The engagement
NH Small Claims
A volunteer project run by Dartmouth College students, making New Hampshire's small claims process navigable for people representing themselves. The brief was a plain-language public resource — procedural guidance, a court lookup, and aid referrals — that a rotating student team could keep current without an engineer in the loop.
- Scope
- End to end
- Practice
- Design & engineering
- Delivered
- 2026
- Status
- In service
Built with
Colophon
Interface
Next.js App Router with React server components, composed in Tailwind. The type is set for sustained reading — this is a site people use while stressed, not one they browse.
Wayfinding
The content is organized around the questions people actually arrive with — who can file, what happens after service, how judgments are collected — rather than around how the court system is structured internally.
Operations
Continuously deployed to Vercel's edge network, so a student team can publish a correction the same day a rule changes.
The problem
Small claims court is designed to be usable without a lawyer, but "designed to be" and "actually is" are different things. The process, the forms, and the vocabulary are spread across sources that quietly assume you already understand how a court works. Someone who has just been served has to reverse-engineer the system before they can respond to it.
What it does
The site is organized around the questions people arrive with rather than the structure of the court system: who can file and how, what happens after you're served, which District Division court covers your town, how judgments are collected, and how appeals work. Mediation services and free or low-cost legal aid are one step away from every page, because for a lot of visitors the right answer is talking to a human rather than reading further.
Impact
A rotating student volunteer team now maintains a live legal self-help resource covering an entire state's small claims process — not a class project sitting unused, but a site people use to work out what to do next.