Only 37 percent of all immigrants, and a mere 14 percent of detained immigrants, appear in court with legal representation, as reported by a 2016 study by the American Immigration Council (AIC).
A significant contributing factor to this gap is the everlasting challenge of communication.
The intricate jargon and overall inaccessibility of the American justice system often deter deserving immigrants from seeking the help they need and having their voices heard. To mitigate this issue, we introduce My Lingual Lawyer—a user-friendly website designed to connect users with lawyers fluent in their language.
Our platform features a streamlined process, offering multi-lingual capabilities to ensure that language barriers no longer hinder individuals from accessing the legal assistance they deserve
My Lingual Lawyer is where language barriers no longer stand between immigrants and the legal support they deserve. We specialize in connecting individuals with compassionate lawyers fluent in their language, ensuring a comfortable and empowering journey through the legal process. We aim to foster a sense of acceptance and justice for all, as we bridge linguistic gaps and break through language boundaries that exist for under-invested communities.
To build My Lingual Lawyer, our team used a stack comprising ReactJS for the front end, NodeJS with ExpressJS for the backend, and MongoDB as the database. Additionally, the project's source code and version control were managed using GitHub. This approach resulted in a strong and flexible app, with quick data processing and a responsive design. It also supported teamwork and easy sharing of code through GitHub.
One of the main challenges was the translating aspect of our website. We knew that being able to make the site accessible to non-English speakers was necessary for the purpose of our project. Originally, we used a React translator from i18next, but that required us to translate all of our text manually. We had a toggle button between the English and Spanish versions of the website but we were frustrated because we wanted to represent more languages. Then we figured out how to implement the Google Translate API as a dropdown menu. We translated the functionality into our React component, and now the whole site can be translated into any language!
Accomplishments we are proud of include being able to finish our MVP in such a short amount of time! Figuring out how to translate entire pages and getting an awesome prototype was very rewarding for us!
In our My Lingual Lawyer project, we learned a lot more than just how to build a website. We discovered how important it is to make sure immigrants and lawyers can understand each other. This helps everyone get a fair chance in court. Our main goal was to make finding legal help easier for people who speak different languages. This project showed us that using technology the right way can help solve big problems and make the law fairer for everyone.
Before we fully implement My Lingual Lawyer, we have to implement a way to confirm lawyers into the database. When they have been confirmed, we will implement easy contact features for the users to be able to contact and hear back from the lawyers. We want to expand the scope of this project beyond Massachusetts so that it applies to all states in the USA. Adding more information and resources about affording a lawyer is definitely one of the next steps after this. The cost barrier to a lawyer is immense, especially for marginalized communities, so ensuring that we can be of assistance in this is crucial.