Our team from Missouri State University participated in the Mid-Missouri Data Fest competition on Friday and Saturday, April 14 and 15 in 2023. The competition included 17 teams from SEMO, Mizzou, Truman, and several other universities. After 24 hours of wrangling and analyzing big data (multiple large-volume datasets), our team was awarded for Best In Show.
Data was sponsored from the American Bar Association
The American Bar Association provides pro bono (i.e. free of charge) legal services across the United States via an online platform available in some states and territories. The platform allows people who qualify (based on state-based low-income status) to post legal questions and receive legal advice from a lawyer. The ABA would like to anticipate the sorts of issues that arise so that they can prepare volunteers to address those questions, better know how and when to recruit lawyers with specific expertise, and know how to advise state partners on general trends they’re seeing. Your data contains actual conversations between clients and lawyers (redacted to maintain confidentiality) and basic demographic information about the client. These exchanges have been previously classified into categories and sub-categories by the people posting questions; potentially, specific conversations might be sorted into different categories by platform administrators. Our challenge was to provide advice to the ABA concerning any patterns or trends we see in these conversations that would help the ABA advise its state partners, create resources to respond to identified patterns, and devise outreach strategies to potential user populations and volunteers.