Portable, a mission-driven legal design and technology company, has seen promising justice technology emerge from student projects only to stall before implementation. In previous work with Australian law schools, students designed and built solutions with significant potential that were rarely refined or implemented once the academic project ended.
The American Arbitration Association® (AAA®)–Suffolk Online Dispute Resolution Innovation Clinic was designed differently: as a multi-year initiative in which successive student cohorts could build on earlier work. Portable joined the AAA-ICDR Institute™, Suffolk University Law School, and court stakeholders as the technology partner helping translate student insights into a working digital experience.
The first article in this series followed the Clinic’s students as they observed court processes, worked with clients, and translated those experiences into design recommendations. For Portable, those findings became inputs into development.
“Each cohort builds on what earlier students learned, so the solution is continually iterated on, redesigned, and pushed toward real impact,” Portable Co-Founder Simon Goodrich reflected. Implementation requires not only preserving what has been learned, but also retaining the capacity to act on that learning by refining the product, testing its underlying assumptions with the people it is intended to serve, and carrying what emerges into the next iteration.
Building with Continuity
Portable has worked in access-to-justice design and technology for nearly two decades. Its experience includes amica.gov.au, developed with the Australian Attorney General’s Department to help people navigate separation, divide assets, develop parenting arrangements, and prepare for court filings. This work contributed to Portable’s investment in R&D to develop Civily, a tool designed to help people resolve disputes across legal issues.
The AAA–Suffolk initiative presented a different challenge: how could that experience translate into a U.S. jurisdiction?
Leveraging Civily, students spent the Clinic’s first year examining Massachusetts court processes, observing where self-represented parties encountered difficulty, working through divorce forms themselves, and identifying opportunities for more accessible digital pathways.
The project’s multi-year structure doesn’t just provide more time—it enables accumulated knowledge. Successive cohorts can take up where their predecessors left off and move the work forward rather than recreating the discovery process.
Translating Legal Process into Product Logic
Portable brought an adaptable platform architecture to the collaboration, but adapting Civily to Massachusetts required the team to understand the legal process on its own terms. Students mapped workflows involving eligibility, parenting, custody, and property separation, worked through Massachusetts divorce forms, observed court proceedings and Court Service Centers, and identified points where procedural complexity created problems for self-represented parties.
Those observations have already translated into specific product decisions. Student feedback influenced how Civily enables parties to communicate when they disagree, including allowing comments on individual items rather than requiring whole-section messaging. Student input also informed changes intended to simplify how parenting arrangements allocate overnight stays between parents.
Adapting Civily to Massachusetts also required Portable to revisit assumptions embedded in its prior Australian work. In Portable’s Australian experience, parenting workflows could establish regular schedules with the expectation that parties would work out certain exceptions themselves. The Massachusetts workflow required greater specificity, including the ability to account for school holidays, extended breaks, handoffs between parents, and special occasions.
The distinction illustrates two separate challenges of implementation. Insights from students and stakeholders have to make their way into actual product decisions, while assumptions embedded in an existing platform have to be reconsidered when the legal environment changes. The legal process must be translated into an experience that self-represented parties can understand and navigate.
Connecting Legal and Product Expertise
Portable’s role is central to translating those insights into a working digital experience, but product expertise alone cannot determine how a Massachusetts family law process should work for self-represented parties.
Through the AAA-ICDR Institute, perspectives from dispute resolution, access to justice, technology, legal education, and the courts inform the work. Suffolk provides the clinical setting in which students engage directly with Massachusetts legal processes and contribute to their redesign, while Portable translates that learning into technology that can be configured, tested, and revised.
The Clinic is directed by Judge John D. Casey, former Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court. His 19 years on the bench provide direct institutional knowledge of the processes the project is examining.
These areas of expertise remain connected throughout development rather than being confined to separate stages. Court experience and student observation inform product decisions; development can expose new legal, procedural, or user questions for the Clinic and its partners.
Testing Assumptions
Much of the work thus far has depended on observation, process mapping, and the experience of students and program partners. Those inputs can identify where an existing process creates difficulty and inform a proposed alternative, but they cannot establish how a person will experience the platform.
The next phase will bring Clinic clients into the development process by gathering live feedback from the tool’s intended users, testing assumptions developed through observation and design.
Building on their earlier work with Civily, students are now working through the platform in teams, documenting their observations and recommendations to help shape the next phase of testing, including who participates, how usability is assessed, and how success might ultimately be measured against cases that do not use the platform. Working with Suffolk Law’s Legal Innovation and Technology Clinic, students will explore how users respond to specific aspects of the experience like whether question flows and decision points are easy to understand, how parties want to communicate when they disagree, and where future mediation support might be useful.
Sustained development allows the project to respond to what each stage reveals, bringing what it learns through testing into further refinement rather than treating observation, development, and testing as disconnected interventions.
“Our intent is to create the space for this tool to expand beyond the current use case,” Goodrich said. Whether and how that occurs remains to be determined, but sustained development allows the project to move through successive stages of configuration, testing, and refinement.
What Implementation Requires
The Clinic’s first year focused on understanding how people experience the Massachusetts family law system. The work now underway with Portable is testing a harder proposition: whether those insights can survive translation into a tool that will materially help people.
It is easy to view implementation as the final stage of innovation—the point at which research and design are complete and a solution is ready to be deployed. But this project demonstrates implementation is itself a process of learning: translating observations into product decisions, testing those decisions against real-world experience, and retaining the capacity to respond to what emerges.
Justice technology needs infrastructure for learning as much as it needs infrastructure for delivery. The most consequential part of a multi-year innovation project may be what persists between its milestones—the capacity to act on what the project learns.