it because they care about homelessness. So eviction is something that they care about. Certainly protective orders and domestic violence has a stream of funding as well. But we need to be thinking about courts more holistically. Right? Like if we want courts to work interoperably, we need to make sure that the infrastructure of those courts work for every case type, just like the plumbing in the building. That plumbing does not care what docket you were on, it just has to work. Right. And the same is true of data infrastructure, case management, calendaring and scheduling.

We should not be building piecemeal for docket types. We need to be building holistically so these courts can function in a modern way. And so I think that is a big part, and telling that story is a big part. The other takeaway, and I think the challenge is that fellowships are expensive, right? Like we're human heavy, and people cost money and salaries infringe and all of that.

And so in that regard, I feel like we're kind of big because, you know, I tell people, you know, there's a million dollars to get through a year or so of this, and they kind of bulk because you don't see a lot of million dollar programs in court modernization.

So it feels big in that regard, but at the same time, it's too small, right. Because if we're talking about 75 million cases a year in state courts, and I'm talking about placing three, four or five people in state courts around the country, we're not coming close to the scale and scope of the problem, right. So I think that there's also space for us to be thinking bigger.

And one of the ideas I've started to kick around, thanks to kind of the lessons learned over the last year, is like, what would an ARPA for justice be? Right. Like, you have DARPA for the defense department. You have now DARPA H for healthcare and health science. And the cool thing I think about that is that for the most part, the tech modernization folks ask, how can tech move courts forward? How can tech move the justice system forward? But when you start talking about arpas, the question is, how does justice push technology and science forward? So flipping the question on its head, and I think it forces us to think bigger and beyond just the narrow scope of what we think about, like court procedure or how do we make calendaring better, like thinking about how justice could improve technology to the benefit of all of society. I think then you can start putting price tags on the solution that more represent the scale of the problem. And so I think thinking bigger is going to be a part of, you know, first you tell the better story. And then I think you can get people bought in on the idea that this requires a bigger, more cohesive national solution. Yeah.

Bob Ambrogi
I mean, there are others out there working on pieces of that. Right. I mean, thinking of, like, I know Stanford has a program looking at the more sort of court filing and docketing issue and how that's a factor in access to justice. And I'm sure there are others looking at other, other parts of it. But you're saying there needs to be something much broader and much more coordinated.

Jason Teixe
Exactly, yeah, because, I mean, there's, you had Mike on recently from pre law. They do great work. Margaret at Stanford does great work. Danielle and Zach, the National center for state courts, Erica at Pew, there are people doing really good work, but the scope and size of the problem is not reflective of the funding. And so long as we keep being confederated, that is going to remain true. Right. Like, we need to show that we are a cohesive, sophisticated movement moving the ball on a really important issue. And I think we can get there. We just need to do it.

Bob Ambrogi
Yeah, I'm thinking, as I'm listening to you, because you keep saying we need to do this, and I keep thinking, who is that we exactly? Because is maybe part of the problem that courts, courts are.

There's been, I think historically, to some extent, there's been a reluctance on the part of courts to be too vocally advocates for themselves in some ways. I think, again, I think judges in particular, in often court administrators are, you know, are judges who move into an administrative role. And I think often they have the sense that, you know, they have, they, they have to take more or less neutral ground. They don't want to be too outspoken as an advocate for themselves. In a way, when I hear, you know, when I hear you saying that we need to, we need to kind of share, share the stories and tell the stories and, you know, take approach bar foundations and others with some of these things, it seems like part of it is just the courts need to do a little bit more of that themselves.

Would you agree with that?

Jason Teixe
Yeah, I would, up to a point. Bridget McCormick, when she was chief justice in Michigan, wrote this really great law review article that the line that judges had primarily drawn around the line between advocacy and being kind of this neutral arbiter is way too conservative and way too restrictive and that you can still be well within the bounds of judicial ethics by being more vocal, advocating for better services, better representation, whatever the case may be, to help close the access to Justice Gap. And I fully endorse what she said in that piece. So in that regard, yes, there's a lot of space between where that conversation is now within the courts and where it could go.

Bob Ambrogi
If only every judge had a vision of Bridget McCormick, we'd be all set.

Jason Teixe
Well, and I think that there are, like, you see these conversations, you know, Chief Judge Blackburn Risby, who's on our board, she's in the DC appellate courts. She's a great voice on topics like this, and I'm not sure she gets the praise that she deserves. We also work with another judge in Florida, recently retired Judge Judge Bailey, similar fighting the good fight internally within her, in her case the Miami Dade courts, to improve technology, infrastructure and public access.

But where I think the limit comes is like these judges are fighting for whatever their jurisdiction is, right? Whether that's at the county level or it's at the state level, which then again, leaves the conversation really confederated. And I think one of the things that I've learned in pitching this program is you can't talk about when we talk about courts, we talk about how many people go through a given court in a given state every year. But that doesn't really give the scope and scale of what's going on. If you're talking about 150 million Americans, businesses and government agencies going through the courts every year, that's the same size as about Amazon prime memberships in the United States. Right? So, like, that's the type of scale we need to be talking about. And you need national groups that can help push a national narrative and then get that. Get those resources and get that support down to the local level. But until we make the case that this is a national problem with huge numbers attached to it, then whatever's going on in any local jurisdiction is just never really going to rise to the scope and scale to get the type of attention, the type of funding that the problem truly deserves.

Bob Ambrogi
You're not certain yet what's next for the judicial innovation fellowship.

You're also talking about the need for something on a more natural national scope.

Should the judicial innovation fellowship continue, or was it a good experiment that should lead to this bigger picture?

Jason Teixe
I think both can be true. Right? Like this fellowship should exist. It clearly works.

There's clearly an appetite for it, and there's room for improvement, for sure. We've learned a ton of lessons throughout the year, but even in our first attempt, I think we did better than I would have expected.

One of my advisors told me that do no harm was the win in your first year of a program and we far superseded do no harm.

But at the same time, there is a need to be building a national coalition on these issues. We saw it happen for criminal justice in the last decade that got really major bipartisan reform at federal and local levels. And now criminal justice reform isn't as politically tenable as it was ten years ago. And so. So I still think that there is an appetite, though, for improving these institutions and helping people understand that if you are held pretrial, which, of course, is something that criminal justice reform people care about, then there's a good chance you're going to get evicted, you might get divorced, you might go through a child custody dispute, you might end up with debt issues or a repossession, which are all civil issues. And this goes towards the access to justice gap issue, helping articulate that pipeline between these two dockets. You know, in law school, we pretend like civil and criminal never meet, but as far as people's lived experience is concerned, that's entirely inaccurate, especially for the populations that need the most support.

So I think building coalitions around, you know, on the shoulders, that has come before. Like, there's so much that the civil justice world can learn from what criminal justice reform folks did in the last decade to be able to move the ball forward on really important issues that affect every side of the court docket and aren't just focused on one particular type of case, which I think is one of our mistakes, is we need to be thinking more holistically about what solutions look like to be able to move the ball forward on all sorts of really critical social problems that are replete throughout the United States.

Bob Ambrogi
So when will you know what's happening next?

Jason Teixe
I am not in control of that.

That is up in the air with our funding partners.

So we will wait and see if I'm planning on two futures. One is that we get funded and that we run another class, and we have lots of lessons learned that we can do to improve, to create a second class or we don't get funded, which is. Is certainly a possibility. And we have a default open policy that we started with when we founded the program. So every bit of documentation, every process we created, every tool that we created, we're publishing.

And so if we don't get funded, then it's going to be about how do you turn, basically create a fellowship in a box document. So for a court or for another agency or another organization that wants to try to do something similar, we're just going to put it all out there, and there's going to be stuff that they can pull from and build on in new iterations of a similar looking program in the future.

Bob Ambrogi
Well, I hope it continues. I think it's a great idea. And I didn't, I don't think I've mentioned this. You alluded, I think, to the white paper, which is available up on your website, which kind of sets it all out in a lot of detail. And I'll make sure to put a link to that as well as to your website in the show notes here. But I'll keep my fingers crossed that it keeps going. And when it does, let me know when you're putting out a call for fellowships and programs and everything else, and I'll put it up on my blog.

Jason Teixe
Wonderful. I really appreciate that.

Bob Ambrogi
Anything else you want to say about this that we haven't had a chance to talk about?

Jason Teixe
No, I don't think so. Judicialinnovation.org is the website.

And you know, Bob, I'm grateful that you had me on. You've always been such a wonderful supporter of all the various things I've done over my legal tech career. And so I can't thank you enough. It's a pleasure to finally be a guest on the podcast.

Bob Ambrogi
Thank you for all the wonderful things you do. Well, great. It's been great to talk to you. Jason, good to see you and keep me posted. Keep us all posted. We want to, we hope you go forward.

Jason Teixe
Thank you, Bob. I appreciate it. Take care.

Bob Ambrogi
My sincere thanks to jason Teshea for joining me today to talk about the Judicial innovation Fellowship program.

You can read more about it@judicialinnovation.org where you can also download the white paper that served as the roadmap for the program. It's a good read.

I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

You can share your own thoughts or comments by messaging me on LinkedIn or x or wherever you find me on social media or by emailing me directly@ambrogiomail.com.

and if you're a fan of Lawnext, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Lawnext is a production of Lawnext Media. I'm your host, Bob Ambrosi. I hope you'll join us again next time for another episode of Law. Next.

Ep 251: Cofounder Jason Tashea on the First Year and Uncertain Future of Georgetown's First-of-Its-Kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship

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1: Introduction to the Fellowship

2: Year One Achievements

3: Challenges Ahead

4: Future Outlook

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