Court Room Compass

Client: Sashy Nathan, Commons Law CIC

Many people who appear in a magistrates' court carry problems alongside the charge: nowhere safe to sleep, untreated mental illness, addiction, debt. These issues are often also what bring them back to court, yet their solicitor has little more than a web search to find help. Your task is to build Justice+, a tool that lets a lawyer select a client's needs and a postcode and, in under three minutes, receive a ranked shortlist of local services that are open, eligible and genuinely taking referrals. The hard part is trust. Service directories go stale fast, feeds from councils and charities overlap and contradict each other, and one wrong fact sends a vulnerable person to a dead end. You'll need to design a pipeline that merges messy sources, detects duplicates and changes, and routes doubtful records for human checking, plus a tool that never hallucinates or shows a fact it can't trace to a verified source. Security and trust are paramount - nothing identifying the client may be entered or stored. Your client co-founded an award-winning law firm and will provide seed data from a pilot and practising lawyers to test with.