Many legal innovators attempt to standardise and scale the services of lawyers. They may build referral sites, matching clients and lawyers, thus lowering the search costs for customers and the marketing costs for lawyers. Another opportunity is to offer legal information and diagnosis. Advice can be automated through chatbots and tailored by a telephone help desk.

A few innovators went further. They support negotiation and even filing claims at courts. The French start-up Demander Justice specialises in employment issues and claims lower than €10,000, because these can be filed without lawyer assistance. For other problems, it helps people to prepare their files and then connects them to lawyers who will represent them in court at a lower price than they would pay if they had to contract a lawyer individually.

How should a task force evaluate the value added by these services? Most of these services fixate on price. By increasing efficiency, they lower the costs of legal services.

A task force should consider outcomes first. Information or advice is valuable if it increases resolution rates. Finding a lawyer prepared to take on a case does not help, unless that lawyer is more capable than a random lawyer found on the web in negotiating good outcomes for clients. Help with filing a claim at court is as good a value proposition as the solution the court offers. If the service is not capable of delivering good outcomes, price hardly matters. It is like lowering the price of diesel generators to ensure people get power 24/7. Actually, surveys on access to justice indicate that price is only one of many barriers to effective solutions. In our 2020 Trend Report Charging for Justice we explored the option that fixating on price may even decrease access to justice. If customers can only distinguish between services according to price and are not able to assess the value services bring to them, providers will compete on price and quality will decrease in the entire market.

In order to prepare providers of these services for substantial investments, we therefore  recommend a taskforce to ask them to first define outcomes. Then stimulate them to ensure these outcomes can be achieved. Evidence for this may be made available by developing a treatment guideline or using an existing one. Next, the service can be standardised to ensure outcomes in a systematic way. Ideally, the service offers the users a step by step process towards resolution, with continuous evaluation of progress against the desirable outcomes.

Crucially, the online legal service should adjust to the adjudication option that is available. Can an uncooperative defendant be incentivised to agree to a fair solution? Can the provider then ensure a decision by a local court, or an intervention by an ombudsman? If a neutral decision through formal channels is not feasible, incentives to cooperate can be generated by influencing the reputation of the defendant. This is a more aggressive approach, used by platforms such as Resolver in the UK. It is most common for assisting consumers seeking a solution from sellers of goods and services, for whom reputation is crucial. 

When investigating legal information pathways available to internet users, the task force is likely to be disappointed. Information websites, mobile apps, or Facebook pages are easy to start but costly to maintain. They are often not scalable. Many remain dormant or are little more than fronts of law firms, which may confuse the increasing number of people who look for trustworthy information on the internet. Wikipedia pages on justice issues are not that helpful (which may change if treatments become standardised across jurisdictions).

Advertising models for legal information websites have failed. Information through a radio program or television show discussing legal issues may generate sufficient revenue (check, feasible? Effective outcomes?). In the UK, information is supplied by Citizen Advice, a cooperative between local NGOs, where each NGO  generates a combination of private donations and subsidies. In the US, no single source of information online is dominant, although the HiiL/IAALS survey found 40% of people with justice problems start their justice journey online. In African countries and the Arab region we have seen many attempts to set up legal information sites, but until now no such platform has reached the broke even point.

Most information websites therefore offer tools and follow-up services that can be monetized and replicated. Another business model is referral fees or subscription fees from lawyers. Websites using this model now exist in many countries. We have not seen national champions yet, so we suspect that the financial model for this type of service still needs attention.

When assisting people with advice or with filing cases at courts, startups like Demander Justice had to invest in litigation started by members of the legal profession. In California, courts have set up help desks that assist clients with filing claims as a public service, arguably because private services were afraid to fill the legal advice gap. 

Similar to claiming platforms, these portals bridge the gap between the public and unresponsive government justice services. Once a task force ensures that a one stop procedure or a community justice service is effective and scaled, the private portals will shift their attention to other justice problems or services adding more value.