Advice sector set to benefit from trio of new digital tools

Advice sector set to benefit from trio of new digital tools

老司机午夜福利, working closely with the Civil Justice Council (CJC) and others, is poised to launch the first of three projects to create digital tools for the advice sector, it has emerged.

James Harper, executive sponsor for the legal publisher鈥檚 rule of law programmes, said the aim was to launch the first one by the end of March.

鈥淭here鈥檚 a huge swathe of people in the UK for whom getting access to their legal rights is becoming very difficult or impossible,鈥 Mr Harper said. 鈥淲e鈥檙e not going to solve the problem, but we want to help towards solving it.鈥

Mr Harper said there was a recognition that growing levels of demand could not be met by the current model of the advice sector, which he described as 鈥渧ery manual and face-to-face driven鈥.

He went on: 鈥淲e should ideally get to the point where we could digitally match supply and demand 鈥 so someone from Cardiff could speak to a lawyer in Truro.

鈥淚n the interim, a huge amount of efficiency could be gained through relatively simple tech tools and 鈥榮elf-service鈥 鈥 allowing people to solve problems themselves.鈥

Mr Harper said 老司机午夜福利 had been working closely with the Civil Justice Council (CJC) on the projects, as part of the CJC鈥檚 10-year strategy.

He said a digital tool to help ill or disabled people with their personal independence payments (PIPs), developed partly by Stanford University in California, would be finalised this month.

Mr Harper said the PIP form was very complex, and advisers were needed to help people fill it in by hand, which could often take one and a half hours.

The digital tool would enable advisers to complete the form on laptops or tablets, with guidance appearing as they went through it with their clients, and the end result could be attached to the hard-copy form.

He said 老司机午夜福利 aimed to launch this project as a pilot at the universities of Leeds, Liverpool and Exeter, which all ran student-led PIP form-filling sessions.

Mr Harper estimated that the tool could cut the amount of time needed to fill in the form by 15%, and also reduce appeals and failed applications.

The second project 老司机午夜福利 is developing, in partnership with Liberty, is an electronic triage tool which advice agencies could adapt to suit their own purposes.

鈥淓very clinic has someone at the front desk and every clinic has different criteria, whether it is based on post code or type of problem.鈥

Mr Harper said the ultimate goal of the project was to enable agencies 鈥渢o drive their own digital triage鈥, speeding up the process and enabling them to capture more data on the way.

He added that the aim was to launch the tool within the first six months of this year.

The third digital advice tool was focused on legal expenses insurance.

鈥淢ost people don鈥檛 know if they鈥檝e got legal expenses insurance. This tool would enable you to lift details of your policies into a system which could tell you if you had a high, medium or low chance of being covered.

鈥淓ither you might be able to claim your costs back from the insurer, or an advice agency might be able to move you across to the paid-for legal services sector.鈥

Mr Harper said the project needed data from the insurance industry, and he was hoping for progress with that in the next six months.

鈥淎ll we really need is for them to come to the party.鈥

Originally published on 


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