LILW meets GLH 2022 – Fast.Law
When stepping into uncharted territories, there are always challenges, however, the experience one gains through the journey makes it worthwhile.
That was the case for the participants of the Global Legal Hackathon 2022 - at least the one hosted in Manchester University - where we put our agile development and team-working skills to the test over the weekend of the 25th of March.
Running for the fourth time this year, the Global Legal Hackathon (GLH) is the largest event of its kind internationally. It took place in over 100 cities around the world simultaneously, bringing together software developers, legal professionals, designers, business professionals and anyone interested in law and innovation, with a mission to develop a proof-of-concept solution to address one of the four challenges: ELTA Ukraine challenge, access to justice, ESG x blockchain, and business of law.
The Lab along with a couple of valuable recruits came together to design an access to justice solution, leveraging the experience we’ve gathered working with organisations and charities around Wales and the UK. Furthermore, as we have just completed our latest collaboration with the SRA on the RPF2 – Access to Justice and Innovation project, we felt invigorated to work more towards building a tool to facilitate access to justice and inclusion.
A few software developers, a designer, a legal professional, and the team was ready to go.
Next step – Fast.Law
Although volunteer lawyers around the world have committed over 4m hours of pro bono work globally, the need for free legal advice provision internationally remains much larger. To this day, 1 in 6 people around the world finds it difficult, or nearly impossible, to afford to resolve their legal issue while another 17% have given up on trying to do so, even though the issues persist (World Justice Project – Access to Justice 2019). Under these circumstances, the UK’s position on the civil justice provision map has decreased over the past few years, going from 10th to 16th in 2021.
We believe that one of the reasons complicating the provision of pro bono services lies in the low level of effective communication between the ones who offer free legal advice and the ones who need it. In light of this, we decided to build a platform that would facilitate the communication and logging of pro bono hours and, thus, render the process much faster, hence the name.
Fast.Law was designed to address the aforementioned issues by implementing communication streams in two unique channels; the first one aims to give charities and organisations the opportunity to easily network with lawyers specialised in the subject area of each specific request and the second one focuses on the direct communication of individuals in need with lawyers experienced in the area of law at hand who will provide helpful advice and guidance.
As there were a lot of things to be done, everyone got to work immediately. Fortunately, after a high intake of caffeine and a low intake of sleep, we were ready to present our work to the judges. We are very proud to share that the idea was very positively received and the Fast.Law team will be progressing to the next round of GLH.
Until then, have an innovative week, and if you’d like to keep up to date with what we get up to in the Legal Innovation Lab Wales (LILW), make sure to follow us on social media and keep an eye on our website.
Watch our presentation and the Q&A on our YouTube channel.
You can also read the blog from the Software Developer point of view here.