Wage theft, loss of health benefits, eviction, family separation…these are just some of the countless civil justice issues affecting more than 150 million Americans every year. Due to a widespread lack of access to civil legal services, very few of these issues result in just outcomes. This “civil justice gap” is a major contributing force to structural inequality and systemic oppression in this country, yet it goes largely unnoticed compared to highly visible issues like criminal justice or police brutality.

In the middle of the Pandemic, I was approached by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences to create a short PSA that could help broad audiences understand the personal and societal nature of this crisis, and introduce the Academy’s report of recommendations for how to fix it.

Inspired by experimental documentaries that reveal larger social problems through eyewitness narration and haunting footage of landscapes, we mobilized legal aid organizations around the country to help us find litigants who could tell their stories about unjust legal hardships, and deployed cinematographers in their locations to capture the geographic diversity of the crisis.

To connect these individual experiences to the national story, we recruited actor Lamorne Morris, fresh off of his starring debut in the Hulu series Woke, to explain the crisis from the friendly perspective of a legal aid worker who wants to help.

The PSA launched with the release of the Academy’s report to great acclaim. Our client was very proud of this being the first time the 200-year-old Academy has ever told “the human story” about one of their research projects, saying that the narrator and interviewees we’d selected were the “perfect” voices. He received multiple praises from folks in the legal services field that we’d gotten the issue “right.” Our scripting process also helped them to take a new approach during a complete rewrite of the report.