Setting the Standard: Termination Help
Building a digital pathway through an employment dispute
For most people, losing their job is one of the relatively few occasions in their life when they suddenly need legal help.
The problem is that the legal system expects them to act quickly.
Australian unfair dismissal claims generally operate within strict procedural requirements and short timeframes. At the same time, obtaining traditional legal advice can be expensive relative to the amount at stake in many employment disputes.
Termination Help is an Australian digital legal service designed around that gap.
Rather than beginning with the traditional model — find a lawyer, arrange an appointment and explain the problem — the service uses a structured online pathway to help someone understand their position following termination of employment.
That model illustrates an important opportunity for consumer legal technology.
Many common legal problems are neither completely standard nor completely bespoke.
There are rules that can be translated into structured questions. There is information that needs to be collected. Documents can be reviewed. Potential issues can be identified. Procedural requirements can be explained. And some matters will ultimately require human legal expertise.
Technology makes it possible to reorganise those components around the user.
Instead of:
legal problem → find lawyer → meeting → information gathering → legal assessment
the pathway can increasingly become:
legal problem → guided digital intake → preliminary assessment → information and document collection → appropriate next step → lawyer where needed.
Employment termination is particularly suited to this approach because the problem is relatively identifiable, there are substantial numbers of potential users, and people frequently need assistance immediately after the event.
The broader significance is access to justice.
Digital legal services don’t necessarily need to replace lawyers. They can change where lawyers enter the process, allowing technology to handle parts of the journey that can be structured and reserving professional assistance for the points where judgement and advocacy add the greatest value.
Termination Help is an example of legal technology being designed around a particular legal problem and the person experiencing it — rather than around the traditional architecture of a law firm.
