A new chapter for the Justice and Innovation Group

For the past seven years, we’ve had the privilege of convening the Justice Innovation Group (JIG). What started as a small group of special interests has grown into the UK’s leading forum for people using technology to deliver and support free legal advice for marginalised communities. With over 500 members spanning frontline organisations, technologists, funders, law firms, and policymakers, JIG has become proof of what’s possible when we come together around a shared challenge.

We’re now handing over facilitation of JIG to Smart Justice, a social enterprise that supports the research and development of digital platforms and mobile technology to enable affordable access to justice. This move will give the group the flexibility and structure to expand while keeping the collaborative spirit that makes it work.

The potential is huge. JIG has helped to build a list of over 50 ​“JusticeTech” tools that have been developed to reduce legal need, resolve legal issues, and drive efficiencies in frontline free legal advice organisations. One tool developer estimated that by rolling out their solution across frontline organisations the free legal advice sector could help 100,000 extra people a year using the same resource. At a time when demand for free legal advice services continues to outstrip the resources available to help, these solutions are not something we can afford to ignore if we’re serious about ensuring more people get access to justice.

There’s a lack of funding directed at addressing unmet legal need. Technology has transformed commercial legal services, but investment in social welfare legal practice remains desperately limited. Even LawTech aimed directly at consumers focuses on property conveyancing and wills, while areas like employment, debt, welfare benefits, homelessness, and immigration, where 45% of unmet legal need sits, remain underfunded and underdeveloped. This may be the predictable result of funding flowing where there’s financial return, but where additional funding is granted, it should go to where there’s greatest need.

Technology succeeds when it’s designed collaboratively. We’ve been blown away by the community approach we’ve seen from JIG members to address that challenges faced at the frontline. The most successful JusticeTech solutions come from cross-sector collaboration and genuine partnerships between advice organisations who understand user needs and technologists who can build sustainable solutions. But these partnerships need time, trust, structures, and resources to work and too often, none of these are available.

Infrastructure matters as much as innovation. Frontline organisations face real barriers to adopting technology: outdated hardware, limited IT support, case management systems that don’t talk to each other, and telephony systems that can’t support new tools. Funding tends to chase the exciting development work, but implementation needs investment in the basics. Without it, even brilliant solutions sit unused.

Culture and confidence take time (and money). Frontline organisations are firefighting demand. Carving out time to understand, train, assess, experiment, trial, and implement technology, and creating an organisational environment which does the same, requires leadership capacity that simply doesn’t exist when you’re stretched thin on the ground. These changes require ongoing support, mentoring, and access to specialist knowledge, but these essential resources require dedicated time and funding that is difficult to build into project budgets.

Scale and sustainability need coordinated investment. Too many promising solutions never make it beyond a single organisation because there’s no pathway to scale. Open-source tools, shared templates, and coordinated development could transform what’s possible, and how many could benefit. But this approach requires a fundamentally different funding approach that prioritises collective infrastructure over individual projects.

As a grant-making organisation, our strength lies in securing funding for free legal advice organisations. While Smart Justice takes JIG forward, we’re will be directing our resources to increasing the funding available to support frontline free legal advice organisations enabling them to implement some of the successful solutions JIG has played a part in highlighting.

But we can’t do this alone. Earlier this year we explored setting up a dedicated JusticeTech fund to support this work at scale but couldn’t secure the backing needed to make it happen.

That means funders willing to fund in new and collaborative ways, including exploring owning technology for wider social good. It means Government departments recognising and funding the vital role the free legal advice sector plays in designing and developing tech to reduce legal need. We should be asking tech companies and investors to reinvest profits from the legal tech ecosystem into solutions for marginalised communities. And we should expect funding in this space to the impactful work that happens in the unglamorous spaces: leadership time, training budgets, hardware upgrades.

The expertise exists and there are solutions sitting on the digital shelf. What’s missing is the collective will to fund them properly.

We’ll continue collaborating with the Smart Justice team to ensure JIG maintains its core principles and remains a space where the community can connect, share, and learn together.

Thank you to everyone who’s contributed to JIG over the years. What you’ve built together is rare and valuable, and we’re excited to see where it goes next.