About the Joining Up Justice Project

Since 2016, Justice Connect has been researching the experience of people in Australia looking for legal help, and the experience of legal services delivering help. We have spoken directly with hundreds of legal help-seekers and workshopped with many community legal centres, legal aid providers and referring agencies.

Our research showed what many of you would know already: for help-seekers, looking for legal help is hard, confusing, demoralising. And for service-providers, connecting with help-seekers, handling enquiries, getting the word out, and reducing the referral roundabout is a constant challenge.

This Joining Up Justice website summarises our research findings and sets out some of the opportunities to improve the issues we identified. It presents and maps the experience of looking for help from the perspective of both a help-seeker and a legal service provider.

For each stage of the journey, the site articulates common pain points and presents opportunities to address these pain points, as identified by the people and organisations that have participated in our research.

We will continue to enrich the website with further materials to help the legal assistance sector take action to address pain points and seize opportunities to make improvements. This version of the website is our MVP, and we hope to release further, more useful versions with further time and resources.

We are grateful to the many consumers, clients, help-seekers, and sector colleagues who hace contributed to this work since 2016.

And while many organisations have funded our exploratory work and research since 2016, we would like to particularly acknowledge the Victorian Legal Services Board (VLSB). The VLSB have funded a project over the last two years enabling us to explore the interactions between our work and the broader sector that we operate in, and the interdependencies between our aims to improve the experience for our help-seekers and improving the broader justice ecosystem in which our help-seekers struggle to connect with help.

If you have feedback on this site, we welcome it. This is our V1, and we hope to iterate and enrich the site you see today. Please provide your feedback here. It will be gratefully received.

You can read more about Justice Connect’s digital innovation work here.

Thank you, the Justice Connect Innovation Team.