Current Positions at Free Law Project

Free Law Project is a small but growing non-profit that uses technology, data, and advocacy to make the legal sector more equitable and competitive.

Our constituents include organizations, researchers, journalists, and individuals that are engaging with the legal system, studying it, or building businesses to make it more competitive. Our democracy-building work brings justice to Americans.

We run some of the largest open legal systems in the world, were instrumental in passing a non-partisan transparency bill through congress, and are directly involved in many of the court-related stories you have read in the news.

If you have questions or comments about the positions or about Free Law Project, please contact: jobs@free.law. We enthusiastically welcome questions as you are considering your application. Applicants that show engagement with our organization or that have demonstrated an effort to understand our work will be at an advantage.

All of our positions are remote.

We're thrilled you're considering joining us.

Open Positions

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Closed Positions

Product Manager / User Researcher (Full Time / Remote)

Compensation: $90,000-$110,000

We are hiring a Product Manager/User Researcher to build the first Open eFiling System.

For years, courts have used closed, proprietary filing systems that stymie the public’s right to judicial transparency. Such systems serve nobody well. They erect paywalls between the public and the courts while poorly serving the needs of court staff. To combat this and finally break this anti-democratic pattern, we are developing and launching an Open eFiling System that better serves the public and the courts.

To begin this process, we are hiring a Project Manager/User Researcher. In this role, the successful candidate will spend the next year developing partnerships with courts and the public and working to understand their needs. This will be completed via discovery interviews, contextual inquiry, surveys, and other methods, as deemed appropriate by the successful candidate.

As this researcher works, they will publish their findings via our website as a series of blog posts or formal reference papers.

Next, as the needs analysis solidifies, the successful candidate will shift their work to system design, using approaches such as paper prototypes, low-res prototypes, and wireframes. At this stage, the user researcher will team up with developers to create a prototype of the system, iteratively refining the prototype based on continuous user research. In addition, the person in this role will be called upon to help guide the design of our existing systems, CourtListener.com, Bots.law, and RECAP.

They will work closely with the Executive Director and Advisory Committee to ensure that the project is on track. They will also work with the Director of Philanthropy on reporting to funders and identifying additional sources of funding.

This role will involve travel to the courts we are partnering with, though we do not envision that travel happening on weekends or particularly frequently, unless desired by the candidate.

The top priorities of this position are to:

• Manage and execute all aspects of the development of the project
• Identify and act as frontline support to assist in the onboarding of courts
• Speak about this project at conferences and webinars
• Ability to clearly communicate findings and insights to stakeholders
• Conduct user research to understand needs, motivations, behaviors, and pain points
• Create wireframes, prototypes, user flows, and mock-ups to effectively communicate design ideas
• Use both quantitative and qualitative research to measure and improve designs
• Develop case studies that tell compelling stories about courts and their experience using our docketing system

Experience, Skills & Knowledge

• Comfortable working collaboratively and independently in a fast-paced, dynamic environment
• Knowledgeable and have experience using qualitative and quantitative user research methods, gathering both attitudinal and behavioral data
• Experience applying the most common user research methods, including (but not limited to) usability testing, surveys, interviewing, persona creation, heuristic evaluation, and Design Thinking
• Experience creating prioritized actionable insights derived from user research and showing a path of change as a result
• Ability to apply UX research approaches throughout the product lifecycle
• Be aligned with our mission of transparency
• Effective presentation, verbal and written communication skills, and ability to facilitate collaborative sessions
• Ability to effectively communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical partners
• Experience creating & sharing data visualizations that tell a clear story

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree, advanced degree, or equivalent lived experience - JD or experience working in the legal system or legal tech preferred
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with peers, board members, and volunteers
• Experience coding is a bonus. We use Django, Python, Docker, Github Flow
• Familiar with Agile project management and how user research functions within it
• Demonstrated analytical, decision-making and problem-solving skills
• Knowledge of website architecture, interactive design principles, and web usability
• Considerable experience delivering user-centered recommendations from discovery to concept to MVP

Benefits

• The base salary range for this US-based, full-time, remote, and exempt position is $80,000 - $110,000, not including variable compensation
• This is a benefits-eligible position. Free Law Project offers paid time-off, company paid holidays, SIMPLE IRA retirement program with a company elected match, and assistance with health insurance premiums
• Free Law Project is an equal opportunity employer. The Company offers employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, marital status, veteran status, citizenship, genetic information, hairstyles, or any other status protected by local or federal law.

Development Director (Full Time / Remote)

Compensation: $80,000-120,000 / year

After many years building a financially stable organization based on program services revenue, Free Law Project is hiring its first development director. This is an innovative and entrepreneurial position that will work closely with our director to develop and execute a comprehensive fundraising plan.

Success in this unique role will mean shifting Free Law Project from a single source of funding—program services revenue—to multiple funding sources including grants, corporate giving, and major gifts.

The top priorities of this position are to:

• Work with our executive director to develop a fundraising plan.
• Manage and execute all aspects of development identified in the plan.
• Act as a frontline fundraiser to establish a pipeline of donors and grants.
• Identify and hire any necessary support.

As this role matures, the successful candidate will shift from developing the fundraising plan to executing it. Duties will be guided by the plan the candidate establishes and may include:

• Running our annual giving campaign and seeking major gifts, planned giving, corporate and foundation grants.
• Working closely with our constituents identify, cultivate, solicit, and steward gifts.
• Identifying, researching, and evaluating prospective major gift, individual, corporate and foundation donors to build and grow prospect pipeline.
• Researching, writing, and overseeing the preparation of persuasive and accurate proposals, correspondence, and other development-related communication materials.
• Identifying and executing fundraising opportunities via our existing tools and website.
• Representing the organization to its various constituencies.

Qualifications

• Three or more years of progressively challenging experience with quantifiable results in all areas of fundraising (identification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship)
• Bachelor’s degree, advanced degree, or equivalent lived experience
• Ability to work independently and be highly organized, efficient, and effective in task and time management
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with peers, board members, and volunteers
• Exceptional written and verbal communications skills

Our Recent Successes

• Last year, President Biden signed the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which we and our partners made possible.
• Last month, we served more than 20 million people through our website, CourtListener.com. Through our alert system, we sent about 200,000 emails to our users.
• Our browser extension, RECAP, recently got its 20,000th user, many of whom are journalists.
• Our Twitter bot shares breaking court materials with an audience of 50,000 followers.
• Our databases are some of the largest in the world, with detailed information about:
  • 2.5 million minutes of oral argument audio
  • 350 million federal filings
  • 7 million opinions
  • 16,000 state and federal judges

If you are passionate about our work and believe it is an important element of the democratic system, we invite you to submit your application as described below.

Legal Data Researcher (Temp/Contract)

Compensation: Can range from $20-50/hour, depending on skills

Hours: This role requires at least 20 hours per week, but can go up to full time. Some of those hours must be during 9:30-5:30PT.

We host a unique collection of information about judges that has been collected by librarians and researchers over a period of many years. We need help expanding it further and updating it with the latest available information. At present that will mean researching and adding biographical information for hundreds of California judges. We hope in the future to continue this project and that this position will continue being funded for additional work, but we cannot guarantee that at the moment.

For this position, you must:

• Be proficient with spreadsheets and basic online data entry

For this position, you should:

• Have experience researching and organizing information

• Be able to work independently and flag issues as they arise

For this position, nice-to-haves are:

• Familiarity with legal data and the judicial system

• A background in legal research, librarianship, or information organization

If you think you may be able to help us with this project, please submit your application as described above. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.

Thank you!

Paid Summer Internship (Closed)

Every year, judges must file financial disclosure reports listing their investments and potential conflicts. For the past several years, we have worked with the federal government to collect these reports, and we now have a groundbreaking collection of thousands of reports that spans nearly a decade.

We also have a huge collection of judge profiles in our database. The task of our summer intern will be to combine these two collections of data so that judges, their financial disclosures, and their courtroom work are all in one big, transparent database.

To do this, the developer will need to:

1. Convert the financial disclosure reports from TIFF files to PDF.

2. Write a script to merge the new PDFs with the database.

3. Update our website to expose this new resource.

4. Write a blog post advertising the new tool to journalists, lawyers, and the public.

Our stack is Django, Postgresql, and Bootstrap.

The successful applicant will be paired with our lead developer, who will provide technical and process mentorship through the summer.

If you think you may be able to help us create this system, please submit your application as described above. Applications will be accepted until May 29th, and the internship will run until the end of August or your school's start date, if sooner.

Thank you!

RECAP Developer (Temp/Contract, Closed)

For this contract position, we are seeking an experienced JavaScript and Extension developer to add several distinct features to our RECAP Extensions for Chrome and Firefox. These extensions are used by tens of thousands of people, including journalists, lawyers, and researchers.

The general purpose of the RECAP Extension is to upload content from the PACER electronic court record system to our servers. Normally PDFs, Zips and HTML in the PACER system cost money to download, so our extension builds a mirror of this data to save people money.

You can learn more about these extensions here:

The tasks in scope for the successful applicant are the following:

1. Determine why big PDFs and Zip files are not properly uploaded by the extension and fix the underlying issue.

2. Add support to the extension for uploading zipped bundles of PDFs to our server.

3. Use the extension to begin adding a link to every docket on PACER to start watching that docket on CourtListener.

4. Add support to the RECAP extension for uploading PDFs and HTML from appellate courts on PACER.

Payments for each of the above tasks will be made according to agreed upon amounts and milestones.

A successful candidate for this position will have experience with the following:

• Modern JavaScript development practices

• Chrome/Firefox Web extension development

• Excellent communication and analytical skills

The following are nice-to-haves:

• Familiarity with the legal or PACER systems

• Knowledge of the Github workflow and expertise with git

• Experience working with open source code and in open-culture organizations

• A gnawing frustration with the current legal ecosystem

If you think you may be able to help us launch this system, please submit your application above. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or comments.

Thank you!

Submit Your Application

Open Data Backend Developer (Closed)

For this contract position, we are looking for somebody to help us with two major initiatives that we expect to take around six months to complete.

The first initiative will be to gather and share a huge new collection of legal data that previously was only available behind a paywall. If successful, this project will collect millions of documents and make them freely available to the public.

The second initiative is to finally audit and complete our case law database. For the first time in history, thanks to the tireless work of innumerable people, a free, audited, and complete collection of case law is possible. We have been working with librarians for years to gather the data needed for this project, have gotten the work funded, and now just need the right person to make it happen. Like Wikipedia, once this is done, it'll never need to be done again.

If these projects are successful, we hope to hire you as a full time employee.

We're looking for somebody that has deep experience in the following:

• Languages: Python, SQL

• Database: Modeling, PostgreSQL

• APIs: Django REST Framework, Django ORM & migrations

Excellent written communication and a demonstrated ability to work independently on larger technical projects are also important for this role.

Proficiency with the following is preferred, though expertise is not a must:

• Celery distributed task queues including task canvases

• Django framework

• An understanding of the American legal system, with a particular expertise in its data and information flows

The following are nice-to-haves:

• Scraping: lxml, XPath, Python requests, HTTP

• Knowledge of the Github workflow and expertise with git

• Experience working with open source code and in open-culture organizations

• Experience or interest in developing extensions for Chrome or Firefox

• A degree from a law school, school of information, or school of library science (or similar experience)

• A gnawing frustration with the current legal ecosystem

If you think you may be able to help us launch this system, please submit your application above.

Thank you!

Submit Your Application