If you have never seen it before, I recommend listening to the below excerpt from a talk by Steve Jobs. He speaks about organizational focus: drilling down to the fundamentals of what an organization is about, determining what activities best align with them, and dropping what does not to accelerate delivering on those fundamentals with a heightened degree of excellence.

That is our game plan for our databases going forward. With the release of the new Title IX regulations likely just around the corner, Title IX matters – especially on the accused student side – are all but certain to become busier. We have some ambitious plans, but to realize them we must be judicious with our scope. While I cannot speak about everything yet, I want to give you a roadmap of our database plans for the foreseeable future and how they fit into our vision going forward. I will address each of our four databases in turn.

As a disclaimer, these plans are subject to change.

After nearly thirty upgrades improving this database alone, we feel confident that it has a good core set of features. That said, the release of new features has been slower than ideal to meet the needs of Title IX respondents, especially accused students. We plan to refine our focus and restructure our work so that we can deliver the most impactful features to the most impacted audiences at the time it matters most. This requires some worthwhile tradeoffs.

With that in mind, we believe it is best to focus this database exclusively on accused students (as opposed to accused students and accused school employees) going forward. We also believe it is best to shift the focus of new developments to provide more resources for accused students and their advisors while they are still in the grievance process and before schools have made final determinations.

With this shift, the database will be much more “proactively useful.” Currently, with a focus exclusively on lawsuits, it is useful primarily at the end of the process after students have been found responsible and are considering litigation – an option few can afford. I will go further and say that our work in general has been too slanted toward addressing accused student issues “late stage.” In 2024 and beyond, not only do we plan to shift our work to earlier in the Title IX process, but we also want to do more to connect with students before they are even involved in the process (more on that in a future announcement).

We will likely rename this database to the Accused Students Database to reflect this change. This will require more than a simple renaming and the flicking of a switch, however; it will require a series of back-end and front-end adjustments to the system itself. We will make the announcement when the transition is complete.

This refined focus will also accelerate completion of future projects for this database to a much more reasonable timeframe. I would like to give you a preview of those projects below.

New Feature: Regulation Provisions Lookup + Citation Tool

This new feature will provide an efficient means of locating and citing key provisions in Title IX and FERPA regulations. Some provisions are diffused throughout the regulations rather than consolidated exclusively into dedicated (sub)sections. Using this tool, users can search by over thirty pre-defined terms such as “advisors,” “cross-examination,” “appeals,” and so forth, and pull up all relevant citations.

We plan to expand this area to track any future regulatory changes regarding Title IX grievance procedures whenever such final rules are published, including of course the final Title IX rule currently targeted for a March release. Users will be able to compare and contrast new and old provisions section by section.

Here is a screenshot of one part of this feature:

New Feature: Full-Text Document Search

This feature will allow users to search the full text of thousands of key legal filings (opinions, exhibits, complaints, etc.) for an exact phrase or name. We imagine this will have a variety of uses, but here are two in particular:

1. Searching lawsuit documents for the names of university personnel – hearing officers, investigators, Title IX coordinators, and so forth – to see what lawsuits are saying about them. This may support objections and appeals based on biased decision makers.
2. Searching for citations to specific legal cases in judicial opinions.

A preview of the search engine is below:

New Feature: Interactive Reports

This is a feature we included in the release of the OCR Resolutions Database. We want to bring it over to the Title IX Lawsuits Database. These interactive reports will be pie charts, line graphs, bar graphs, and area charts depicting a broad range of data, such as:

1. A line graph of lawsuits filed over time
2. A pie chart that breaks down lawsuit dispositions overall (settled, voluntarily dismissed, successful, unsuccessful, pending, etc.).
3. Pie charts breaking down lawsuit dispositions by circuit, court, attorney, and so forth

These interactive reports will automatically update as new data are added. We imagine creating anywhere from a dozen to thirty.

New Feature: Legal Theories Tracker

While we already track the legal theories argued in complaints, we plan to track on a granular level the successes and failures of all the legal theories and causes of action used in litigation by accused students as mentioned in judicial opinions. These legal theories will be searchable by a myriad of methods (circuit, court, judge, etc.). An example of how we plan to track them is below:

We have mentioned this project before. In terms of legal knowledge, this will likely be the most technical project we ever complete. It will require a long development cycle, and we need to give it the room that such a highly technical project will require.

Expansion of Provisions Section to Include Judicial Opinions

We want to build on our earlier work in the Regulatory Provisions section to allow users to search for all judicial opinions regarding those same provisions: advisors, cross examination, live hearings, and so forth.

This database was released with a decent set of features and was further improved by our developments last year. We have planned the following projects for it:

New Feature: Full-Text Document Search

This is similar to the feature planned for the Title IX Lawsuits Database, and we plan to release both of them simultaneously. This feature will allow users to search the full text of all resolution agreements and letters found in the database with a simple search.

New Data Categories: Agreement Terms and Outcomes

We want users to be able to search resolution agreement documents by the specific terms agreed upon. We also believe there is some merit in allowing users to search and filter resolution agreements based on whether they were entered into before or after OCR made final determinations. We plan to add more interactive reports reflecting the new data on agreement terms and outcomes.

Better Tracking for Claims, Especially Related Claims

Some categories for OCR investigations are too broad. One example is “denial of benefits” which is not intuitive and can represent a wide number of deprivations.

Additionally, some categories are too narrow, especially resolutions involving both Title IX and non-Title IX complaints. One such example is “disability harassment” which does not cover other forms of disability discrimination. Ditto with race and age harassment.

We plan to take a second pass on how we categorize these claims by consolidating some categories and adding others. This will improve clarity and ease of searching.

We created this database in July of 2023 and moved all our records of legal challenges to Title IX regulations and guidance (six lawsuits total) into it.

We also started using the Regulation Challenges Database to track legal challenges in other Title IX matters such as gender identity (transgender issues). Trans issues are not our focus, however, and while there are only two such lawsuits in this database it does take resources away from our other work to scan for new ones and update existing ones.

Going forward, we will no longer be including gender identity lawsuits in this database. It will focus just on lawsuits challenging executive branch actions (guidance, regulations, and executive orders) regarding Title IX disciplinary proceedings.

More UI/UX Improvements

While we made incredible strides in 2023 with improvements to the user experience, we have another such project planned after most or all these other projects are complete. This project will focus on user interface improvements along with a few other bells and whistles.

Pricing Changes

Since converting to a subscription database model in 2018, we have never increased prices. It is the last thing we want to do. Either raising or restructuring prices (or both) will likely be necessary in 2024, however. The main reason is straightforward: our costs, like everyone else’s, have increased substantially in that six-year span. We have reached the point where not raising prices may risk us being unable to provide these databases in the future.

Additionally, in that same timespan, we have taken on new costs to develop new database features, improve the user experience, and fortify security (including security of user data). Fully told, we have made thirty-two upgrades (many of which include new features) to our databases since our 2018 relaunch. Our goal is to deliver high-quality, impactful, secure, and unique resources that our users feel rewarded for supporting, but we cannot do it below a certain price point.

Simply raising prices is not always the best route, however, so we are also considering restructuring them to meet several goals. The current plan is to raise the baseline subscription price to help offset our costs while offsetting costs to users with two additional measures:

1. A substantial discount for the first cycle of any subscription. This will help new or returning users.
2. A larger discount for longer subscriptions so that we can reward our long-term subscribers.

We will provide a minimum of two months’ notice before any pricing changes go into effect.

Artificial Intelligence

We have no current plans to integrate AI – especially generative AI – as a feature for users to interact with, but we are closely monitoring developments of AI technology. While legal AI has made some highly visible blunders in the last year and should never be looked at as a one-size-fits-all tool, it shows some promise.

New Databases

If we create any new databases, it will likely be a free “School Lookup” database with basic features such as allowing parents and students to look up which schools that have lawsuits and OCR resolutions. They would need to sign up for the Accused Students or OCR Resolutions Databases for more information on those lawsuits and resolutions, however. Other than that, we have no other plans to create additional databases at this time. Instead, our plan is to double and triple down on improving existing ones.

Cadence and Order of Completion

For the first time, we are entering a year with ten or fewer remaining database projects planned. The catch is that half are exceptionally time intensive, and we have other irons in the fire, so we will probably complete and release an average of three a year – give or take one depending on the year. Again, the scope of our database projects is subject to change. Additionally, we cannot make promises regarding the specific order of release.

Feedback

Please feel free to provide feedback. Tell us what you think we are doing wrong or right, opportunities we can follow up on, and so forth. The only constant is change, and we want to make sure that change is an improvement.