A new approach to bringing people access to justice “centers the justice experiences of ordinary people, rather than the structure or staffing of justice institutions, the elements of legal families, or the content of laws themselves.”1 This “people-centered” approach requires not just a paradigm shift, but also empirical evidence as a critical tool to redesign systems.

Though evidence-based approaches are standard practice in other fields, like health, they are rare in law. But this is changing. We describe two projects that create regulatory environments to enable evidence-based, people-centered services, each endorsed by its respective state supreme courts: the Utah legal regulatory “Sandbox” and the Alaska Community Justice Worker Program.

Utah’s Sandbox allows legal-services-providing entities to explore new business structures and service models, including services that are technology based, offered by people who are not attorneys, or financed or owned by nonlawyers. Entities in the Sandbox are closely monitored through the regular collection and analysis of service data to ensure that consumers are protected from harm.

In Alaska, the Supreme Court has authorized a statewide legal aid provider (the Alaska Legal Services Corporation) to supervise and train community health and other frontline workers to offer legal advice and representation. Such services meet people and their legal needs in those moments when legal issues emerge as parts of other kinds of life issues, such as those involving access to health care, secure and healthy housing, income, or nutrition.2 The work of these Community Justice Workers would normally violate “unauthorized practice of law” restrictions but in Alaska has been granted a program-specific waiver.3 Evidence on the effectiveness, sustainability, and scalability of this program is being gathered and analyzed through a first-of-its-kind study funded by the National Science Foundation.

Both projects demonstrate the promise of evidence-based regulation to generate right-sized, targeted legal help for life-altering legal issues, provided to people and communities who usually receive no assistance at all.