Law Centres Triage Assist

The Problem Every year, millions of people in England and Wales face a legal problem they cannot resolve - around 3.6 million adults annually have an unmet legal need, and roughly a third of all legal problems are never satisfactorily resolved. A decade of cuts has hollowed out the help available: legal aid spending has fallen by more than £700 million since 2012, and the number of people receiving early legal advice has collapsed from nearly 680,000 a year to around 127,000. Whole regions are now "legal aid deserts" — for welfare benefits, more than four in five people have no local provider at all.

But the deeper problem sits at the front door. Even where help exists, it is overwhelmed. People arrive at an advice service in crisis and are turned away, misdirected, or lost between agencies — not because no one wants to help, but because there is no capacity to triage, route, and prioritise them quickly enough. The first point of contact, where the journey to justice should begin, is exactly where people fall through.

The Solution Triage Assist is a front-door triage tool that helps advice services see more people, more safely. It does not give legal advice. It does one thing well: at the moment someone first makes contact, it captures their problem in plain language, checks scope and eligibility, flags urgent deadlines, and routes them to the right help — whether that is a caseworker, another agency, or a self-help resource. It is built on principles the advice sector itself has set out. It draws only on designated, vetted sources, so every output is traceable and the risk of hallucination is controlled. It keeps a trained human in the loop on every advice-bearing decision — assisting frontline staff rather than replacing them. And it is co-designed with the caseworkers who use it, so it reflects how the work is actually done. The result is a front door that turns no one away uninformed. By absorbing the repetitive load of triage, it returns scarce caseworker hours to the people who need a human most — and gives those who cannot be seen an accurate route forward instead of a closed door. No wrong door to justice.

Measuring Success

Reach and Routing

Number of people triaged through the platform. Percentage correctly routed, validated against adviser judgement.

Capacity Returned

Time saved per enquiry. Additional clients that frontline teams can support as a result.

Safety and Accuracy

Routing accuracy and error rates within agreed thresholds. Traceability of outputs to approved sources. Human review maintained on all advice-bearing decisions.

Equity and Inclusion

Number of users reached who would otherwise have been turned away. Accessibility outcomes for people facing language, literacy or digital barriers. Impact in areas with limited advice provision.

Trust and Adoption

Adviser confidence and adoption rates. User experience measures, including whether people felt heard, respected and directed to the right support.

Governance

Completed Data Protection Impact Assessment. Zero confidential-data incidents. Alignment with ICO, SRA and Charity Commission expectations.

**Front-door triage. **Captures a person's legal problem in plain language at the first point of contact and structures it into something a service can act on — the moment in the journey where people most often fall through. Scope and eligibility checking. Assesses whether the issue is in scope and whether the person is likely eligible for help (including legal-aid criteria), so cases are matched to the right route from the outset. Urgency and deadline flagging. Identifies time-critical issues — eviction dates, appeal windows, statutory deadlines — and prioritises them, so the most urgent cases surface rather than sit in a queue. Intelligent routing and signposting. Directs each person to the right destination, whether that's a caseworker, another agency, or a vetted self-help resource — meaning even those who can't be seen leave with an accurate way forward rather than a closed door. Constrained, traceable knowledge base. Draws only on designated, vetted sources, so the risk of hallucination is controlled and every output can be traced back to its source — the safety architecture the advice sector itself has called for. Human-in-the-loop by design. Assists frontline staff rather than replacing them; a trained human stays in control of any advice-bearing decision. The tool is an assistant, not an adviser. Caseworker-assist model. Built to support staff at intake rather than operate as a public-facing chatbot, which keeps a human between the model and the client and protects against deskilling. **Co-designed with frontline staff. **Developed with the caseworkers who use it, so it reflects how the work is actually done — a core part of the methodology, not an afterthought. Accessibility and inclusion. Plain-language interface, support for language barriers, accommodation of low digital confidence, so the tool narrows rather than widens the access gap. Privacy and data protection. No confidential client data passed to external models; designed around a Data Protection Impact Assessment and aligned with ICO, SRA, and Charity Commission expectations. **Built-in evaluation. **Designed from the start to measure routing accuracy, time returned to caseworkers, and equity of reach — so impact and safety can be demonstrated, not assumed.