By Francisco Silva -
Marrickville Legal Centre (MLC) has partnered with Women’s Legal Service Queensland and the Environmental Defenders Office to create a new legal practice management platform aimed at improving access to justice in Australia.
Named Consensus for Purpose, this new platform was developed in collaboration with Microsoft Partner Barhead Solutions.
“As a large community legal centre, you can imagine the volume of clients we have coming— there’s a huge amount of administrative work that’s associated with that workload,” says MLC’s Chief Executive Office Vasili Maroulis.
“Consensus for Purpose will free up our limited resources to focus on legal work and speed up the process for those needing help.”
As the second-largest community legal centre in New South Wales, the MLC has experienced increasing demand for legal aid in the recent years. Consensus for Purpose uses artificial intelligence, automated workflows, advanced search features and email management to streamline the client journey and reduce administrative burden.
“What that will then translate to is freeing up that time to enable solicitors and employees to deliver more frontline services to the community,” Maroulis says.
It’s expected the platform will reduce administrative workload by 20-30 per cent.
The platform is now live and operating at the Marrickville Legal Centre and can accommodate other CLCs. Any legal centre interested in adopting it, can register their interest here.
“Projects like this capture the innovative culture at MLC that is forever exploring more ways to help people,” says Maroulis.
“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.”
