OakQuant Foundation

Access to Justice

Everyone reaches the right help, on equal footing.

Legal-aid organizations turn away far more people than they can serve, and the quality of that triage decides who gets help. This application makes triage — and the help that follows — fair, fast, transparent, and accountable.

Guided intake Smart routing Deadlines that don't slip Find help near me Whole-person support
We help people find their footing in a hard moment — and we help advocates spend their scarce time where it matters most. Help, not gate. Safety first. Equal footing.

What every flow follows

Commitments, encoded into the software

These aren't slogans on a wall — they're rules the system actually enforces.

Help, not gate

The system routes and refers people to help; it never renders a "denial." A non-match yields alternatives, never a dead end.

Safety first

A crisis surfaces emergency contacts immediately — ahead of any process step.

Equal footing

Plain language, cost transparency, and language access, so someone without a lawyer isn't at a disadvantage.

Fairness, observed

Protected attributes never drive routing; the system audits itself for disparate impact so humans can review and contest it.

Privacy by design

Data minimization — only what's needed. Protected attributes are isolated and used solely for fairness auditing.

Not legal advice

Legal information and navigation — with staff-reviewed document assembly. Never case-specific advice or outcome promises.

Who it serves

One system, three points of view

People seeking help

Someone facing eviction, a benefits cutoff, a debt lawsuit, a workplace problem, an immigration matter, or a safety crisis — arriving by web form, a call logged by staff, or an assistant chat.

Legal-aid staff & advocates

The caseworkers who triage incoming matters, route them to the right person, manage the work, and refer people to trusted partners.

The Foundation team

Operators who keep the resource directory current, watch fairness, and learn from real outcomes which programs actually help.

For people seeking help

From "I'm in trouble" to a clear next step

A1 Guided intake & safety-first triage

Live · basicRich · planned
Who
Anyone with a legal or life problem.
How it works
  1. Describe the situation on a simple form or in an assistant chat.
  2. The system captures only the essentials — issue, location, goal, any hard deadline, and risk signals.
  3. If a crisis signal appears, emergency contacts show immediately, before anything else.
  4. The matter enters triage with a reference and a clear "what happens next."
The benefit
A calm, guided path instead of a blank form — and if someone's in danger, the right number instantly, not buried three screens deep.

A2 Plain-language guidance & deadlines

Planned
Who
People who need to know their rights and next steps.
How it works
  1. Returns plain-language rights, the typical process, documents to gather, and questions to ask.
  2. Leads with deadlines — the biggest reason people lose winnable cases.
  3. Curated content first; anything AI-written is framed as information, not advice, and flagged for staff review.
The benefit
People understand what's happening and what to do next — in language they can actually read — and don't miss the deadline that would cost them the case.

A3 Deadline calculator

Quick winPlanned
Who
Anyone who received a notice with a clock on it.
How it works
Enter the issue and the date on the notice; get back the exact response window — eviction answer date, the EEOC 180/300-day charge limit, a debt-lawsuit answer date — from a jurisdiction-aware rules table. No AI, no advice: just the deadline the law gives you, with its source.
The benefit
The most common, most preventable way people lose is missing a deadline. This turns "when must I act?" into a clear date in seconds.

A4 Find help near me

Planned
Who
People who need a local provider — legal, or the support that travels with legal trouble.
How it works
  1. Enter a ZIP and situation; search a unified directory — legal aid plus crisis lines, sliding-scale therapy, food, housing, and benefits help — with live, local data.
  2. Results put free and pro-bono options first, flag waitlists honestly, and for immigration show only licensed attorneys or BIA-recognized nonprofits.
The benefit
Legal problems rarely travel alone. This connects the whole set of needs — free options first — in one place.

A5 Eligibility & cost transparency

Planned
Who
People unsure whether they qualify or what a matter will cost.
How it works
Estimates likely eligibility for income-based legal aid before the call, and shows likely court fees, fee-waiver eligibility, and out-of-pocket cost after free options. It estimates and informs — it never gates.
The benefit
Removes the "will they even take me — can I afford this?" uncertainty that stops people from reaching out at all.

Safety is never gated behind a form

Whenever a self-harm, domestic-violence, or safety signal is present, crisis resources — 988, 911, the domestic-violence hotline, and population-specific lines — surface first, independent of where someone is in any flow.

For advocates & legal-aid staff

Spend scarce time where it matters most

B1 Triage queue & smart routing

Live · queueRouting · planned
Who
Intake staff and advocates deciding who handles each matter.
How it works
  1. New matters land in a triage queue, oldest first, scoped to the staffer's organization.
  2. The system suggests the right queue and best available person — matching issue to specialty, preferring advocates who speak the applicant's language and have capacity.
  3. Routing creates a real assignment with a service-level deadline, visible in the shared inbox.
The benefit
A ranked, explained recommendation instead of a bare "assign to…" — and every matter gets an owner and a clock, so nothing silently stalls.

B2 Multiparty case management

Planned
Who
Advocates managing real cases, which are rarely one person.
How it works
A case holds all its parties — applicant, opposing party, dependents, and the assigned advocate, attorney, or interpreter — with internal parties linked to real users and external parties kept as minimized references.
The benefit
The full picture of who's involved and who's responsible — so you can route to and schedule with real people, not juggle it in a spreadsheet.

B3 Workplan, activities & timeline

Planned
Who
Advocates running a matter to completion.
How it works
  1. Each case gets a sensible default workplan for its issue type — including the answer deadline.
  2. Meetings, calls, filings, and deadlines schedule as activities and appear automatically on the calendar.
  3. Everything that happens forms one chronological timeline.
The benefit
A shared workplan with deadlines that show up on the calendar — and a complete history anyone can catch up on at a glance.

B4 Guidance & document assembly

Planned
Who
Advocates preparing materials for clients.
How it works
Fills curated templates — hardship letters, fee-waiver requests, evidence checklists — with case facts. Every generated document lands in staff review and is never delivered unreviewed.
The benefit
Less time on boilerplate, more on judgment — while a human always signs off, keeping the "information, not advice" line intact.

B5 Referral packets & wallet cards

Planned
Who
Advocates handing a client a concrete next step.
How it works
Paste a client's situation; the workflow classifies the issue, pulls the right local providers, attaches the relevant deadlines, and produces a printable PDF packet with a "what to bring" checklist — plus a compact county wallet card.
The benefit
The client leaves with something real in hand — the right offices, the deadlines, what to bring — not a verbal "try calling around."

B6 Multilingual generation

Planned
Who
Advocates and clients who don't share a first language.
How it works
Guidance, packets, and the master resource guides are auto-translated (Spanish first), human-verified before a client relies on them.
The benefit
Language stops being a barrier to understanding one's rights and next steps.

For the Foundation team

Keeping the service fair, current, and improving

C1 Learning loop — what helps whom

Planned
How it works
Records what it recommended, then ingests the outcome — did the referral connect, was the person served, was it timely? Starting with self-reported follow-ups and upgrading to automatic closed-loop tracking, it learns which programs help which matters, using operational features only — never protected attributes.
The benefit
The service gets measurably better at sending the right people to the right help, grounded in real outcomes rather than guesswork.

C2 Fairness & equal-footing audit

Planned
How it works
A read-only report computes disparate-impact ratios across protected axes on routing speed, SLA breaches, disposition mix, match rate, and outcomes — so humans can see, review, and contest how the system behaves. A guard keeps protected attributes out of the learning loop.
The benefit
Fairness is observable and contestable, not assumed — operators can prove equity and catch drift early.

C3 Resource upkeep automation

Planned
How it works
Weekly automated sweeps check every link for health and scan public feeds (LSC, grants.gov, Open Referral) for newly added programs, delivered as a short digest.
The benefit
Directories rot fast — numbers change, pages move. This keeps guidance current with near-zero manual effort, so no one is sent to a dead end.

C4 The unified data layer

Planned
How it works
An ingestion pipeline normalizes 211, findhelp, and legal-aid directories into one open standard (HSDS) — deduped, geocoded, queryable — so any source is interchangeable and every tool draws from one clean dataset.
The benefit
A single, reliable source of "where to get help" that powers find-help, packets, and matching — and grows to new sources without rework.

How it's built

Part of the OakQuant platform — not a system apart

  • Isolated & privateRuns as its own secure tenant with strict cross-tenant isolation — the privacy posture vulnerable clients need. Partner orgs can be sub-tenants.
  • Built on shared strengthReuses the platform's routing, calendar, notifications, cost-disciplined AI, and learning engine — while all legal knowledge lives in one place.
  • Charitable by designSits off the commercial billing path, appropriate for a Foundation service that puts people before revenue.

Where we are

Status at a glance

This page describes the intended experience. Today's live system is a data and triage substrate; the richer flows are designed and on the roadmap.

FlowAudienceStatus
A1 · Guided intake & safety-first triagePeopleLive (basic) → richer planned
A2 · Plain-language guidance & deadlinesPeoplePlanned
A3 · Deadline calculatorPeoplePlanned (quick win)
A4 · Find help near mePeoplePlanned
A5 · Eligibility & cost transparencyPeoplePlanned
B1 · Triage queue & smart routingAdvocatesLive (queue) → smart routing planned
B2 · Multiparty case managementAdvocatesPlanned
B3 · Workplan, activities & timelineAdvocatesPlanned
B4 · Guidance & document assemblyAdvocatesPlanned
B5 · Referral packets & wallet cardsAdvocatesPlanned
B6 · Multilingual generationAdvocatesPlanned
C1 · Learning loopFoundationPlanned
C2 · Fairness & equal-footing auditFoundationPlanned
C3 · Resource upkeep automationFoundationPlanned
C4 · Unified data layer (HSDS)FoundationPlanned