Wales Children’s Legal Centre:
a digital first platform, artificial intelligence, virtual
legal office and information handling systems
Jane Williams
Wales Observatory on Human Rights of Children
and Young People
In brief
1. My research interests: public law; children and young
people’s human rights.
2. My bid ideas: all aimed at making a reality of human rights
of children and young people (0 – 24).
3. This project: the Children’s Legal Centre. It needs expertise
from Computer Science. The work also speaks to Human
and Health Sciences, Geography, Arts and Humanities, Law,
potentially all disciplines.
4. Possible funders: it will require a succession of bids as it
develops. CHERISH-de? AHRC/ESRC e.g. Connected
Communities
5. Prior inter-disciplinary bid development: Yes. Two current
grants as PI (Big Lottery and Paul Hamlyn Foundation).
6. I am willing to serve as PI unless someone else seems more
appropriate. n.b. I am very ignorant about digital
technologies.
The Observatory: an international forum for research, debate,
education and knowledge exchange: engaging globally and
delivering locally
The Children’s Legal Centre
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Community service
Virtual legal office
Data bank
Research resource
Monitoring and reporting resource
Policy development resource
Practitioner resource
Law reform resource
Strategic litigation resource
Bilingual
Web-based law centre: compare to Coram Child
Law Advice, London
http://childlawadvice.org.uk/
Web-based
information and
advice
Human
Computer
Interaction:
different ages
and categories of
users
Artificial
intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
‘Teenager creates website allowing motorists to
fight parking tickets in minutes’ The
Independent, 3 September 2015
Joshua Browder, 2015
Service Delivery:
individual case
work
Triage
Can we deal with this (do we have the
knowledge/resources)
If so, how?
in-house
out-source
Record
for virtual legal office
for research
Service delivery
No
Can we deal with this?
Virtual legal office
use: encrypted
Yes
How?
Immediate
answer/signposting
In-house
follow up
Research and
impact
Research use:
anonymised
Data
Bank
Read across to
other social data
Outsource follow up
Participating
lawyers
Visualisation of
data
Support and intermediary
services
Application
Shadow and support outsourced
follow up
Research
Evaluate
Accountability
Embedding rights
Collaboration?
• Human Computer Interaction
• Artificial intelligence
• Data storage and retrieval, with encrypted and
anonymised categories
• Read across between data sets (e.g. socioeconomic/population health/justice system)
• Data visualisation