A lifetime of the same idea.

That the law should be something people can actually use.

I have spent my career on one problem: the legal system works well for those who can pay for it, and badly — or not at all — for everyone else. JusticeXpress is the latest answer I’ve built to that problem, but the commitment behind it goes back to law school.

In 1963, as a law student, I helped found the Law Students’ Civil Research Council, out of a simple conviction that the law belonged to everyone, not only to those who could afford a lawyer. Two years later that conviction became my work. When the War on Poverty created the National Legal Services Program within the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, I joined OEO’s Office of General Counsel — serving as counsel to E. Clinton Bamberger, Jr., the Program’s first Director, and to the Program itself. We were building the federal commitment to legal services for the poor from the ground up, and I saw both its promise and the limits of what any single program could reach.

Information was the first frontier. If people couldn’t afford a lawyer, at least they could understand their rights.

So I founded the People’s Law Library of Maryland — free, plain‑language legal information for anyone who needed it. More than twenty‑five years later it is operated by the Maryland court system as a service to Maryland’s citizens, and it remains the leading legal information website in the state. It proved something I have built on ever since: that ordinary people will use good legal help when it is made genuinely accessible.

But information alone is not enough. People don’t just need to know the law — they need to act: to file, to respond, to resolve. So I went further and built some of the first online legal services in the country — MyLawyer.com, SmartLegalForms, and DirectLaw. In 2003 I launched MDFamilyLawyer.com, one of the first online law firms in Maryland to deliver fixed‑fee, limited‑scope legal services. I am still a member of the Maryland bar.

JusticeXpress is where those decades come together — as a Public Benefit Corporation built to carry this work further, and to make it sustainable, state by state. Because without access to the legal system, justice is denied. And technology, used well, can finally put that access within reach.