Katie Sykes – The Justice Hack – Voices of Justice Magazine 2021

#VOICESOFJUSTICE 

PROFESSOR KATIE SYKES 

#VOICESOFJUSTICE

PROFESSOR KATIE SYKES 

Katie Sykes is an Associate Professor in Thompson Rivers University’s 

Faculty of Law.

IF WE HAVE A 

PROFESSION THAT IS 

HARD TO GET INTO 

AND HARD TO SURVIVE 

IN FOR PARTICULAR 

GROUPS OF PEOPLE, 

WE’RE REDUCING 

ACCESS TO JUSTICE 

Can you tell us a bit about what you do, and 

any particularly exciting access to justice-related 

research you’re working on? 

My research and writing on innovation grew 

from teaching, and it really grew from when 

I first started here at Thompson Rivers 

University (TRU) seven years ago. I came here 

as a person new to being a full-time professor, 

thinking, “There’s a lot in legal education 

that is ripe for change.” There are needs that 

our students have as they go out into a legal 

services ecosystem that traditional legal 

education isn’t fully preparing them for. I felt 

this kind of professional responsibility to the 

students to build that into my teaching. 

The main thing I’ve been working on for the 

last two years is a research project with the 

Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT). The CRT is 

I think one of the most exciting innovations 

in access to justice and the marriage of law 

and technology. There’s a lot of interest from 

other jurisdictions, but there really is no other 

independent, empirical, legal research project 

on it. We managed to get in there first, because 

it was new. Me and my team have an article 

that is going to be coming out in the Windsor 

Yearbook of Access to Justice. 

#VOICESOFJUSTICE

Is that going to be the end of the project 

or will it continue? 

This particular study is funded by the Social 

Sciences and Humanities Research Council 

of Canada. The main pieces we’ll produce 

are the one article that’s already finished, 

and the second article about stakeholder 

perceptions. There is actually an article 

that one of my students wrote on her own 

that grew out of this project. There’s a 

mechanism in the CRT called a notice of 

objection for small claims, where – if you go 

through the CRT process, and you don’t like 

the outcome, for any reason or no reason 

– you can file an objection and start like a 

De Novo process at Provincial Court, which 

is unusual for a tribunal. So my student, 

Rebecca Dickson, wanted to answer 

whether this enhances access to justice, 

and she got all of this data on the cases that 

had had notices of objection filed and what 

happened to them. She has a piece coming 

out in the UBC Law Review, which is terrific. 

I have a book proposal in the works. The 

project is far from over. I think it’s really 

great if more people researched what is 

happening with the CRT. The preliminary 

research that we did, which is very much 

exploratory, is really ripe for more empirical 

work to be done on it. 

One of the questions we wanted to explore 

was how this compares, and does it enhance 

access to justice, compared to the baseline, 

and the baseline is the traditional courts. 

It’s challenging to do that, because there’s 

not a whole lot to measure it against. One 

of the more interesting things we did in 

the survey is we asked people if they had 

done both. And actually, some people had. 

We had 49 respondents and I think roughly 

about a quarter of them had done both – 

more than we had expected. So we could 

actually ask people how the two compared. 

Not surprisingly, people did find it easier to 

use the CRT, but there’s this more granular 

information that is pretty interesting. 

You teach a course that is groundbreaking 

in its responsiveness to 

students’ needs. What was the impetus 

for the course and how was it developed? 

It’s been a really interesting evolution. 

When I first arrived at TRU, I had this idea 

to prepare people for the future of law 

practice. I didn’t have that much of an idea 

what that was, except that I knew when I 

was an associate at a law firm, it did not 

have much to do with what I learned in 

law school. I had to start with these basic 

nuggets: you need to know how to use 

Excel, what billing is, and all this practical 

stuff. The law faculty let me develop this 

passion project course that started out as a 

thing called Lawyering in the 21st century. 

The main assignment was a pitch project. 

Students had to do a pitch competition 

at the end of the semester, imagining 

ways to do legal services better. I learned 

about a course that has been running at 

Georgetown University Law Center – a 

collaboration between Tanina Rostain, 

a visionary law professor, Neota Logic, 

a legal software company, and the Legal 

Services Corporation, which is the main 

provider of access to justice stuff in the 

U.S. Students got to use Neota Logic’s 

software to build applications for access 

to justice. I was jealous. I thought, “This is 

amazing. I wish we could do this.” Through 

some weird combination of miracles and 

chance, I managed to talk the law faculty 

into licensing this thing with Neota. We 

ran a course and we had teams of students 

building apps for use by non-profits. It was 

very hard to do the first time, but it’s been 

a very transformative experience for the 

students. It really makes them think about 

breaking down legal problems into a series 

of steps and decision trees. 

We just did a run of that course in the fall 

2020 semester, which was really exciting 

because we worked with the Law Society of 

BC, and four teams did projects that were all

supported by the Law Society. Two of 

them were on professional ethics rules 

– one on the relatively new client ID and 

verification rules that are part of the antimoney 

laundering initiative, and one on 

conflicts. The other two were to do with 

mental health and substance abuse in the 

legal profession. They were sort of like little 

self-assessment apps for issues in that area. 

It’s something that the students were very 

passionate about and committed to. They 

really care about mental health becoming 

an increasingly recognized and understood 

issue in the legal profession. If we have a 

profession that is hard to get into and hard 

to survive in for particular groups of people, 

we’re reducing access to justice. 

To what extent do students learn about 

litigant experiences? 

I think about trying to incorporate the 

perspective of clients into teaching 

regular courses. I teach first year. We’re 

indoctrinating you into this entirely new 

world, but we also want you to step back 

and take a critical perspective on that and 

think about this other thing too. It’s a lot. 

My colleague Ryan Gauthier and I are 

trying an experimental thing this year. 

We’re having our whole class of 120-odd 

torts students do a settlement exercise, 

and they’re going to use the CRT platform, 

because the CRT actually gave us a back-end 

sandbox sort of thing so the students can 

run a fake dispute through it. We wanted 

to give them direct experience around the 

fact that most things end in settlement. 

The students are going to play the roles of 

lawyers and clients, so they’ll have at least a 

little bit of experience putting themselves in 

the shoes of the client. 

We haven’t done this before, but we’re 

really excited about it. We think it’s going 

to be at least fun, even if it’s maybe a little 

chaotic the first time. It was driven by both 

of us wanting to incorporate more of that 

understanding of the client’s perspective, 

looking at the realities of litigation, along 

with the legal principles and the ability to 

read the appellate cases. 

What would you suggest could be the 

most impactful thing the legal profession 

could do in order to improve access to 

justice, if you had to pick just one? 

Don’t be hung up on the monopoly idea of 

the profession. I think that it is not going 

to last. Even if we like its advantages, we’re 

just going to have to reconcile ourselves 

to a world where it isn’t a thing anymore. 

I think the business reality is that other 

service providers are already finding ways 

to encroach on what lawyers have thought 

of as traditionally their territory. And if 

our attitude as a profession is fighting to 

protect that shrinking area of monopoly, I 

don’t think that’s a good way forward for 

us. I don’t think that vision gives me hope 

for the future of the profession. I think if 

we are more focused or more open to new 

possibilities, new markets and ways to 

serve them, then we have a much brighter 

and much more hopeful future. That is also 

a future that is more conducive to access to 

justice for the public. 

IF OUR ATTITUDE AS 

A PROFESSION IS 

FIGHTING TO PROTECT 

THAT SHRINKING 

AREA OF MONOPOLY, 

I DON’T THINK 

THAT’S A GOOD WAY 

FORWARD FOR US 

#VOICESOFJUSTICE

Katie Sykes – The Justice Hack – Voices of Justice Magazine 2021

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