As a lawyer, it seems to me like we have an obligation not just to be part of an imperfect system, but to think about how we can make the system itself a bit better.
That’s why I founded CrowdJustice four years ago, with a mission to make the legal system work for everyone. My basic starting point was that a system doesn’t work if people can’t use it – and that one of the biggest barriers to access was funding.That was the genesis of CrowdJustice, the world’s first, and still the only platform, which enables people to raise funds to pay for legal costs. It is a different way of funding legal matters, a different way of building awareness of the law – compliant for lawyers, participatory for individuals.
I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved so far. We’ve enabled over 1,000 legal matters to go ahead. Some of those have been Supreme Court cases. Others have been individuals who needed a lawyer to write a letter on their behalf. Many would not have moved forward without the support of other people via CrowdJustice. At the very heart of everything we’ve done is how to make the experience better for the people who need legal advice. Providing better access to funding is a big step forward to improving an imperfect system. But it’s become clear as we’ve focused relentlessly on giving consumers more options to access the legal system, that to create more access, the focus needs to be broader. It also needs to be on the lawyers who serve those consumers and the clients’ experience of legal services.
It’s a truism, but it’s often overlooked in the access to justice discussion: if you want to get legal advice, you need to access a lawyer.
I expect that a lawyer’s role in the provision of legal advice will change and evolve as technology, and our understanding of how technology can interact with the legal system, improves. But for now and for the majority of use cases the fact remains, if we want to help make the legal system work better for everyone, law firms need to survive and to thrive.
Over the last four years, we at CrowdJustice have been, both intentionally and to some degree by happy coincidence, creating better tools for lawyers, in order that CrowdJustice can be a great tool for clients.
We’ve automated compliance on funds that go directly to lawyers’ accounts, we’ve facilitated hundreds of thousands of transactions to law firms and we’ve done KYC on thousands of lawyers’ clients in a way that meets lawyers’ own standards. And in doing this, we’ve helped change the way that consumers can both pay for – and understand their ability to access – legal services.
Today, we are excited to announce that we are going to give a name to that technology that acknowledges that the tools we have built are no longer only for the benefit of people who never thought the law applied to them – until it does. They are also for the law firms that serve those people and who are keen to use technology to do a better job for those clients.
The name we have chosen for our company that works for consumers as much as for the lawyers who serve them, is simple. It’s Legl.
Without intending to be grandiose (but no dreams were ever accomplished by thinking small), we think we’re building on firm foundations to pursue our mission of creating a legal services market that works for everyone. We look forward to partnering with you.
