Award-winning platform to address social justice issue

After 4 long years in planning and development, the Law On Earth platform is finally set to launch in April 2019 and it’s already won several awards for the concept alone.

The founder, Katie Richards, who recently won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Legal category at the Brisbane Gala has been working on finding ways to provide a basic level of legal assistance to all Australians, regardless of what they earn or where they live.  Richards has travelled to several countries around the world, pitching her platform on the world stage in front of investors, startups, techies and everyday people to find a solution to the social justice issues plaguing our society.

When Richards found out in 2013 that up to 85% of the world’s population couldn’t afford basic legal assistance, she founded her online law firm Virtual Legal to start addressing this problem.  Although quite successful in its own right, still there was a chunk of the population who still couldn’t afford the much lower priced, fixed fee services provided by Virtual Legal and the model was not so easy to scale, so the team researched into how different technologies could be built to automate much of the work done by lawyers but in a safe environment which protected the client and also the advisor, and operated at a price point that was up to 90% less than traditional models of legal service offerings. 

For the everyday Australian, the platform provides a free Learning Centre, so they have a way of learning about the situation they are facing and how to solve it in a cost-effective manner.  The system then does the work to create the documents for the customer by using a Wizard to slot the correct clauses and information in as the customer answers straight forward questions about their situation. Given most people don’t understand how to decipher legal clauses, the system creates what is called a Human Guide, which provides a line by line explanation of each of the clauses in the agreement so that even a person with a relatively low level of education and reading ability has the potential of understanding the document as it is written in plain and simple, everyday English. 

The advisors also gain significant benefit – they can throw in the 12-hour days in the city and work from home with their children or travel the world.  And better yet, the system cuts out the middle man, so advisors can work around 1/3 of the hours they currently work for a law firm or accounting firm to earn the same income.  This feature alone contributed to Virtual Legal’s recent win at the Women in Technology Awards as Small Business Employer of Choice, given this will provide significant flexibility to women in careers who need more flexible practices.

Isn’t it about time we found a way for every human being to have a basic level of legal assistance?  The government have done a great job of providing Legal Aid to those who need it the most, but it doesn’t cater for millions of Australians who make just over the financial threshold but still don’t have enough funds for legal assistance.  And Legal Aid doesn’t cover many elements of the law that the Law On Earth platform does, so for those types of legal questions, such as those small business owners may struggle with, there hasn’t really been a viable option for them in the past.  The community legal centres can also benefit from the free Learning Centre in the platform and redirect people to how they can manage their legal situation at minimum cost following the Guides in the system.

But what if every person in Australia logged on at the same time?  Are we heading for a site crash?  Nope – it’s already been trialed and tested to handle 24 million concurrent users, so go for your life Australia – we love a good challenge. 

Published on 02 December 2018