Guide to Safety: Meeting legal need with technology
Peninsula Community Legal Centre and Legal Tech Helper join forces to create an online tool that aids support workers to help their clients navigate the legal system.
Women on temporary partner visas experiencing family violence face significant risks, including threats of deportation and separation from their children. Navigating family violence exemption provisions in Australia’s Migration Framework can be challenging, and it can be difficult for support agencies to access clear and easy to understand information on the application process.
To address this issue, Peninsula Community Legal Centre partnered with Legal Tech Helper to create an online resource that assists agency workers in supporting their clients on temporary visas. The Guide to Safety tool provides a guided pathway to help workers understand the family violence provisions of the Migration Framework and to refer their clients to migration assistance services
Clients and support workers struggle to navigate migration laws
Under the Migration Act 1958 (Cth), victim survivors of family violence who have applied for or hold a partner visa can leave abusive relationships without losing their entitlement to a permanent visa. However, there are many barriers preventing eligible women from applying for this safety net.
“These clients are particularly vulnerable,” explained Sam Lovrich, CEO of Legal Tech Helper, when discussing the low application rate. Clients can face cultural, language, and technological barriers alongside a lack of knowledge about their visa status and rights.
There was also limited resources for support agencies to navigate the complex legal system. “We started hearing more and more from our community partners and community workers about their difficulty in navigating and assisting clients,” relates Engy Abdelsalam, Community Lawyer at PCLC. “Workers just didn’t know where to go.”
To address the lack of clear and accessible information available to support workers or their clients on how to go about this, PCLC and Legal Tech Helper partnered to create an easy-to-use online guided pathway to build an understanding of the application process.
Designed for purpose
To understand how to assist support agencies, PCLC and Legal Tech Helper had to first understand the major challenges workers face navigating the Migration Framework. Consultations were held with 38 professionals from 13 different organisations across the family violence and community sector. This included family violence workers, settlement and community case workers, lawyers and migration agents.
“We wanted to know what their current process was, and where our tool could fit to make a real difference.” said Engy, outlining how the consultations shaped the client journey mapping. The consultations also helped to identify the key requirements for the tool, including the need for clear and simple legal information, warnings and safety planning resources and tips, and resources such as flowcharts and printable PDF information factsheets to be embedded in the tool to help workers to collect evidence.
Weekly meetings between PCLC and Legal Tech Helper were held over twelve months to ensure the project’s development and delivery. The project team also held regular meetings with PCLC’s migration clinic legal team to create, review and approve the legal content.
“Through the design and build stage, we kept going back to what those concerns were from the support workers we consulted with to ensure that the tool was relevant to them.” - Sam Lovrich, Legal Tech Helper CEO
The final Guide to Safety tool provides a range of guidance and resources including:
• an easy-to-navigate pathway to identify if a client may be eligible
• Information about the evidence a client needs
• Guidance around safety planning
• Referral options to PCLC’s Migration Law Clinic, other pro-bono migration services and other resources.
An important refection from PCLC and Legal Tech Helper after undergoing the project was that legal technology can offer highly effective solutions to legal problems, but that it requires significant investment in terms of time and financial and human resources to create.
Guide to Safety launched to high engagement
In the six weeks since the launch on 13 June 2024, PCLC and Legal Tech Helper’s Guide to Safety tool has been accessed over 200 times. More than 50% of those users navigated through the entire pathway. There were also a number of users who identified that they were not a worker but were experiencing family violence themselves, indicating that victim survivors are also finding value in using the tool designed for support workers
In addition, more than 30 community workers indicated that their clients were still in the violent relationship, meaning that whilst they were not yet eligible to benefit from the family violence provisions, these clients could benefit from information on gathering evidence to increase their chance of receiving full protection under the Act.
“This data is positive," Kirsten Young, Education and Legal Policy Officer at PCLC explains. "In addition to assisting people who are already eligible under the family violence provisions navigate the process, the tool is also having an impact at the early intervention stage.”
The potential future of legal technology at PCLC
PCLC has added the Guide to Safety to their regular community legal education and engagement programs, and have plans to explore how the tool could be built upon to further aid support workers to assist their clients.
“Guide to Safety meets a significant unmet legal need,” says Kirsten Young. “We have come away with a great appreciation of the opportunities legal technology can open to provide innovative ways to reach our clients.”
Guide to Safety is accessible from PCLC’s website.
“VLF grants had made a huge difference not just in the way we've delivered our services, but in how we innovate to provide legal information.” - Engy Abdelsalam, PCLC Community Lawyer
The Guide to Safety tool was funded by a Victoria Law Foundation Grant. If you have a project addressing a legal need that we could help to fund, explore our Grants program.