 I want to thank John Podesta and the Center for American Progress and Carl Malamud and Public Resources for inviting me to talk with you about the Access to Justice Initiative. It's something that the President and the Attorney General had in mind shortly after the election. It took quite a while to get started because it's a new office, there really is no exact precedent for it in the Department of Justice, although you might think Access to Justice and the mission of the Department of Justice are at least cognate if not entirely parallel. It's a small office, there are seven lawyers including myself, we're still getting staffed up, we've been in office only since the beginning of March. The charge of the office, its mission is however rather broad, we're charged with improving indigent defense, enhancing the quality and availability of civil legal services to the poor and to the middle class and quite importantly seeking less lawyer and court intensive solutions to problems. Access to court is simply a means, not an end, it is access to the ultimate outcome, to the fair outcome that's of extreme importance and sometimes and indeed increasingly often that involves hopefully not having to go to court, going directly to a BP escrow fund is a lot more valuable than having to bring a lawsuit, class action or otherwise. There are many parts of the government, social security, veterans, other areas where the direct effort to make benefits more accessible and the labyrinth less Byzantine are really central to our initiative and indeed what we've discovered in looking around the country in many different areas both criminal and civil is that the system is generally speaking broken, it's broken for the middle class as well as for the poor. People who want to use the legal system as a means of gaining access to the outcomes that are there right often and indeed more often than not find law an obstacle course rather than a facilitator and so as we've asked how we can make a sustainable difference around the country we have found places like Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans where efforts are underway which fit the idea of making the law more accessible, more user friendly in self help as well as legally assisted context. There's lots of resistance, very often courts will have portals that are sort of designed to facilitate self help but then they won't allow electronic filings by people who are representing themselves rather than being represented by lawyers and when electronic access is available very often the interface is primitive not at all user friendly so that there is a tremendous marriage in a way between what I understand the purpose of law.gov to be and what our purpose is that is I love Beth Novak's image of liberating information when it's liberated no one can fully predict what's going to be done with it how people are going to make it more useful how they will build on the platforms that are made available and in particular your image of re-engineering the plane while we fly it seems to me to be just right and one of the articles I wrote 30 years ago I found a quotation from the 19th century by I think it was Otto Neurath who talked about redesigning the ship while we're sailing it so it's an old idea but it's an idea that is made more plausible with contemporary technology because sort of the dangers of redesigning the system while one uses it can be offset by the by the virtues and the possibilities of a technological universe that makes that not simply an aspiration but perhaps a reality. So the purpose of the initiative that that I am leading is to open up access in ways that require as much from the open government initiatives of the administration as from anything else. I had a very good meeting with Anish Chopra with whom Beth works and it's very clear that some of the purposes of open government and some of the purposes of access to justice are completely complementary so I look forward to working with you and with all of you in in making those things a reality and it's a challenge that that can use everyone's help.