Emerging Technologies and Legal Innovation
Proyecto ACCESO has been facilitating the transfer of technologies around the world for two decades. We started with technologies for the legal sector as Latin American America moved its judicial system from the inquisitorial to the adversarial model of criminal procedure. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, we focused on assisting ministries of justice, bar associations, law schools, and law enforcement agencies with technical assistance to implement new oral trials.
We worked in 15 countries throughout the Americas to teach skills and extend new judicial mechanisms like oral advocacy; case management systems; DNA and other evidence; alternative sentencing regimes arbitration; and, mediation and other alternative dispute resolution mechanisms including indigenous problem-solving. Over the years we developed programs on Intellectual Property rights protection, working with prosecutor offices, national police forces, the United States Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of State, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries and other industry and trade associations.
Proyecto ACCESO helped fight IP piracy, assisted in educating industry and the legal profession about new mechanisms to resolve Intellectual Property disputes and promoted Indigenous Traditional Knowledge. We are now turning our attention to the future of emerging technologies and their legal regulation.
We are working with governments, financial institutions, investors, and technologists on new ways to promote equitable and sustainable economic development while protecting civil society. Proyecto ACCESO truly spans the spectrum of disruptive technologies from orals and DNA evidence to the development and rollout of Artificial Intelligence, Blockcahin, FINTECH, and other technologies.
Methodology
Proyecto ACCESO is a not-for-profit legal think tank that promotes the rule of law in the Americas. Utilizing multi-media and popular culture, we create innovative, educational and entertaining programs that increase access to justice and build confidence in the legal mechanisms and institutions that provide better access to justice, foster sustainable development, and enshrine democratic governance.
Too often, the law is viewed as an accessible code for the elite, rather than a set of principles and practices that weave together a stronger democratic society and provide for justice. If the benefits of globalization are to be maximized, we must build the rule of law in a language that people understand.
Rather than the one-size-fits-all solution espoused by others, Proyecto ACCESO embraces, and has been embedded in, local cultures, utilizing best practices, traditional methods of problem-solving, and indigenous mechanisms built from within, rather than imposed from outside.
The ACCESO team has been committed to using the language of the streets, the common vernacular and local customs. For these reasons, over the last twenty years our work has been in tandem with civil society groups, state institutions, and the academy to promote meaningful reform and fairer and more equitable administration of justice.
