Learned Hands is a game in which you spot possible legal issues in real people’s stories about their problems. You read the stories, and then say whether you see a certain legal issue — family law issues, consumer law issues, criminal law issues, etc.
The game is also a research project. Each time you play, you are training a machine learning model to be able to spot people’s legal issues. This model will be used to develop access to justice technologies that connect people with public legal help resources. It will help us to make a Rosetta Stone for legal help — linking the legal help guides that courts and legal aid groups offer to the people who are searching for help.
As you play on Learned Hands, your work is eligible for Pro Bono recognition, if you are a law student or a lawyer.
Your work in spotting issues in people’s legal stories is essential to the development of open-source, access to justice technology. When you read people’s stories and spot issues, you are training a model to automatically spot people’s issues in their fact problems.
The labeled datasets and machine learning models you help us create will be used to improve how courts, legal aid groups, and others can serve people online, when they’re looking for help. Learned Hands will keep track of your Pro Bono hours for you.
Learned Hands is a project of Stanford Legal Design Lab and Suffolk Law School’s Legal Innovation and Technology (LIT) Lab
It was created with the support of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Learned Hands is a machine learning labeling game. It does not provide legal advice or information to the public. It is intended for use by lawyers, law students, and others with legal expertise to spot legal issues in people’s stories.
Want to give us feedback? Write to us at
Want to see more of our labeling, datasets, and preliminary results? We have it online for you to explore on our Project Hub.
Learned Hand is a famous American jurist, whom we admire greatly. Also, many (learned) hands make light work. Enjoy the pun!
The graphic at the left has Justice Learned Hand, as well as the famous tort case of the Hairy Hand and the property concept of the Mort Main.
