A public/private partnership has developed an online tool to support changing attitudes toward ‘destructive legal battles’ and encourage families to resolve their issues earlier and outside of court, where it is appropriate and safe to do so.
The Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE), part of the Home Office, seeks to solve ‘public safety and security challenges arising from rapidly changing digital and data technologies.’ According to the ACE website it ‘brings together expertise from industry and academia to innovate collaboratively.’
Over the past two years the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has worked with ACE to design and develop a new online chatbot that allows users to ask questions in their own words and provides them with the correct advice and guidance. A self-help tool for making child arrangements plans (CAP) to enable conflict resolution, negating the need for attending court, has also been developed with positive initial results say the MoJ; 17 new users and a 36% completion rate in BETA testing.
The systems have been developed to tackle issues around a ‘justice system that can, at times, reinforce that conflict, pitting parents against each other to ‘win’ an unnecessary and destructive legal battle. Evidence clearly shows that these strung-out separations are especially damaging for children with effects that can last a lifetime.’
The MoJ say they have conducted stakeholder engagement on the projects across internal MoJ teams, cross government departments and wider ecosystem stakeholders of private family law, technology sectors and academia as part of the development of the tools.
The aim of these workshops was to take the pain points identified and understand from the current ecosystem, what capabilities are required of a ‘one-stop shop’, and what existing and what future technologies can be leveraged to support this work.
The tools are designed to help families resolve issues without the need to go to court with MoJ statistics showing more than 60,000 private law children and contested finance cases ended up in the courts in 2022 alone.
