This document proposes five design principles for public-facing digital tools in the legal services sector. They emerge from decades of collective sector experience and recent conversations with innovators, funders and service providers. We’re framing these as principles as we want to create something that can be adopted across our diverse sector and won’t date as technology changes.

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These principles are for anyone designing, building, funding, or implementing digital tools to improve access to justice. That includes designers and developers, service providers and legal aid organisations, lawyers and advocates, funders, and policy makers. They’re primarily aimed at people working on direct-to-consumer and client-facing services, but can also be used by people who evaluate, commission or fund these services.

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We hope that these principles can help guide the design and development of new and existing tools and inform funding decisions.

Principles work. The Agile Manifesto, created over 25 years ago, continues to guide software development because it articulated shared values that resonated widely. We believe the same is possible for Access to Justice digital tools. The technology landscape will continue to accelerate and change in ways we don’t know, likely increasing the need for Access to Justice.

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But principles alone won’t shift behaviour. They need structural support – whether that’s funders prioritising them, certification mechanisms, or other ways we collectively embed them into how we work. Implementation is something we need to figure out together.

What we’re still grappling with

We want to be honest about the questions we haven’t fully resolved. These principles are designed to be useful despite that uncertainty, but the following tensions are real and we’re naming them rather than papering over them:

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These principles apply to individual tools, but many access to justice challenges are systemic. You cannot put a well-designed tool over a broken system and expect it to fix things. These principles recognise that reality and don’t purport to resolve it.

Tools should meet people where they are, not where we assume they should be. We need to recognise consumer agency and the risk of mismatched expectations – not everyone wants or needs the same level of support.

We’re mindful of the organisational mindsets, capabilities, data practices, security measures, and infrastructure required to build and sustain these tools, and aware that not every organisation is equally positioned to meet these principles.

Fundamentally, we’re still asking: what outcome are we actually designing for? That question sits behind all five principles and we don’t think it has a single answer.

What’s out of scope

These principles focus on the design of tools themselves. They assume tools are discoverable and people know how to access them – questions of marketing, communication, and program strategy sit outside their scope, though we recognise those questions matter.