Nathaniel Baca works as a manager at IAALS, supporting its mission to forge innovative and practical solutions to problems within the legal system. Additionally, his work focuses on creating bridges across content and project areas for the benefit of the organization as a whole. He joined IAALS in the summer of 2017.
Baca came to IAALS from the nonprofit sector where he worked to provide customized information to individuals involved in the criminal justice system. In particular, he developed two projects to assist individuals with navigating the Colorado criminal courts. The first project worked to inform individuals about their options and the likely outcomes from the court process. To provide the individuals with useable information, the project aggregated over 200,000 cases from the Denver County Courts to provide individuals with highly specific information that could be tailored to the individual interests of each user. The second project worked to reduce rates of failures to appear across Colorado. This project required Baca to develop a system that monitored every case in Colorado to provide individuals with information about their mandatory court appearances. In its exploratory phase, this project helped to reduce failures to appear by approximately 50% in the main testing area of Boulder County, helping thousands of people to avoid bench warrants, bond forfeitures, and to improve people's perceptions of the court.
Over the last decade, Baca has had the privilege to work for the Office of the Public Defender, the ACLU, and the Prosecution section of the War Crimes Division in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Baca received his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and his B.A. from Northwestern University.