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main page
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pro bono case form
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case information retrieval
Inspiration
Carousell, CMB, and tuition matching agencies were some angles we considered, but we ultimately wanted something simple and yet instructive for pro bono clinic attendees who seek further legal representation ("Prospects").
Singapore Legal Advice served as both the main anchoring inspiration as well as a motivation to improve through our platform.
What it does
The platform has two main points of functionality, driven by two main issues facing these Prospects.
The first issue is the repetitiveness in explaining their situation to each lawyer they consider working with. Each potential lawyer contacted by the Prospect has to sieve out the legal issues in the Prospect's story and then render legal advice. Searching for the right lawyer thus takes a lot of time and trouble for Prospects. We aim to eliminate this problem by simply transmitting knowledge and analysis performed by the pro bono volunteers to prospective lawyers. This includes a coherent summary of the salient facts and the legal issues, and the advice rendered by the volunteer lawyer. Much like a diagnosis of a patient's symptoms would help make other doctors' work much easier, would-be lawyers could access the Prospect's anonymised pro bono case brief to speed up discussions with the Prospect, as well as a possible price quotation.
The second issue is the helplessness that Prospects feel when they are told to find legal representation on their own by volunteer lawyers (as the volunteer lawyers are not allowed to make any recommendations). While websites like Singapore Legal Advice provide some relief, their "Find a Lawyer" section is organised according to areas of law (e.g. civil litigation, conveyancing), and does not allow searching for multiple categories at once. Assuming Prospects do discover such websites, they are likely to feel overwhelmed.
Again, our platform addresses this by drawing on the work done by the pro bono volunteer students, who classify each case according to the relevant legal areas. When volunteers submit the same information to our platform, a special token is given to Prospects, allowing them to perform a specialised search on the platform that displays a list of lawyers with expertise in at least one of the legal areas with which their problems are concerned. The legalese is hidden from the Prospect and only what is needed is shown.
Thereafter, Prospects can choose to share their information with selected lawyers on the list. The lawyers are informed by email and can view the Prospect's case information and contact information on the platform. The lawyers can then reach out to the Prospects, already armed with a good background of the Prospects' case. The Prospects may alternatively also reach out to the lawyers via the phone and email numbers on our platform.
