Inspiration
Law and Legality are something that all of us come across in one or another phase of our lives, some ranging from parking tickets, and traffic violations, all the way to family disputes, and even criminal charges. As a team that has personally witnessed a divorce case and faced the consequences of high monetary charges, it is a tedious situation to find lawyers who are ready to fight for your cause while considering your economic status.
As we know it, there are loops between clients and lawyers based on what they can afford for certain cases and how they can connect to those lawyers. However, sometimes, those who come from underprivileged communities. Our app, SociaLawgy, aims to incorporate such communities into this loop to provide services for them with minimal to no cost, represented as Pro Bono cases. With regards to this, we chose the track, Out of the Loop.
What it does
SociaLawgy provides a platform for direct monitored communication between lawyers and clients. It also allows lawyers to find Pro Bono cases in an effective and efficient manner based on their profiles and backgrounds. It also includes the steps needed to start the process, the evidence and documentation required, and an approximate time frame, to make it user-friendly for both clients and lawyers. This allows the clients to get exposure to the future outcomes of the case or the legal process involved with the case.
How we built it
Starting off with brainstorming ideas on a whiteboard based on the given tracks, we chose the one that most appealed to us: Out of the Loop. Based on this track, we connected our personal experiences to design a web application that solves an issue present around us. With this, we created basic wireframes and sub-flows while identifying major functionalities and sub-flows. Later, we split ourselves into smaller teams, dividing ourselves into the different aspects required to put the application together: Backend, Frontend, and Database. With each aspect committed to branches in GitHub, we came together and merged all of these together, while fixing any bugs, to create SociaLawgy as we see it now.
Challenges we ran into
One of the challenges we ran into, was deciding on effective platforms to use for collaborating as a team. We started by running into issues with the functionalities of GitHub to effectively commit each of our individual efforts. By consulting the technical managers, we were able to debug and solve this issue by using resources that we had access to, NCSU GitHub, and practicing clear communication techniques. Later, even though we had effectively tested each of our aspects when merging everything, we faced bugs that caused some functionalities to fail. Working together and brainstorming, we were able to successfully fix these bugs, and create the web application as shown in our demo video.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A major accomplishment that we are proud of was the amount of work we were able to get done considering the limited amount of time we had, creating a complete application with major functionalities as discussed previously. At the same time, our application is unique from other applications and websites by including basic legal information that a client would need before visiting a lawyer.
What we learned
Through our research, we learned about various legal practices and processes that are common in our state, North Carolina, while also understanding how we could use our technical skills to help those around us.
What's next for SocioLawgy
One of the major future goals for SocioLawgy is to allow a third party to create authentication during login and verification of important documents that determine the credibility of the user. We plan on doing so by using AI models that use image recognition with any official identification documents provided by each of the users. We also plan on expanding this application on a larger scale to be able to incorporate other states and their legal practices, while making the app as effective and efficient as planned. Moreover, to follow the state's legal practices more effectively, we would like to allow lawyers to choose cases based on the proximity or locations where they are permitted to work.
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