The following is a summary of what we heard through CPLEA’s community consultations project – along with a glimpse into human-centred design in action within the legal information and services ecosystem.
This is probably a problem we can all relate to when working on a long-running project or thorny issue – where you feel like you are walking in circles in a place that looks familiar, but you are having trouble seeing the forest for the trees. How do you chart the path forward when there is no obvious compass or map to refer to…except for maybe past or current experiences, which may or may not reflect what’s happening on the ground?
In the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta (CPLEA)’s Transforming Tenancy Law Resources Project (also known as our “community consultations project”), we faced exactly this type of problem. How do you keep developing an established, widely used legal information project so that it meets the real, evolving needs of tenants in Alberta and the intermediaries (people who help people with legal issues) and service providers that support them?
This is where design thinking comes into the problem-solving process, especially in uncertain times. Instead of falling into analysis paralysis as a reflex, we can build our way forward (as Silicon Valley innovators and Stanford University design educators Bill Burnett and Dave Evans would say). In design thinking, there’s a related concept: radical collaboration. When faced with a design problem, we don’t have to stay in our silos and solve it all on our own. Design is a collaborative process, and many of the best ideas come from others.
So, we created a plan to gather feedback from the legal information and services ecosystem – including tenants, intermediaries, and service providers in Alberta. To realize this plan, we worked with Pieter de Vos Consulting to design and facilitate seven (7) virtual focus groups with tenants, intermediaries, and service providers. These focus groups discussed tenancy law resource needs in Alberta and innovative solutions to providing information resources for clients with different self-help needs.
Defining the design issue: evolving well-established resources
Since 2000, CPLEA has served Albertans through the Residential Tenancies Legal Information Program (RTLIP). RTLIP provides plain-language information on residential tenancy law in Alberta.
CPLEA’s Laws for Landlords and Tenants website offers over 100 resources on tenancy law topics in various formats, including web content, videos, webinars, and print. Tenants in Alberta, and the intermediaries and community service providers that support them, are among the largest users of these resources.
In virtual sessions lasting up to two hours, we invited participants to provide feedback on CPLEA’s tenancy law resources. We designed the focus groups to be conversational and cover three areas:
- greatest legal information needs and challenges,
- legal information sources (where people frequently “go to” for information) and
- improvement of legal information resources.
What we heard
From August 2025 to November 2025, we spoke with 43 agencies or individuals across Alberta, including the following:
- Immigrant serving agencies
- Legal clinics, public agencies and legal organizations
- Real estate and landlord associations
- Tenants, advocates, housing agencies and community services
Participants were highly engaged, and our sessions explored a range of intercutting ideas about current legal information use and needs in Alberta, as well as emerging landlord and tenant issues. The following is a summary of what we heard.
Cultural and linguistic relevance
Cultural misunderstandings and needs beyond translation
Cultural misunderstandings were a common issue. Participants recognized that not all clients or service users are on the same page about their rights and responsibilities, or about what certain legal terms mean through their cultural lens. Because of Alberta’s growing population, there is a need for newcomers to understand our laws, processes, and legal system.
Translation is already happening on the ground
We also learned that agencies on the ground already run multilingual public legal education sessions or translate available legal information material for their cultural communities. But translating doesn’t always work the way we think it does because it doesn’t explain how Canadian culture, systems and processes work.
Legal misinformation and myths in immigrant and newcomer communities
Many cultural communities rely on cultural brokers, informal translators, and social media (such as WhatsApp groups) – where misinformation can spread rapidly – rather than official sources. Participants also observed that there are inaccurate “myths” floating around about how our justice system and processes work, which add to misinformation in various immigrant and newcomer communities.
Growing legal misinformation with artificial intelligence (AI) and social media
Scale of misinformation
Through every session, participants discussed the impacts of AI and how widespread legal misinformation is on the ground. Participants noted the scale of misinformation tenants get from social media and generative AI tools. Common sources of misinformation include Facebook, Reddit, and ChatGPT. In some cases, word of mouth, intermediaries, misconceptions from old cases or industry practices also provided incorrect information.
Scope of misinformation
Participants noted that Facebook groups are “nearly impossible to keep up with” due to misinformation. Also, tenants increasingly rely on ChatGPT (and other AI tools) for legal advice or answers because it explains things in a conversational way. However, ChatGPT (and other AI tools) contribute to misinformation because they often cite legal resources from jurisdictions outside of Alberta.
AI as the new reality
AI is now the “new reality” for legal clinics, public agencies and legal organizations. Participants noted that they now must spend more time educating tenants on the “right legal information” and correcting misunderstandings caused by legal misinformation on social media and generative AI tools. Participants involved in resolving tenancy disputes are increasingly seeing their clients or service users being misinformed by Reddit and ChatGPT, and face challenges in correcting misinformation.
System navigation challenges
Knowing where to start is a challenge
Across all sessions, participants stressed that people feel overwhelmed and unsure where even to begin when facing tenancy issues. Many cannot identify what is relevant or how to act on the information they find. People do not know where to start, especially older adults, newcomers, and tenants facing conflict or exploitation.
Intersection of legal issues and systemic barriers
Intermediary participants observed that tenancy issues often intersect with other legal issues (for example, family, estates, and bankruptcy law). There also appears to be a void of information when it comes to complex and certain emerging topics, such as:
- Informal housing arrangements (renting without contracts, couch-surfing, relatives moving in, shared housing)
- Situations that often fall outside of the Residential Tenancies Act (motel/hotel long-term stays, transitional housing, cohabitation situations, and subsidized/public housing)
So, it’s often not easy to triage or navigate their clients or service users to get the right help. Even with high-quality legal information and referrals available, agency clients and service users often struggle to understand it due to language, technology, and information literacy barriers.
The role of trusted intermediaries
Participants noted that people are often coping with survival and don’t have time to gather bits of information from different sources. They really rely on their trusted support workers to provide support for them and relay important information on the ground. Clients look up to people they trust and often, so they will take what an intermediary says at face value – although there is a possibility that what they say may be wrong. While well-intentioned, there is often a lack of consistent understanding of tenancy law across intermediaries.
Importance of universal design
Information navigation is a challenge
Participants consistently reported that many who need tenancy help cannot access information online, read long documents, or navigate complex sites. Seniors often cannot use online resources, have vision issues, or rely entirely on intermediaries. The digital divide limits access, particularly for isolated seniors and low-income households. While emphasizing that “plain language is so needed!”, participants also noted that people “desperately need things explained,” rather than just given webpages or resources.
Need for more alternative formats beyond text
Text-heavy resources are difficult for many groups with literacy, language, or disability barriers. Many seniors struggle with digital literacy, so videos or simplified formats would help. In immigrant and newcomer communities, people prefer getting information from word of mouth and discussion, rather than reading. Those working with immigrants and newcomer communities shared with us that there is a large illiterate population. There is a general, ongoing need for resources “that don’t rely so much on text” such as videos, sound clips and other simplified formats.
What’s next?
If there’s anything that became a defining moment for the agency participants during our community consultations project, it’s the shared realization that we are all in the same legal ecosystem. During this process, we observed that many legal information and service providers face similar challenges in providing legal information on the ground, especially with the evolving information use, needs and challenges of their clients or service users.
We hope that the first-hand insights from this community consultations project will help those looking to improve legal information and service delivery to tenants in Alberta, as well as the intermediaries and service providers that support them. We acknowledge the contributions of participants who provided valuable insights and look forward to incorporating those insights into the next phase of the project.
CPLEA plans to renew and redevelop our tenancy resources starting in the summer of 2026, along with our ongoing work in developing our housing law information project. To support others in navigating similar challenges, we’ve curated the following design‑thinking frameworks and resources that continue to shape our work going forward:
- An Introduction to Design Thinking, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University.
- Stanford Legal Design Lab – builds and studies new technologies, services, and policies that can empower people who are dealing with legal problems.
- Innovation for Justice (i4J) – a virtual social justice innovation lab with a focus on three disruptive strategies (service, system and structure), along with an ethical tech design framework.
About Judy Feng
