Our innovation work
We undertake some of the most cutting-edge work at the intersection of justice, communications, and technology.
Our multidisciplinary team works on projects that aim to increase access to justice with a focus on:
Our innovation work has widely been recognised as leading the field
Some of our most recent awards include:
2022
Legal Innovation Awards: Disruptive Technology of the Year
Global Pro Bono Portal (with LawWorks)
Scaling our reach and impact with online help
In Australia and all over the world, there are more people who need free or low-cost legal help than there are services available to meet these needs. At Justice Connect, we’re focused on creating scalable models of legal assistance to help meet the huge demand for assistance.
As we continue to scale our services through digital strategies, reaching consumers in the places they spend their time online becomes increasingly important. We analyse trends, online behaviour, and rising legal needs to identify opportunities to strategically promote our legal services and products. We regularly share our insights and learnings with the sector so that others can benefit from our real-time trends and insights.
Learn moreImproving the experience of getting and giving legal help
We’ve built products that redesign ways of working so that getting legal help is easier, and providing legal services is more seamless.
With the integration of technology in everyday life, the process of finding, accessing, and providing legal help has changed dramatically. Our work has changed the way Justice Connect conducts intake and referrals, saving time and stress from both people seeking help and lawyers alike. Evaluations have shown efficiency gains between 22%-44%, reduced emotional burden on frontline workers, and higher traffic to our online Help page.
We also empower people to better identify their legal issue through our AI Model. Research shows that when people search for legal help online, they often struggle to correctly articulate their legal problem and this prevents them from accessing appropriate legal help.
Instead of expecting people to skill themselves with the technical legal language needed to explain their problem, we are building tools that can do this work for them. In partnership with the University of Melbourne, we have built an artificial intelligence tool using natural language processing that can diagnose legal problems in natural language and will overcome barriers between people and legal help providers in Australia.
Finally, our Pro Bono Portal was built to make the process of connecting with pro bono opportunities easier for law firms, which 160 law firms are now using across Australia. In the year after the full launch of the Pro Bono Portal, Justice Connect’s referrals to firms increased by 50%.
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Strengthening access to justice ecosystems
We empower other legal service organisations to deepen their reach and impact by adopting our suite of innovative products.
Our track record of success has enabled us to offer our digital tools to the wider pro bono ecosystem, to enable system wide responses to the Justice Gap.
Firm Manager, a tool designed to streamline the internal pro bono processes of law firms, is currently being scaled for wider adoption. Co-designed with DLA Piper and Norton Rose Fulbright, Firm Manager is a powerful, intuitive and secure system to manage the work of pro bono teams in law firms.
In response to appetite from stakeholders, we have deployed our Pro Bono Portal in a range of jurisdictions around the world: UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Germany. 588 law firms are registered users of the Pro Bono Portal internationally.
Recognising the potential use cases of our AI model, we are also working on an API to make our AI Model available across the legal help ecosystem. We are currently offering a free license to not-for-profit legal service organisations to incorporate our AI model into their work.
Our work is based on our deep understanding and research on the legal help journey. We contribute to better service design across the legal service ecosystem by running sector-wide research to identify issues areas and opportunities for improvement. We publish our findings for the benefit of the legal assistance sector so that we can collectively build a fairer legal system.
Learn moreOur history of innovation
Justice Connect’s digital innovation program of work commenced in 2017, with support from Google.org. Since then our work has grown in scope and sophistication, with a range of products now completed and in wide use.