LawTie

(1) Landing Page
(2) Landing Page down
(3) User's Page: Seeking help & Requesting Support for a Case
(4) Professional's Page: Creating own Profile
(5) Businesses' Page: Profile Overview
(6) About us page
(7) AI Chatbox

Inspiration

Imagine working tirelessly for 12 years in trying to win a court case against a powerful opponent. Imagine losing for 12 years because the opponent has a private lawyer and you can only afford a pro bono one. This is the story of Luca. This was our starting point for our startup and future organization "LawTie".

It is estimated that 86% of civil legal problems faced by low-income Americans receive inadequate or no legal help in a given year, according to the LSC. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, a similar survey revealed that 37% of young people reported one or more legal problems, but an alarming 84% received no support from any professional adviser or lawyer.

What it does

This real life experiences and data, built our inspiration and motivation, convincing us of the necessity of an innovative and ambitious platform: LawTie. We visualised three words: Bridge, Empower, Succeed. These represented our mission of not only raising awareness on this substantial issue, but also connecting three main groups: users in need of legal support, students in law-related fields who are searching for opportunities to learn and gain experience, and employees who can contribute knowledge and structure. By bringing them together we ambite to address the lawyer-client mismatch, the problem of underpaid internships and limited work experience for students, and the constant struggle of businesses to find qualified professional with objective record tracking.

How we built it

The website was built using Visual Studio Code in connection with a GitHub repository. Using GitHub Desktop, we were able to fetch all the new changes to the website. As beginners, we asked for help in finding a way to properly observe any changes we were making, and we were advised to use Lovable for this purpose. That is what we did.

Challenges we ran into

Our greatest challenge, however, was synchronizing work on the same file. We had to use Visual Studio Live Share, but the number of conflicts and issues in fetching was numerous, and this became one of our biggest challenges, slowing us down. Still, we learned so much in such a short and fun amount of time, we connected with other students, and strengthened that resilience and perseverance that let us confidently say: we are ready to win this "case"!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As an emerging tech team, not only as a category but in hackathons in general, we are proud first to have found an idea that all of us are enthusiastic about and to have found something that will go beyond after HackGT12. This occasion truly showed us the passion we have for learning, embrace challenges, and step out of our confort zone in an environment that no one of us has ever seen before. We found what we believe we were born to do: create to make an entrepreneurial idea a reality, led by a team of ambitious students and to call this our LawTie North Star. Acknowledging this, we had a productive discussion which prompted us to identify not only one but three big problem areas, merging each team member’s interests and unique skills. And what excites us the most: we built a website prototype in 36 hours.

What we learned

As a group of 3 curious girls, we discovered the importance of scoping ideas and managing time for improved quality, not quantity. We now know the basics of web development by learning from our mistakes. Thank you to the Hacker House for hosting us and encouraging us in our journey, and to the mentors and help desk for their support, we also got to learn that the community in GT wants us to grow, and that asking questions and reaching out for help is what makes us stronger. Hundreds of syntax and name errors later...LawTie might have started as the idea of three, but it grew through the collaborative spirit of the GT community. From a sofa on the third floor of the Klaus building, now we are ready to spread our ideas, and scale them up for the world.

What's next for LawTie

We firmly believe in the potential of LawTie, but we do acknowledge the thousands of step forward and changes still need to be made. The website does not present all the features we would need for smooth running, thus we are looking forward to adding Cedar.ai technology to our chatbot, a 48-hour response countdown, team-based approach matching and assignment algorithms, performance ranking calculations, and career advancement, among others. Outside of the technical aspects of our platform, LawTie will soon apply for incubator programs and crowdfunding initiatives, connecting with local legal aid organizations to test LawTie in real use. This is only the start and we will pursue this idea, which started in HackGT12, but that will go so much beyond!