Not-for-profit
Justack Centre for Law & Technology
The Justack Centre for Law & Technology exists to improve access to justice through practical legal technology, public legal education, and applied research.
Our work is grounded in a simple premise: access to justice is not only a legal problem. It is also a design problem, a technology problem, and a public-service problem.
Our Work
The Centre supports initiatives that help people understand their rights, navigate legal processes, and obtain practical assistance before legal problems become more serious.
This includes public-facing legal information, access-to-justice technology, research on legal system barriers, and partnerships with organizations working directly with communities that are underserved by the current system.
Why It Matters
Access to justice is often discussed in institutional terms: courts, lawyers, tribunals, funding, and reform. Those issues matter. But for most people, the problem is more immediate. They need to know what their problem is, what their options are, what steps to take, and where to get help.
Our Approach
The Centre's approach is practical, evidence-informed, and collaborative.
We focus on projects that can be tested, improved, and deployed. We are interested in tools that help real users, not demonstrations of technology for its own sake. We work from the premise that legal information must be accurate, accessible, and designed around the needs of the person using it.
Research
The Centre develops open instruments for measuring how faithfully the law delivers on its own stated purposes. The first is the Borovoy Coefficient — a civil-liberties measure of the gap between what a law promises and what it actually does, scoring statutes, regulations, and bylaws from 0 to 100 across five dimensions, each grounded in Canadian constitutional doctrine and in the machine-learning alignment literature. It is named for Alfred Alan Borovoy, General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association from 1968 to 2009.
The Borovoy Coefficient →
Civil liberties · Legislative alignment
Explore the interactive dashboard — the formula, the five dimensions, and a prototype corpus of fifteen Canadian laws scored from “textually aligned” to “severe specification failure” — and read the paper (version of record 1.6, on SSRN), the specification, and the calibration report.
Board of Directors
Alex Peel
Director
Alex Peel is a senior access-to-justice executive with nearly two decades of experience at Legal Aid BC. Her work has focused on public legal education, legal publications, service design, and the practical delivery of legal information to people who need it.
She brings a rare combination of institutional knowledge and user-centred judgment to the Centre's work. Her career has been shaped by the operational realities of legal aid: how people actually seek help, where legal information breaks down, and what makes legal services usable for communities facing barriers to justice.
Paul Brookes
Director
Paul Brookes has worked in internet and e-commerce product development for more than 25 years. He is the founder of Metropolis Media and has built digital products, platforms, and online experiences across a period of major technological change.
His background gives the Centre direct expertise in product strategy, digital execution, and user experience. He also served for three years on the Ontario Justice of the Peace Appointments Committee, bringing experience at the intersection of civic institutions, appointments, and public confidence in justice administration. He holds a degree from Toronto Metropolitan University.
David Valentin
Director
David Valentin is an award-winning activist, entrepreneur, and public-affairs strategist. He co-founded one of Canada's leading public sentiment, research, and political intelligence firms, helping organizations understand how people think, decide, and respond to public issues.
His work sits at the intersection of civic engagement, public opinion research, strategy, and democratic participation. He brings to the Centre a sophisticated understanding of public trust, communications, and the ways legal and institutional systems are experienced by the people they are meant to serve.
Executive Director
Hon. Michael Bryant
Our ED has served as Executive Director and General Counsel of one of Canada's most established legal charities, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and of the Canadian Civil Liberties Education Trust; and as CEO of Legal Aid BC. He also served on the boards of multiple charities in Canada, and taught law at universities in Canada and the UK. Bryant served as 35th Attorney General of Ontario and has been working in justice infrastructure systems for over twenty-five years.
Contact / Get Involved
The Centre welcomes conversations with legal organizations, community groups, researchers, funders, and technologists interested in improving access to justice.
We are particularly interested in projects that combine legal expertise with practical deployment: tools, research, or partnerships that can help people understand and act on their legal rights.
mjb@justack.ai