In 2019, Family Law Partners’ innovation department created Family Law Lab, an innovation hub run by a small team to host a suite of family law web applications. We have a wealth of learning directly relevant for family lawyers embracing digital working who want to offer better first-consultation client experiences and develop more efficient processes.
When you live, breathe and dream family law you want to be the best lawyer you can. You surround yourself with like-minded lawyers and become part of a team: you want to change the world! As you become more experienced you can see the obstacles in the way of your clients achieving the best outcomes to their cases and being able to properly move on with their lives. These obstacles can be borne of processes and procedures: the way lawyers have dealt with information has changed little in the last 400 years.
At Family Law Lab, we have set ourselves the challenge of tackling the problems we see family law practitioners and their clients struggle with every day. We have grown impatient with the lack of progress on the challenge posed by the withdrawal of legal aid for family law. We are disappointed that the public continues to struggle to access affordable legal advice and that so many families end up in court as litigants in person.
We have, on the one hand, a significant proportion of the population who need quality legal advice and on the other, a group of highly trained and skilled legal professionals available to help. We want to bridge the gap between the two and make it easier for people to get the help they deserve from the professionals that are keen to help. To do this we need to be bold. We need to disrupt the market. In a thoughtful way, we need to shake things up a bit. We need a place to explore different solutions. This is what Family Law Lab is about. Exploring innovation through technology to solve real-world family law problems.
Our first offering on Family Law Lab is Engage. Engage was established in July 2014 when it became the world’s first online family law triage system. We are pleased to share Engage with the wider family law community.
If you come on this journey with us, we will share our other projects with you. Some of which have been built in collaboration with experts in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Brighton with support from Innovate UK.
We believe in collaboration and sharing ideas because none of us, alone, has all the answers. Why don’t you join us?