A new online platform pledging to ‘democratise’ group actions is coming to the UK backed by a major law firm and the SRA.

The Find Others tool allows consumers to look for people affected by the same injustice or to start their own campaign group, petition or legal action against the government, local authorities and businesses.

The platform also helps users to find an appropriate lawyer to take on their action. Its backers say this 'revolutionary' tool will mean group actions are no longer the preserve of a few large claimant firms but can give opportunities to anyone to join together for litigation.

Find Others’ development was supported by a £50,000 award from the SRA as part of its Legal Access Challenge, which aimed to broaden access to legal help for individuals and small businesses through technology.

It has also received financial backing from the listed Australian firm Shine Justice.

Founders Georgina Hollis and Amar Chauhan (pictured above) said that for consumers, the best way individual ‘Davids’ can take on ‘Goliath’ defendants is to join forces and have a powerful collective voice. They had previously set up a ticketing website to rival Ticketmaster before selling the brand to Sky and setting up Find Others.

Chauhan said: ‘Find Others came out of our experience of a faulty car. It turned out that we were not alone, but we were unable to find other owners easily. Getting a group together to take action was incredibly difficult, so we decided to make it easier.

‘It has been normalised that organisations can break the law and get away with it. Sometimes it’s because people do not band together. Other times it’s because the damage suffered individually does not make it worth taking action. These problems can be addressed by grouping together.’

The service is free to the public, and law firms can list a basic profile on the site. Firms will have to pay for access to the platform's "premium" services, such as the listing of their own cases, creation of a "landing page" to direct claimants to, and onboarding claimants through the platform. The price will range from £1,500 to £3,000 a month depending on the size of their firm.

Hollis said the injustice suffered by groups such as the victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal brought home that people had no easy way of starting their own campaigns, building a group, or finding a lawyer.

‘We realised that all of these people had no way of finding out that they weren’t the only one who had suffered this miscarriage of justice,’ she added. ‘We want to democratise the legal market.’

The platform has already helped hundreds of families unite to form Vaccine, Injured Bereaved UK (VIB UK), a group fighting for a fair compensation scheme for those severely injured or bereaved by the Covid vaccine.

Lawyers using the service can launch a case group and access a search engine for those who need legal support.

 

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