Law Office Management
Oct. 2, 2009
Mapping Out Success
California lawyers are increasingly using data-driven mapping technology to make their case.
About a decade ago Molly Munger, then a partner at English, Munger & Rice in Los Angeles, had a hunch that California's urban areas were being shortchanged on school-construction bond money. But to verify her intuition, she needed to analyze reams of data about state funding for schools. "We had an idea that if we could put all of it on a map, we could see if urban areas were getting much money," says Munger. But creating such a map wasn't simple back then. First, she had to find a computer lab with high-end mapping software that could display all of her data. Then, with help from a cartography expert in Cal State Northridge's geography department, she had to import that data from various spreadsheets. Ultimately, it all did come together and helped Munger win a court case benefiting California's urban, low-income schoolchildren. As Munger remembers, though, the entire process "was not easy-breezy." Today?thanks to significant advances in mapping technology and countless new sources of online data?California lawyers can accomplish similar tasks with a lot less effort. For one thing, property information and geo-coded census data (which is tagged to a specific location) is now widely available online. Maps have also become easier to use through the development of mashups, sites in which code from multiple websites can be combined to form a single hybrid location to produce?for instance?a map that shows locations of a city's schools. In addition, free, open-source mapping software has become more available in recent years, so it's less expensive to create sophisticated maps. All told, these advancements make it relatively straightforward for attorneys to take advantage of maps in litigation, community activism, and project planning. At Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC), staff attorney Eric Schultheis uses maps to defend the education, housing, health care, and racial-equality rights of residents in 23 counties. One example is when LSNC in 2007 began using maps to show how a proposed gas-storage area in Sacramento would place a "disproportionate environmental burden" on a densely populated minority neighborhood, says staff attorney Colin Bailey. Similarly, LSNC has targeted its foreclosure-outreach program by mapping foreclosure data. "The maps tell us where to go to have the most impact," says Bailey. Maps can also play a role in court. For example, the April judgment in a patient-dumping case (People v. CHCM Inc., No. BC411400, Los Angeles Super. Ct.) enjoined hospitals from transporting patients to a "patient safety zone" in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. Maps produced by the Los Angeles City Attorney's office outlined the zone and were attached to the ruling as exhibits. In the school case, maps helped Munger and her partners get the Los Angeles County Superior Court to divert to L.A. and other urban areas nearly $1 billion that previously was slated for affluent suburban school districts (Godinez v. Davis, No. BC227253, Los Angeles Super. Ct.). "We used [the map] as a critical exhibit [to show] that the money was indeed skipping the cities," says Munger, who around that same time helped establish The Advancement Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to civil-rights law and policy. The project subsequently found that data maps were so essential to its social-justice work that it created Healthy City, a policy group and online resource that focuses on using those maps to do such things as help bring early-care and education programs to underserved children. As L.A. Chief Assistant City Attorney Jeffrey B. Isaacs says, "Mapping is no longer just a useful tool. It's an essential tool."
Kari Santos
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