By Chantal
I wrote a bot, and you can find it here. To write my bot, we used a tool called QnA Markup. Basically, you create an interactive dicision tree by nesting questions and answers. Here's my code.
I have sent emails to 3 different organizations in California (Bay Area Legal Aid, San Diego Volunteer Lawyer Program and Asian Americans Advancing Justic LA) and one has responded that they are unable to help.You can find a screenshot here The rest did not respond. I have also reached out to 3 attorneys that my friend has worked with, but did not get any response from them. Here is one of those emails.
First I started with the simple Q and A and have two seperate bots for criminal and civil This is the first bot I created. Then we have our peer testing. Through the feedbacks I combined the two bots into one and i tweaked my bot. I realize that the more i add to criminal, which is the top part of my bot, everything else changes with the numbers and I have to change my GOTO everytime. The A's were confusing as well because they were indented but not right under the Q. So i rearranged everything and this was my newer version. I did not cut out the individual questions for public benefits, but instad i asked the question " if they have public benefit" first in order to cut out that chunk of questions if they already state that they do no have public benefits. The reason why I left that there is because later on, i want the forms to capture what type of public benefits they have. I also added the javascript for calculating indigency.
Then I added header from the sample that the Professor posted. I did more research on obtaining assignemnt of counsel and used some standards from case law to create more detailed questions.
Then we learned about mail merg and I added that into the bot. You can see it here. Then I added a few more questions that is needed for the form. This is the updated version. Then i changed the code so that it will generate a document with the variables from the mail merge and uploaded the word document online. I also added statutes to the results so users are able to find more information online through the links.
Finally i needed to capture the number of people in a household above 6 and add $435.42 to each extra person. This is according to the fee waiver form from California courts. You can see it here. Therefore I added another line to the javascript that can calculate the income line for a household above 6.
This is what i added: else if (getvar('household')>6 && getvar('income')<=(getvar('household')-6)435.42+3433.34) {goto('qual')}else if (getvar('household')>6 && getvar('income')>(getvar('household')-6)435.42+3433.34) {goto('not')}
I also changed all signs to lower than or equal to so if the income is exactly on the line, the bot would still be able to know they qualify.
This is my final bot
The form is different from the court form but it should have enough information for an attorney to determine civil fee waivers. For criminal indigency calculation, an attorney might need a more in depth understanding of the client's financial situation. Because of the blurry rule in California court and a lot of the decisions are at the judge's discretion. Attorneys should fill out the financial statement and review the case laws before advising clients. If clients are already in court, the court or magistrate will make a decision base on the financial statement.
