Three family law professionals have won a prestigious ‘Innovation Award’ at Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Awards 2020/21.
Becki Cassia, co-founder of Transparently, Samantha Woodham, one of the co-founders of The Divorce Surgery and Alice Stephenson who leads Stephenson Law were three women in law out of 40 winners each to win a £50,000 cash prize.
Becki’s lawtech start-up, Transparently, aims to improve communication between family lawyers and their clients and will in the future become a product that could help identify cases involving coercive control.
Transparently is a family law client and communications management platform that links legal and other support professionals to their clients. The platform manages the client journey online, centralising all interactions, between the client and lawyer and between the client and their former partner.
A non-lawyer, Ms Cassia, had a light bulb moment after going through her own divorce with the idea coming about after enduring eight sets of court proceedings. One of the main issues with the divorce process was “an immutable chronology” and the fact that her lawyers were not privy to the full context of exchanges with her ex-husband.
A barrister, Samantha Woodham, who co-founded The Divorce Surgery with a colleague from 4 Paper Buildings Barrister, Harry Gates, launched the Divorce Surgery in 2018 as an alternative business structure – which allows separating couples to seek advice from a one individual expert at any point in the separation and divorce process.
Talking about her winnings, Samantha explained that she wanted to use the prize money to automate completion of the archiac Form E divorcing couples must complete to disclose their finances.
Solicitor, Alice Stephenson, who set up Stephenson Law in 2017 is using her £50,000 cash prize to build an automated platform that provides cost-effective legal support to start-ups.
Not only did the award come with monetary prize but also mentoring, coaching and training – as well as the wider access to the community of winners and accompanying support network.
