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I’d be a worthy winner as I have used innovation to solve the access to justice crisis over the past few years by building Virtual Legal my online law firm 9 years ago and within that then developing my self-service telelaw platform Law On Earth (“LOE”). I have also supported many Irish businesses, university students and individuals, locally and nationally, so our contribution directly betters the Irish community.
Innovating in the legal space has been a difficult task the past 9 years but one that I relished in given my passion for efficiency and also for solving the access to justice global problem. During this time, I became a lawyer in both New Zealand and also the United Kingdom and opened up both Virtual Legal in both regions and will open Law On Earth in the UK in the coming months. England, Wales and also Ireland are excited for what both Virtual Legal and LOE can do for the community given we’ve created a way for the 73% of the population who can’t afford lawyers, to have access to legal help, protecting their rights and reducing anxiety and mental health issues that would normally plague them without having help of this nature when things go wrong.
LOE which teaches the public how to self-act in legal matters, provides the tools to complete the work and then has lawyers immediately available in recorded video session to reverse the screen and finalise the work while giving advice. Members of the public are kept safe given the education is created at a grade 7 reading standard and with simple spoken wording; the entire platform is geotagged so only the correct information, documents, guides and advisors are visible in the users location (unless they request a different location); the advice sessions and chat are recorded and encrypted so the advice is safe but available to the user and lawyer to review at a later date; and mood sensing technology and AI is inbuilt so we can monitor a user’s experience live, to jump in an help them in times of stress or confusion.
LOE’s probono function enables qualifying users to obtain legal help for free and provides training to students from QUT along with grading the performance of those students by the advisor in the timesheets which feeds directly to the University’s dashboard. The corporate dashboard enables corporates like Drake Workwise to onboard any of their 300,000 employees easily when they require legal services as part of their Employee Assistance Program.
We have won several awards for our impact but what matters most are the emails we get from so many people telling us this platform has made their lives easier and, in some cases, saved their lives, including some users who were experiencing domestic violence, business owners on the brink of insolvency and people bed ridden with terminal conditions. I think a contribution like that deserves recognition for my team who work tirelessly with me to build this business and have massive impact.
