LawfulFree (Team nusmuuu)

Home Page (English Version)
Home Page (Chinese Version)
Free Law Clinics List Page
Means Test for Legal Aid Bureau's Legal Aid Page
List of Lawyer Page
Lawyer Login Portal
Lawyer Registration Page 1
Lawyer Registration Page 2
Lawyer Registration Page 3
Lawyer Profile Page 2 - Display Experience and Activities
Lawyer Profile Page 1 - Display Basic Information

Inspiration

After several types of research, we discovered that the major issue resulted from our problem statement is caused by the legal information gap and scattered information. It causes uncertainty and confusion among those that are seeking legal help. Hence, we decided to build a user-friendly platform to assist the delivery of information and simplification of the help-seeking process to increase efficiency.

What it does

LawfulFree is a one-stop platform that aims to offer a smooth user experience and seamless interaction between lawyers and clients. Essential information and guidelines are collected from different sources and re-organized and categorized to develop a user-friendly web application. To further increase the usability of the application, different language is being offered to cater to the user’s needs.

It can be broken down into three main functions, legal clinic search, lawyer search, and check for legal aid eligibility. In the legal clinic search, the users can retrieve nearby clinic information based on their postal code. Moreover, to better meet the user’s needs, several filtering options are included to assist the user to find their best-fit clinic. In the lawyer search, we display collaborating lawyers’ information with filtering fields such as price range, years of experience, and specialities to increase the likelihood and effectiveness for both the user and lawyer to discover a suitable match. Upon deciding on reaching out to the lawyer, the user can then contact the lawyers through the contact information given by the application. For our last function, we came up with a step-by-step questionnaire to facilitate the users through the mean test. In this test, to ensure that the user will not be overflooded with additional information, we simplified the process by using user-friendly wordings and only display questions that are relevant to the user’s current status.

In conclusion, through all these 3 functions, LawfulFree will effectively help to bring the lawyers and clients closer together.

How we built it

We consulted the law student and exchanged ideas within the group to understand the real pain of the issue. Upon identifying the possible pain points of the users, we draft our application using Figma. Several enhancements and adjustments were done through online meetings to finalize our prototype. After that, we assigned the task to each team member to complete both the frontend and backend.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge that we ran into was deciding on the programming language. React was proposed to be used as our front-end. However, some of us are unfamiliar with the language, hence, we have to read through several tutorials before the hackathon to ensure that we know the language. The second challenge that we encountered was developing the prototype. As most of us have little knowledge of the problem statement, we have to read up to fully understand the problem statement and to develop a solution that caters to the true user’s needs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to include a highlight function - translation in our project. This idea better enhances our website’s accessibility and readability to the users. We are also proud that we managed to finish the project on time and learnt a lot in this short journey.

What we learned

We have learned that empathy is important in product development as it helps us to learn and analyses the real needs of the user. It helps to align our product and the user’s expectation to provide a seamless user experience. Moreover, through this journey, we have also learned about the importance of teamwork and communication.

What's next for Untitled

We will continue to develop the application to enhance the application by adding more user-friendly functions. We aimed to fully achieve the goal of a one-stop legal help application.