Justice Connect’s award-winning AI work shows how technology, legal expertise, and sector collaboration can help more people take the first step towards justice. 

When someone has a legal problem, they rarely start with legal language. 

They start with what has happened to them: a letter they do not understand, an eviction notice, an unfair dismissal, a debt they cannot pay, a family violence concern, or a problem with a service provider. 

For many people, this creates an immediate barrier to getting help. If you do not know what kind of legal problem you have, it can be hard to know where to go, what to ask for, or whether help is available at all. 

As Justice Connect’s Head of Innovation, Tom O’Doherty, explains: “If people don’t know what their legal issue is, they go to one service, get pushed to another, become disillusioned, and ultimately don’t get help.” 

This is the problem Justice Connect’s AI model is helping to address. Our AI-powered Intake Tool allows people to describe their issue in their own words. It then helps identify the kind of legal problem they may be experiencing, so they can be directed to the most relevant information, resources, or support services. 

In June, this work received an Australian Financial Review AI Award in the Community Engagement category, alongside our partners at the University of Melbourne.  

The award recognises years of careful work, but the real value of this work is practical: helping more people find the right pathway to legal help sooner. 

Technology built around human need 

At Justice Connect, we know technology is not a replacement for lawyers, legal services, or human judgement. 

Used responsibly, technology can help remove some of the barriers that stop people from getting help in the first place. It can help people explain what is happening, reduce confusion, support more consistent triage, and make it easier to connect people with the right next step. 

That is why this work has always been grounded in real needs of real humans.  

People do not always describe legal problems in neat categories. They describe the stress, the letter, the deadline, the risk, or the thing that has gone wrong. To build tools that respond to that reality, we need more than technical expertise. We need the insight of people who understand how legal problems show up in people’s lives. 

That is why collaboration has been central to this work. 

Justice Connect has worked alongside research partners at the University of Melbourne, community legal centres, legal assistance partners, pro bono lawyers, and law firms to strengthen the tool and make sure it is shaped by legal expertise. 

The power of pro bono partnerships  

One of the ways pro bono lawyers have contributed is through TAG, Justice Connect’s Training AI Game. 

Through TAG, lawyers review de-identified language samples from real people and highlight key legal phrases. This helps the AI model better understand the everyday words people use when they are trying to describe a legal problem. 

To date, hundreds of lawyers have contributed to this work, and nearly 22,000 samples have been annotated more than 310,000 times.   

For lawyers, TAG is a practical way to use legal skills in a different form. Their skills in issue spotting, categorisation, and plain-language interpretation can help shape tools that work better for people who are overwhelmed, stressed, or unsure where to turn. Through TAG, those skills can support many more people than a single matter or one-off advice session alone. 

Michael Tran, Senior Associate at Ashurst Perkins Coie, said he was motivated to take part because the work offered “a clear opportunity to apply the skills and experience I have developed in practice to improving access to justice.” 

He hoped the AI model would help people “identify their legal issues clearly so they can be directed to the appropriate support.” 

Luke Hall, Head of Pro Bono Australia at Baker McKenzie, described TAG as “a great way to apply innovation to the pro bono legal sector” and to create “more opportunities for help-seekers in accessing justice.” 

For firms, TAG offers a flexible way to contribute pro bono capacity to systemic access to justice work. Lawyers do not need to take on a full matter or be in a particular jurisdiction to make a useful contribution. 

As Michael Tran puts it, “the time commitment is modest and flexible, but the reach of the work is significant.” 

Luke Hall’s advice to other lawyers is simple: “Every contribution, no matter the size, is valuable. Know that you are going to make a difference in accessing justice.” 

Helping more people reach the right pathway 

The scale of unmet legal need in Australia means we need to keep finding better ways to connect people with support. 

The Victorian Law Foundation’s Public Understanding of Law Survey (PULS) found that where legal need existed, 78 per cent went unmet. 

At the same time, legal assistance services, community legal centres, and pro bono teams are responding to increasing demand with limited resources.  

AI will not solve this challenge on its own. But carefully designed digital tools can help legal services use their time and expertise more effectively. 

Justice Connect has already seen early signs of this through our online Intake Tool. After the AI model was integrated into the tool, early findings showed more people progressing through the stage where they select their legal problem type, with fewer people dropping off before completing intake. The tool has also helped reduce staff time spent on intake and triage. 

That matters because intake is often the first step towards legal help. If that first step is overwhelming, people can drop away before they reach support. If it is clearer, more people have a better chance of finding the right pathway towards justice. 

That is the purpose of Justice Connect’s innovation work: not technology for its own sake, but practical solutions that help more people move from confusion to clarity, and from uncertainty to action. 

Get involved 

Justice Connect is continuing to build technology initiatives that make legal help easier to find and more effective to deliver. 

The next stage of this work depends on continued collaboration across the sector. If you are a lawyer, law firm, community legal centre, researcher, or sector partner interested in contributing to the future of digital access to justice work, we’d love to hear from you at innovation@justiceconnect.org.au. 

Together, we can help more people get to the right legal help, sooner.