LegalBeagles is the UK’s longest running dedicated legal advice forum. A forum is a public website where users join anonymously and ask the community for advice on a personal ‘thread’ which contains all their questions and responses from experts. The public nature of the forum and its sheer size means that any incorrect responses are quickly challenged and corrected by one of around fifty volunteers, known as VIPs.
This open approach has allowed us to safely handle an incredible range of legal matters, but we specialise in civil matters like court claims, debt, employment law, family, wills & probate and property. LegalBeagles has now generated 904,000 legal Q&A and helps around 2 million people a year.
Forums can be risky places to seek advice. They are unregulated and do not always guarantee good advice, but when they are well managed, transparent and respect the legislature and courts, it is possible to harness the power of a forum like LegalBeagles to support access to justice.
We plan to use our data and community to:
- assess our role in delivering frontline legal advice and calculate what needs to be done to ensure greatest benefit to consumers.
- build relationships with tech providers and research groups to use machine learning, an innovation that can analyse our data to auto-generate tailored advice, to support the training of an industry wide range of legal chatbots (computer programs that deliver live conversations with users) to be tested and deployed directly into the forum community for testing and monitoring.
We have spent the last three years working with Innovate UK to design, train and build our first chatbot specialised in employment law issues. We have therefore undertaken the vital technical work required to ensure that legal chatbots can be smoothly integrated into the existing forum architecture.
During 2022, we worked with LawLabWales on the first formal research project on a forum’s frontline performance during Covid19. This research analysed the behaviour of consumers seeking help with employment law problems incurred during the pandemic and compared it against consumer behaviour before and after Covid19. This report was fascinating to participate in and the first time we have been asked to open our data to formal study. It was very gratifying to hear the positive feedback from the researchers on the excellent performance of the forum during challenging times. They certainly believe LegalBeagles advice is highly tailored to the individuals needs and therefore can be considered more useful and relevant than static advice sites.
Another consideration is the mental health benefits of tackling a stressful legal problem with the support of an online community. Previous research on mental health support communities has shown clear benefits but this has never been fully analysed for legal forums. Our observations of user behaviour has revealed that the process of successfully tackling a legal problem yourself is very empowering and educational.
We have direct ‘case study’ data from thousands of consumer/SME experiences since 2007 and we really want to drill into these journeys to see if analysis can help show the way forward in using our forum as a trusted and safe legal resource for the UK and perhaps further afield.
Despite the vast size of the LegalBeagles forum and our evident success at helping large numbers of users cost effectively, the site is run by just two management team and we receive no public funding, nor can we be a charity as the advice offered is unregulated and without liability.
This leaves us with the challenge of growing an ethical data led solution to ensure our future stability. We are optimistic that we are finally reaching the point where we can use LegalBeagles as a ‘Sandbox’ for legal tech corporates to learn from our data, leverage our community and work together to solve access to justice from the ground up using the power of people and AI working alongside one another.