Access to justice, delivered by technology.

Led by

Five decades of making the law accessible.

JusticeXpress Mediation is led by Richard S. Granat, who has spent his career asking one question: how do you put the legal system within reach of the people who need it most? He has been early to every wave of legal technology — from the first legal-information websites to document automation to AI — always focused on the same problem: that most people cannot afford the legal system, and that technology is the most powerful lever for changing that.

A pioneer of online mediation

This platform is the realization of work Granat began three decades ago. In the mid-1990s, at the University of Maryland School of Law, he directed the grant-funded On-Line Mediation Project — one of the first efforts anywhere to mediate divorce disputes over the internet. He presented that work at the 1996 NCAIR Conference on Online Dispute Resolution, now regarded as one of the founding events of the ODR field. The idea was ahead of its infrastructure then. JusticeXpress Mediation is that same idea, built for the moment it can finally deliver.

The People’s Law Library of Maryland

Granat founded the People’s Law Library of Maryland (peoples-law.org), one of the first statewide legal-information websites in the country. It is now operated by the Maryland Court System and serves more than a million visitors a year — a state judiciary choosing to run a founder’s website as a public service, and the proof of concept for everything JusticeXpress builds.

A career built around access to justice

His work long predates the internet: he co-founded the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council at Columbia Law School, served on the team that created the U.S. Legal Services Program, and later founded a series of legal-technology ventures — MyLawyer.com, SmartLegalForms, and DirectLaw, whose Rapidocs document-automation library now powers the JusticeXpress state sites. He served as Co-Chair of the ABA eLawyering Task Force and has taught Computers and the Law and Law Practice Management at the University of Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Rutgers law schools. He holds a J.D. from Columbia University, an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. from Lehigh University.