Every year poses its own challenges and opportunities, and 2023 has been no different. I’d like to walk you through our work this year – and more importantly, the thought processes, perspectives, and principles behind it.

Our 2023 Plan

Our first mission is to inform (hence our motto). It runs through the veins of everything we do: database work, newsletter and article writing, advising, and advocacy. The time proportioned to each varies yearly, but 2023 was atypical in that we focused almost ad absurdum on databases, especially new developments that were fundamentally different from previous ones. There is a reason for this.

The number of lawsuits by accused students has declined significantly over the last few years. This is due in large part to the 2020 Title IX regulations requiring greater due process. With fewer lawsuits to track, some of our time has been freed up to accelerate progress on other projects. This will not last indefinitely, however; the Biden administration has been drafting new Title IX regulations to roll back these protections. We anticipate – as many do – that after they go into effect litigation by accused students will spike. This would require us to spend more time maintaining data and effectively close the window on a considerable amount of time for developing new features (a regular part of our work).

Our initial understanding was that the regs would be released as announced: by the end of May 2023. As of January, we had completed nearly thirty upgrades to our databases, but several of the largest and most challenging ones were still ahead. When to complete them? Certainly, it would be best to do so before lawsuits sharply increase. Thus, the anticipated May 2023 release of the regs became a kind of countdown to finish some of our most challenging database projects.

As often happens, the hard work puts us where the good luck finds us. The timetable for the regs was pushed back several times and eventually to March 2024, allowing us to complete more of our work in 2023 than we anticipated.

Advocacy

While we spent significant time in 2021 and 2022 engaging in more visible forms of advocacy (e.g., raising awareness of and opposing the re-nomination of Catherine Lhamon and opposing various sections of the draft regulations), our 2023 advocacy efforts were more private in nature. We are grateful to have been invited to speak and advise on coordinated calls with advocacy organizations (some of which included state lawmakers) and at private conferences, the latter of which included our second keynote presentation on Title IX matters.

Newsletters and Articles

Hopefully, you are familiar with our Title IX Recaps: well-sourced newsletters featuring recent media reports, government announcements, legal filings, attorney blog posts, and other resources regarding Title IX matters. We distribute these newsletters faithfully during the first few days of each month. You can sign up for them here.

Content-wise, they lean strongly into issues affecting male students, but they also venture into issues we consider analogous: women’s issues, issues complainants in Title IX proceedings face, and educational achievement. We prefer our Recaps to have minimal opinionizing and focus on “just the facts”-style reporting.

We also prefer linking to the work of specialists who eat, sleep, and breathe the subject matter – even if we disagree with them on a few things – over mainstream media reporters who almost always lack subject matter expertise and too often parrot misinformation (Boston Globe, anyone?). Engagement analytics indicate our readers agree.

We have tried several versions of these Recaps over the years and think they are generally in a good spot in terms of content, cadence, and method of delivery, although we are always considering ways to improve.

One of the tradeoffs we made this year was writing fewer articles, focusing only on a few hotspot cases when time allowed (example: Khan v. Yale). Looking at engagement analytics (especially from email campaigns), it’s obvious to us that people want more of these, and we hope to deliver on that in 2024.

This Year’s Database Development Work

Our databases are our unique offering. They are used by legal, media, education, and risk management professionals, students, parents of accused students, advocates, and concerned citizens. While we certainly have our own position on the issues, we don’t pretend we have all the answers. A better-informed public can only help, especially when Title IX matters have become increasingly specialized. We see value in simply creating a digital library of sorts that everyone can use.

The primary database in terms of robustness and number of users is the Title IX Lawsuits Database, followed by the OCR Resolutions Database, then the Attorneys Directory, and lastly the Regulation Challenges Database. If you would like to learn more about the contents and purposes of each, please feel free to access their respective links.

Our database work is split into two main activities:

1. Maintaining Data. This involves adding and updating records: lawsuits, legal filings, attorneys and law firms, OCR resolutions, schools, judges, etc. Although this is basic data entry, it also requires some familiarity with civil litigation. For example, asking “where are the parties at with this lawsuit?” and adding notes to a lawsuit record accordingly is routine.
2. Database Development. This involves changing the structure of the database by adding new features, expanding into new data categories, improving the user experience, and so forth. This is a much more creative endeavor with a much higher skill requirement in terms of technological (and sometimes legal) knowledge.

We are always quietly working on these, only to pop up every now and then and announce the completion of a new project. We like it that way: work diligently, speak sparingly.

From planning to execution to announcement, database development projects are a tremendous time investment. We always plan on them taking 50% longer than we initially suspect, not just because there are unforeseen challenges, but also because the project inevitably expands in scope as we discover new opportunities along the way.

Historically, upgrades to our databases centered around adding new features to help users understand what is going on in these lawsuits or adding entirely new data categories. Examples of this are the addition of oral arguments in 2019 and the Key Decisions upgrade last November that allowed users to quickly navigate a table of all major decisions (screenshot below):

Our developments this year tended to be different in kind and centered around a very different goal: improving the baseline user experience. In my view, they involved overdue and basic features such as:

1. Improving the mobile and tablet experience by re-creating or adapting database modules for smaller screens
2. Improving site speeds for all users
3. Simplifying navigation and making it more intuitive
4. Improving accessibility for users with visual impairments
5. An overhaul of automated email communication
6. Account options that modern users expect, such as:
   • A payment history section in users’ account management pages
   • An option to upgrade or downgrade subscriptions
   • An option to update card information in their account management page
   • A streamlined registration and signup experience so that users do not have to go through seven to eight separate windows (we were able to reduce it to two)
   • Allowing users to pay with Google Pay or Apple Pay (hello, Gen-Z users) and bank accounts

This is just a small sample of improvements, most of which were featured in the “User Experience Plus (UX+)” mega-upgrade (our largest and most challenging to date). This upgrade was a combination of thirty-four individual improvements primarily aimed at improving the user experience, about a quarter of which were based on user feedback.

The UX+ upgrade also contained upgrades to specific databases, such as:

1. Increasing the amount of cross-data displayed between the Title IX Lawsuits Database and OCR Resolutions Database
2. Adding six search engines between the Title IX Lawsuits Database and OCR Resolutions Database
3. Expanding the free trial for the Title IX Lawsuits Database
4. Overhauling oral arguments for the Title IX Lawsuits Database to display more related data while simplifying navigation

We completed most of this work before May. Once it was clear the regs were being pushed back, however, we delayed the release of the UX+ upgrade several weeks to get in a few more improvements.

In July, we released the Regulation Challenges Database. This is a small free-to-use resource that tracks challenges to executive branch actions regarding Title IX, such as guidance, regulations, and executive orders.

In August, we made further improvements to attorney and law firm records in our Attorneys Directory and Title IX Lawsuits Database by creating an option for users to sort attorneys and firms by whether they explicitly specialize in Title IX and/or student conduct. We added this option because of a worrying trend of  litigation outcomes in lawsuits where accused students were represented by well-meaning attorneys who do not specialize in Title IX or student conduct issues.

The mobile and tablet upgrades followed in November, delivering more long-overdue improvements for the small screen experience.

While we did not release any upgrades exclusive to the OCR Resolutions Database (and that database is on our radar for future development), it benefitted from the UX+ upgrade in June and the mobile/tablet upgrades in November.

An Atypical Split

Atypically, half of this year’s database projects were devoted to improving the user experience while the other half were dedicated to expanding users’ knowledge of Title IX matters. While this was perhaps less exciting to some users who look forward to most (all?) of our database projects being the latter, we needed to knock out as many of the former as we could this year.

Title IX issues are never really “finished.” Since the problems are generations deep and will take generations to straighten out, we need to think and design for the long term. With our unique offering being our databases, part of that means being attentive to the needs and preferences of different generations of users who range anywhere from 19-year-old college students to 65-year-old attorneys and everything in-between.

And as we have said before, the user experience is not something that can be limited to a single upgrade; it is a continuous consideration that informs all our database work. This is especially true as we expand our databases to track more and more data and relentlessly encounter the paradox and the source of much tension in database design: the more data are available, the less accessible and usable the data actually are if tools are not implemented or reworked to increase the efficiency of finding and using them.

Future Plans

One of the things I have learned over the years is that no matter how well you plan, a third of the time things will not go as planned – usually, because they turn out better. We have some plans for next year, but out of discretion we will wait to announce them.

In the meantime, I hope this gives you a good sense not just of our work, but more importantly the values we carry with us no matter what we do: simply doing quality work on the issues and centering it on data and the facts.

If you like that, please consider donating. We have a long and interesting 2024 ahead of us!