55709Secure Integrated Communications SuiteClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKFor this project, Etic Lab will develop a Secure Integrated Communications Suite (SICS) for the not-for-profit legal advice sector, a community of charities dedicated to ensuring that people with limited means receive the support they need to access the UK justice system. Our platform will allow advice providers to chat with clients and leave messages via video, audio or text, to securely transfer important documents and to set appointments with accompanying email and text notifications. It will also support peer-to-peer discovery and communication between advice providers, as well as providing a portal for client feedback. The work of this sector has never been more vital than it is now. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, unprecedented numbers of people are seeking aid with legal issues involving housing, debt, welfare and employment, to name just a few. Advice providers are attempting to address this surge in demand whilst also protecting their staff, clients and the general public by pivoting to remote working. In many cases, this means they have had no choice but to adopt proprietary audio-visual messaging platforms such as Skype, Zoom or Facebook Messenger as a means of providing services to clients. However, these programs do not have the full range of functions required by legal advice providers; nor do they meet the privacy and security requirements of a sector which routinely works with vulnerable individuals and sensitive personal information. As things stand, the sector is being forced to compromise on its values in order to continue serving its clients. SICS would address these concerns by placing the data it produces solely in the hands of the advice sector and its clients. Not only would this ensure the security of sensitive information, it would also enable the sector to use the meta-data generated by the platform (for instance, the length, frequency and purpose of conversations with clients) to systematically evaluate its working practices, supporting charities in their efforts to develop sustainable models for service delivery equal to the challenges of the present. By bringing all legal advice providers together onto a single communications platform, SICS would provide a basis for the sector as a whole to share resources, build community, and come together to ensure that it is able to continue its social mission throughout this crisis and into the years ahead. Extending the project now will allow other providers of sensitive services, with attendant ethical and professional reasons for avoiding the widespread proprietary platforms, to deliver for their clients in a secure platform safe in the knowledge that their choice of medium for extending their business in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic has not compromised their standards. Further, in the conversations we have had thus far in the project it has been made clear to us that until a platform such as ours is brought to market there are certain actions and services that are simply not possible and we would have an immediate impact in being able to reverse that. It can also not go unnoticed that there has been a massive increase in demand for the services of our colleagues in the access to justice sector as the second order effects of the pandemics begin to take shape. Etic Lab has already been working with working groups at all levels of the legal sector to try to prepare for the inevitable rise in cases of people dealing with homelessness, unemployment and the welfare system, to name a few.