News – Blog
17 December 2021
Guest blog by Kari Gerstheimer and Miriam Valencia, Access Social Care
The council never used to reply to me at all, and now I get an answer every time! Thank you – this work is already making a huge difference for our patients!
It’s quite something to receive feedback like this. When an idea is brewing and incubating, when a technology is new and requires multiple iterations, it can sometimes seem like a beneficial product is a long way off. In the space of just two years, we’ve entered and won the Legal Access Challenge, become an independent charity having previously been incubated by Mencap, and come through a pandemic. The pace at which a seed of an idea can become a service that makes a difference to people’s lives is astonishing.
In April 2020, Access Social Care and Mencap won the Legal Access Challenge. Part of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) legal technology fund, the challenge was a £500,000 prize to bring forward innovative solutions to help individuals and small businesses gain greater access to the legal system, allowing them to understand and resolve their legal problems easier.
The idea for our entry to the challenge was born because every day, millions of older and disabled people are denied the social care they need. Local authorities struggle to meet their legal duties and provide the social care people have a right to. Unfortunately, many people in the UK cannot afford lawyers, forcing them to rely on limited legal aid.
Access Social Care started life within Mencap – the UK’s leading charity supporting people with a learning disability. As a team we provided (and continue to provide) expert legal advice to the many people that contact the charity each day about their social care needs – some with simple questions, some with very complex cases. The challenge we faced was ensuring that the finite resources of the legal team were being directed at the most complex of legal issues, whilst maintaining a high quality and prompt service for those simpler queries. We needed a solution that made accurate legal advice promptly available to as many people as possible, and a service that could grow over time to constantly improve the breadth of advice it could offer.
Access Social Care and Mencap’s winning solution was a chatbot particularly designed for the needs of people with a learning disability, harnessing machine learning to constantly improve and refine the advice that is available to users. The chatbot is capable of triaging cases, providing answers to the more routine questions, supporting contact centre staff to support simpler queries, and ensuring the more complicated cases are funnelled to the legal team.
As a start-up, winning the Legal Access Challenge has granted us a status that money couldn’t buy. The validation of Challenge Works and the Solicitors Regulation Authority means we are taken seriously; it’s a mark of quality that our Chatbot is a gamechanger. We were very new to the industry and the legal technology world – not only did participating grant us confidence in ourselves, it has resulted in the confidence of others.
In the last year, we have secured significant match funding from organisations like Comic Relief, the Baring Foundation, The Oak Foundation and the Community Justice Fund. Securing continued funding can be incredibly difficult for start-ups. If a new company (or charity) is to turn an idea into a product with impact, every small business like ours needs investment to scale.
The transition from proof of concept to a product that is ready for market is a difficult process – for long-term business sustainability, this continuation in funding is vital. Whilst there is start-up funding available to explore new innovations like ours, our experience is that funding for continued development remains limited. We would really like to see more grant giving funders investing in continuation for technology solutions such as ours, broadening where investments are made.
Winning the prize was certainly a financial boost, but the additional expert support available through the Legal Access Challenge has been even more important. This included support from the SRA and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to help us understand our regulatory obligations, and, most valuable to the chatbot’s development, expert advice from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Its generous guidance during the challenge have proved invaluable when it has come to developing our rationale for data processing, to a point where we have been repeatedly praised about our use and understanding of data where our documentation has been used as an example for other charities working on tech solutions. Support from organisations and experts of this calibre is not easy to come by for a start-up; the workshops we took part in and the mentoring we received are valuable to this day.
When we developed the Chatbot and entered the Legal Access Challenge in early 2019, we had no idea of what awaited the world in 2020. The pandemic and its impact on social care made stark the need for solutions like ours.
Since winning, we have pressed ahead with developing and iterating the Chatbot to create a product that can help all charities, organisations and support groups working in the sector – many of which are too small to hope to be able to develop anything like it on their own.
Our biggest leap forward has been moving the Chatbot to an open-source platform. All along we have focused on creating a free legal advice service that complements the hard work of the dedicated people who work in social care. This move means in addition to helping people contacting Mencap, we can help many more besides.
There has been a 92% drop in legal aid cases since 2010. Without access to justice, people’s rights do not exist. This is what we sought to address with the Chatbot.
Taking part in the Legal Access Challenge meant we have built a robust platform that works for people in need. Winning has elevated our reputation which in turn has helped us secure match funding investment. Importantly, in a relatively short period, we have released a product that is already helping us to fulfil our mission of making legal advice about social care available to all who need it.
Kari Gerstheimer is CEO and Miriam Valencia is Head of Operations of Access Social Care. Access Social Care provides free legal advice to people with social care needs, helping to achieve a better quality of life.
