Marrickville Legal Centre (MLC), Women’s Legal Service Queensland (WLSQ), and the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) have partnered up to design and deploy a new legal practice management platform set to improve access to justice across Australia.
The new platform, which went live this week, has been dubbed Consensus for Purpose and was developed in collaboration with Microsoft Partner Barhead.
The sector-leading partnership – spearheaded by MLC – was formed back in 2021 in response to a heightened demand for aid from community legal centres across the country. MLC is the second largest community legal centre in New South Wales, based in Sydney’s inner-west.
MLC’s Chief Executive Officer Vasili Maroulis said: “As a large community legal centre, you can imagine the volume of clients we have coming in…there’s a huge amount of administrative work that’s associated with that workload.”
Community legal centres provide an essential safety net to prevent people’s legal problems from escalating. Unfortunately, due to heightened demand and funding restraints, community legal centres must turn away over 200,000 people annually.
Consensus for Purpose will streamline the client journey and reduce administrative burden through artificial intelligence, automated workflows, advanced search features, and email management. The platform is predicted to reduce administrative workload by 20-30%.
Maroulis said: “Consensus for Purpose will free up our limited resources to focus on legal work and speed up the process for those needing help.”
“What that will then translate to is freeing up that time to enable solicitors and employees to deliver more frontline services to the community.”
By providing fair and equitable access to the justice system, community legal centres like MLC help break down societal barriers that marginalise some of our most vulnerable community members.
The deployment of Consensus for Purpose – described by Maroulis as a “truly collaborative grassroots effort” – will enable community legal centres to assist more people in the community with fewer resources.
Projects like this capture the innovative culture at MLC that is forever exploring more ways to help people,” Maroulis said.
“We will never receive enough funds from government or donations to meet demand, which is why we need to be more creative in how to do more with less.”
ALL MEDIA ENQUIRIES: Danica Moore | dmoore@mlc.org.au
