CivSense
Legal services, systems and research built around the realities of civil justice.
CivSense brings together specialist legal practice, practical technology and evidence from frontline delivery to improve how civil legal services are delivered, funded and understood.
CivSense Law delivers specialist civil legal services.
CivSense Systems develops tools that reduce administrative burden and support sustainable legal practice.
CivSense Research uses evidence from service delivery to identify where systems are failing and what improves outcomes.
Why CivSense exists
Civil legal services are becoming harder to deliver sustainably.
The problem is not simply the level of legal aid fees.
Specialist practitioners also spend significant amounts of time managing administration, progressing files, recording work, gathering evidence, monitoring deadlines, preparing accounts, dealing with payment issues and repeatedly entering the same information into different systems.
Much of that work is necessary. Much of it does not require specialist legal judgment.
When those functions are poorly supported, professional time is diverted away from advice, negotiation, representation and client care.
At the same time, legal aid participation continues to fall, specialist capacity becomes concentrated in fewer places and people are increasingly likely to reach crisis before they can obtain meaningful legal assistance.
CivSense is being developed in response to those practical problems.
The aim is to improve the way specialist civil legal services are delivered, reduce avoidable administrative work, make legally aided practice easier to sustain and generate better evidence about what is happening across the justice system.
CivSense Law
Specialist civil legal services focused on practical outcomes.
CivSense Law is designed to provide specialist advice and representation in areas where legal intervention can prevent serious financial and social consequences.
Its initial focus is housing, homelessness, debt and enforcement.
- eviction
- mortgage repossession
- rent arrears
- homelessness
- consumer and public debt
- council tax recovery
- court enforcement
- repayment and settlement
- legal aid
- related civil court proceedings
The approach
The first task is to establish what the real issue is.
That may be a genuine legal defence. It may be an incorrect debt, a procedural defect, an affordability problem, missing financial support, continuing liability, a failure elsewhere in the system or a need for urgent representation.
Where there is a proper legal defence, it should be identified and advanced.
Where liability is clear, the focus should move quickly to the outcome most likely to improve the client’s position: resolving affordability, preventing unnecessary decree, reducing further liability, negotiating sustainable repayment or reaching settlement.
The aim is to use legal expertise where it makes a material difference.
Specialist representation
Extending access beyond the limits of a traditional local office.
CivSense Law is designed around a remote-first specialist service.
Advice, case preparation, negotiation, client communication, evidence gathering and file management can be undertaken centrally.
That makes it possible to provide specialist assistance across wider geographical areas without requiring a fully staffed specialist office in every location.
Where physical attendance is required, CivSense can work with local practitioners to provide defined court representation.
The central specialist team retains responsibility for the wider case, including preparation, strategy, client communication and ongoing conduct.
This allows specialist expertise to reach more people while making use of existing local court capacity.
Supporting local firms
Defined court work without taking over the whole case.
Many local firms have experienced practitioners who can provide effective court representation but may not wish to assume responsibility for an additional legally aided file from beginning to end.
CivSense is designed to make defined local appearance work easier to provide.
The central team can manage the client, prepare the case, organise the papers, provide instructions and retain responsibility for ongoing conduct.
A local practitioner can then undertake an agreed appearance or other defined piece of work.
The intention is to create additional, predictable work for local firms without requiring them to take on the wider administration, legal aid billing and file-management burden associated with full conduct.
CivSense is intended to work with existing practitioners, not around them.
CivSense Clinics
Practical support with the barriers that stop cases progressing.
Not every obstacle to justice is primarily legal.
Clients may be unable to progress a case because they cannot access an online account, retrieve a document, download a statement, understand what evidence has been requested or navigate several disconnected public-sector systems.
These problems can delay cases and consume significant legal time.
CivSense Clinics are intended to provide practical one-to-one assistance with tasks such as:
- accessing Universal Credit journals
- retrieving rent and account statements
- downloading bank statements
- resetting online accounts
- obtaining documents and records
- uploading evidence
- organising paperwork
- understanding what information needs to be provided
The clinics are not a substitute for legal advice.
They are intended to remove practical barriers so that legal advice can be acted upon effectively.
The service is primarily remote, with in-person support where that is useful and can be accommodated.
CivSense Systems
Technology designed around the work practitioners actually do.
CivSense Systems develops tools for legal practice, beginning with the parts of casework that create the greatest administrative burden.
The objective is not to add another layer of software.
It is to reduce repeated work, improve case progression, make legal aid billing easier to manage and turn information already generated through casework into useful operational data.
The underlying principle is simple:
Information should be entered once wherever reasonably possible, reused from reliable sources and carried through the systems needed to run the case.
CaseOS
Structured case management without repeated data entry.
CaseOS is designed to bring the operational life of a legal matter into one structured workspace.
- client and matter information
- documents
- correspondence
- deadlines
- evidence
- court events
- tasks
- case progression
- communication
Where reliable information already exists, the system should be capable of reusing it rather than requiring someone to type it again.
Reuse reliable information
That may include:
- creating client and matter records from legal aid forms and other source documents
- extracting names, addresses and contact information
- generating initial correspondence from information already held
- turning call transcripts into draft attendance notes and follow-up actions
- identifying dates and deadlines from court documents and correspondence
- creating tasks from live case events
- linking evidence to the relevant issue
- maintaining structured case chronology
- generating diary and court coverage information from live case data
The aim is to reduce duplicated work and make the status of a case easier to understand.
Case progression
Making responsibility for the next step visible.
Cases often become difficult to manage not because every issue is legally complex, but because a large number of smaller actions need to happen in the right order and at the right time.
That may include:
- obtaining medical records
- chasing expert reports
- gathering financial information
- arranging signatures
- preparing productions
- monitoring legal aid cover
- lodging procedural documents
- obtaining updated statements
- following up third parties
- checking compliance with court orders
- obtaining instructions before hearings
CivSense Systems is designed to make those actions visible.
Tasks should have clear ownership, deadlines and dependencies.
The solicitor remains responsible for the legal work and professional decisions that require a solicitor.
The system is intended to support that responsibility by making sure routine case progression does not depend entirely on one person remembering every outstanding action.
Claims
Legal aid billing integrated into the life of the case.
Legal aid billing should not begin when the substantive work has finished.
CivSense Claims is designed to connect work recorded during the case with the eventual legal aid account.
- contemporaneous charge recording
- separating chargeable and non-chargeable activity
- linking work to the relevant funding authority
- monitoring authorised outlays and expenditure limits
- identifying missing fee information before a case closes
- preparing claims from work already recorded
- recording abatements and payment decisions
- tracking unpaid or outstanding claims
- identifying recurring causes of delayed or reduced payment
The purpose is to make the financial position of legally aided work visible while the case is still live.
Practitioners and organisations should be able to understand what work has been done, what has been recorded and where payment problems are arising without reconstructing the file months later.
Capture
Turning ordinary casework into usable evidence.
Civil legal services generate large amounts of information.
Much of it remains buried in individual files, spreadsheets and manual reporting systems.
CivSense Capture is intended to record structured information about problems, interventions and outcomes as part of ordinary service delivery.
- the type of legal problem
- when legal assistance was obtained
- whether proceedings had already started
- the amount of arrears or debt
- whether liability was disputed
- the barriers preventing resolution
- what intervention was used
- whether decree or enforcement was avoided
- whether eviction or repossession was prevented
- whether arrears were reduced or stabilised
- whether financial support was obtained
- whether settlement was achieved
- whether the problem could reasonably have been resolved earlier
The purpose is not to create additional reporting work.
The information should arise, as far as possible, from activity already required to run the case.
That makes it possible to produce useful information about demand, capacity, outcomes and recurring problems without relying on repeated retrospective data collection.
Automation with professional oversight
Reduce repetitive work. Keep legal judgment with practitioners.
CivSense Systems is intended to automate or assist with work such as:
- information extraction
- document classification
- creation of draft records
- generation of standard correspondence
- attendance note preparation
- deadline identification
- task creation
- diary preparation
- legal aid recording
- claim preparation
- management reporting
Automation should remove unnecessary manual work without replacing professional judgment.
Outputs should remain subject to appropriate human review.
The purpose is to give practitioners more time for analysis, advice, negotiation, representation and client care.
CivSense Research
Evidence from frontline civil legal services.
CivSense Research is intended to examine what is happening within civil justice using evidence generated through actual service delivery.
Legal aid and access to justice are often discussed using broad statistics.
Those figures are important, but they do not always show what happens inside individual cases, where delay arises or why apparently available routes to assistance do not produce effective outcomes.
CivSense Research is intended to examine issues such as:
- geographical gaps in legal aid provision
- declining practitioner capacity
- legal aid billing and payment friction
- the administrative cost of publicly funded legal work
- digital barriers to accessing justice
- patterns in eviction, debt and enforcement
- the stage at which people obtain specialist advice
- where cases could have been resolved earlier
- what prevents otherwise straightforward cases progressing
- the outcomes achieved through specialist representation
- the wider public cost of unresolved civil legal problems
The research function is intended to remain closely connected to practice.
It can draw on structured service data, case outcomes and practitioner experience to produce reports, policy analysis, submissions and evidence for reform.
Why evidence matters
Understanding what happens between referral and outcome.
It is possible to count how many people were referred to a service, how many cases were opened or how many hearings took place without knowing whether the underlying problem was resolved.
CivSense is interested in what happened next.
Did the client obtain representation?
Was the debt correctly identified?
Did further arrears stop accruing?
Was an affordable arrangement reached?
Was decree avoided?
Was a tenancy retained?
Was homelessness prevented?
Did another public body need to intervene?
Could the matter have been resolved sooner?
Capturing that information consistently can help show where systems are working, where they are creating unnecessary difficulty and where changes would have the greatest practical effect.
Outcomes
Measuring what changed.
The purpose of a legal service is not simply to open and close files.
Depending on the case, meaningful outcomes may include:
- eviction prevented
- repossession prevented
- homelessness avoided
- decree avoided
- accommodation retained
- arrears reduced or stabilised
- further liability stopped
- an affordable repayment arrangement agreed
- unlawful charges removed
- benefits or other financial support obtained
- enforcement restricted or stopped
- settlement achieved
- legal rights identified and enforced
- a dispute concluded without unnecessary litigation
CivSense is intended to record those outcomes in a structured way.
That provides useful information for the practitioner and the organisation while also helping funders, policymakers and the wider justice system understand what different interventions achieve.
Built for different organisations
Technology should support sensible legal practice.
Every legal practice works differently.
CivSense Systems is not intended to impose a single rigid workflow on every organisation.
The aim is to provide enough structure to support:
- reliable case progression
- automation
- legal aid billing
- reporting
- delegation
- accountability
- scale
while remaining adaptable to different practice areas, team structures and ways of working.
Practitioners should not have to redesign sensible working methods simply because their software cannot accommodate them.
Starting with housing and debt
A practical starting point.
CivSense begins with areas where the need is immediate and where legal intervention can have clear and measurable consequences.
The initial focus is:
- housing
- homelessness
- eviction
- repossession
- rent arrears
- consumer and public debt
- council tax recovery
- enforcement
- repayment and settlement
- related civil legal aid work
These areas provide a practical starting point for CivSense Law, Systems and Research.
The underlying approach is capable of being applied more widely over time.
CivSense
Law. Systems. Research.
CivSense is being developed from practical experience of delivering specialist civil legal services.
CivSense Law provides specialist advice and representation.
CivSense Systems develops the infrastructure needed to make that work easier to run and sustain.
CivSense Research uses evidence from delivery to understand where problems arise and what improves outcomes.
Together, they are intended to address the same underlying issue from different directions: how to make civil legal services more accessible, more sustainable and more effective.