Legal tech obviously has a lot to offer corporate law firms and individual practices alike. But the industry is relatively new, and there is a fairly steep learning curve here. This has led to some rather uncomfortable realizations about what legal tech can and cannot do.
One of the downsides of legal tech in the internet age is the general availability of information. But wait. Isn’t access to information supposed to be a good thing? Yes and no. It depends on what information you’re talking about, who is accessing it, and how it’s being used.
It is great for attorneys and courts to have instant access to all sorts of records at a glance. Getting data from a cloud environment just makes practicing law more efficient. But there are times when information is accessed by people outside of the legal profession. That is not always good. Housing data in the state of Massachusetts is a good example.
Landlords Accessing Information
According to the CommonWealth website, the Massachusetts Trial Courts began publishing eviction date online in 2013. The goal was to help facilitate complete automation of the court case management system and make information available to courts and attorneys by way of a publicly accessible website. So far, so good.
However, it wasn’t long before landlords discovered they had access to the same information. Now they are using what they learn from the MassCourts.org website to screen potential tenants. This doesn’t seem like too big a deal except for one glaring problem: online eviction data is far from accurate.
CommonWealth reports that approximately one million eviction cases, dating back to 1998, are now available online. But the data is not necessarily accurate. Some information is terribly outdated. Some information is misleading or outright incorrect. This has created a situation in which some renters simply cannot find a place to live because past data has come back to haunt them.
Cause vs. No Cause Evictions
It would be one thing if all of the eviction data were accurate and up to date. But because it’s not, landlords are being exposed to data that does not make clear whether past evictions were with or without cause. Tenant advocates say that MassCourts data frequently shows for-cause evictions that were, in fact, no-cause cases. But landlords don’t know the difference. They have to rely on the data the system spits out.
Another problem with the data is that it is not presented in plain English. It is presented in legal shorthand, which is something landlords are not likely to understand. Everything from paying judgments to case dismissal is presented in a way that generally makes it look like evicted tenants are always in the wrong. Yet that’s not really the case.
Plenty of Room for Improvement
NuLaw, a company that makes a Salesforce-based legal case management application of the same name, says that the Massachusetts scenario is evidence that legal tech can and must get better. At the very least, the situation shows that there is plenty of room for improvement.
Making data available online in a cloud environment is not a bad thing in and of itself. Even if a past eviction date had not been uploaded to the state database in Massachusetts, that data was still be readily available in paper form. So it’s not a privacy issue here. Rather, the issue is accuracy.
The ability to put data online has already been established. Now the legal tech industry has an obligation to figure out how to make sure online data is accurate. Without accurate data, bad things do happen.
