Her Justice is a nonprofit organization that has been providing free legal help to women living in poverty in New York City for over 30 years.
As part of this mission to help women and families navigate the legal system, the Her Justice team wanted to make data regarding court appearances and experiences from lawyers more readily available, and decided that the best way to do so was through the creation of a new microsite, Report from the Court.
The Report from Court microsite provides up-to-date data and ongoing reporting based on lawyers’ survey responses and first-party accounts on the experiences of women and families in family court to support potential reform solutions through policy. We created this microsite with the ultimate goal of helping to fill the data gap in a way that felt visually engaging and led visitors through the story behind the data, using charts and graphs detailing the borough, appearance type, case type, how much time was spent in court, and more alongside direct quotes from lawyers to create a full picture of the need for reform in the legal system.
This was an especially interesting project as we created this microsite from the ground up, basing our initial designs and work on just a few survey responses that the Her Justice team had upon the start of the project, with recalibration and updates as they received more responses over the course of development. For the site, we used a customized Blocksy template and WordPress Core’s block editor with Stackable features for features such as flip boxes for testimonial quotes and collapsible sections of content to allow for greater user engagement. Users can also interact with the graphs with the customized hover styles functionalities on the charts that provide additional details and clarification on the information displayed.
A large part of our work was centered around incorporating the survey responses directly into the backend which allows for the data and survey responses to be pulled automatically in real time into the visual elements. To do so, we updated their survey to use Gravity Forms so that after responses are submitted, they’re added as posts to be reviewed and published manually by the Her Justice team.
These survey responses are stored with Advanced Custom Fields data points that are then structured and calculated in wpDataTables with custom MySQL queries. Finally, we used wpDataCharts to build displays of bar and pie graphs, and we added custom shortcodes to display calculation of average numbers and times.
We’re proud to be a part of the mission to make the legal system, specifically family court, a more transparent process and provide lawyers, researchers, and others in the legal industry through Her Justice.