Recently, I spent a pleasant afternoon with members of the Louisiana State Bar Association’s Access to Justice Tech Committee.  We were discussing various ways in which technology could help with access to justice issues and the talk turned to using video chat to meet with clients and co-workers.  Some members were concerned about using third-party services like Skype or Google Hangouts for this and I suggested we take a look at WebRTC.  Unlike Skype and the others, WebRTC creates a direct peer-to-peer link between you and the person with whom you are chatting.  It runs natively in the browser (unfortunately, only Chrome and Firefox), so it doesn’t require any plugins to run. Most importantly, all content streams in WebRTC are encrypted by default.

I did up a demo to show the committee members, which you can try out here. The source code (which is a fork of Keith Norman’s great project) is available on Github.  It would be nice to see some implementations of WebRTC in some justice apps soon.