With five new students and two returning students from the last winter semester, the LawX Incubator has its participants working on the nonprofit CourtServe, which connects judges, charities and court-appointed volunteers with the goal of making it easier to assign community service to people convicted of crimes.
BYU Law says its prototype was well-received by judges and adult probation and parole supervisors. The school plans to start testing it with Utah charities later this semester.
The emphasis on community service reflects the culture of the Beehive State: Utah leads the nation in volunteer service, according to a report released last year from the Volunteering and Civic Life in America. State residents contributed an estimated $2.7 billion in economic value to the state in 2021 alone, the report found.
Utah courts have the option to impose what they refer to as compensatory service for certain offenses, with each hour of service being valued at $10. The volunteer work can be performed for a state or local government agency, a nonprofit or an entity that gains prior approval from the court.
The incubator will run alongside a new design lab project focused on water rights through a collaboration with Salt Lake City-based tech company WETx, which uses blockchain technology to manage and transact water rights. The company is collaborating with the LawX team to automate water rights management.
Like many Western states, Utah uses a priority system to appropriate water rights, but BYU Law says regulatory hurdles have made it difficult for the holders of those rights to make changes to them. The project comes as many states in the region grapple with water scarcity.
"BYU Law launched LawX in 2017 to empower students to address challenging legal issues with innovative solutions in a single semester," said professor Nick Hafen, the head of legal technology education at BYU Law, in a statement. "It's inspiring to see how much our students have been able to accomplish in such a brief time, creating solutions that have made a real difference."
LawX was launched in 2017. Its first-ever project focused on helping self-represented defendants respond to lawsuits.
"Since 2017, student and community interest has flourished, and we're scaling up LawX to tackle a greater variety of projects and to provide continuing support for students' solutions," Hafen wrote.
--Editing by Andrew Cohen.
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