Access to Justice

The Vision is about Access to Justice for Everyone

I have a dream… where everyone in the UK can access basic legal help, more affordably, more quickly and with greater confidence than they do currently.

It seems to me, and most people I speak to about it, that the link between access to justice and legal services isn’t as strong as it may have been in the past.  Law firms may go from strength to strength in selling their services but unless you have insurance or pots of cash you may find it hard to get proper legal help and many people suffer as a result.

At Law on the Web we know first-hand that for every 100 people who say they need legal help, only 8 actually engage a lawyer. Why? The language used may be ‘bad leads’, ‘time wasters', ‘not serious’, but our view is that the 92% of the general public are right and just don’t find what they are looking for at a price that makes sense to them. We plan to change that.

The world is changing quickly around us and we believe that the way people access legal help needs to change too and be all about the individual and never about the law firms. The law firms who do adapt to what people really need will of course become very popular and in demand.

Our challenge is to not only help a person who needs a High Court complex injunction, or a serious personal injury case, but also someone who just needs to speak with a  solicitor once for 20 minutes to find out whether they can legally cut down their neighbours’ overhanging branch. Currently, lawyers are not well equipped to deal with people who just need a bit of help cheaply (or for free).

I take inspiration from Apple. Remember the days when we used to buy CDs for £14.99 and were forced to buy the songs we hated as well as our favourite tracks? iTunes came along and said there was a better way. People can buy what they want at £0.59 a track. This was madness at the time but wonderful for the consumer. BUT, what is the end result, we now all have iPods, iPhones, iPads, and use the iTunes store on an almost daily basis because Apple won our trust.

At Law on the Web we see ourselves as reformers. It all starts with that big bold question to our users (people like you), what do you actually want? We are going to build legal services, products around our community - you. Our agenda and values are being set by you...