The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) is pleased to announce the Southern Africa finalists for its Innovating Justice Challenge 2018 (www.innovatingjustice.com).

The annual Innovating Justice Challenge is a key part of HiiL’s mission to seek out and support entrepreneurs and innovators working on ways to help people prevent or resolve their most pressing justice needs. Through the Challenge, HiiL identifies organisations which can provide scaleable, sustainable solutions to justice needs and will benefit from a mix of seed funding and support through its Justice Accelerator programme.

This year, HiiL received more than 400 applications to the Innovating Justice Challenge, which were assessed with five criteria in mind: impact, sustainability, scalability, uniqueness and team.

“This year’s challenge was the hardest for us to judge yet,” says HiiL Southern Africa’s Adam Oxford. “We were overwhelmed with high quality applications from a huge variety of innovators, and there are many who aren’t on the final list that we hope to work with in the future. It's exciting that there are so many people in the region working to bring access to justice for all.”

Additionally, HiiL involved external mentors to assess applications based on feasibility, social impact, and institutional roadblocks of their justice innovations.

This year’s Southern African finalists are:

• Epoq Legal (Pty) Ltd: Epoq Legal (Pty) Ltd is an online (or offline) real-time legal document automation, designed for everyday people. It includes help, guidance and examples throughout the process including multiple workflows.

• Baobab.law: Baobob is a platform which enables lawyers to create engaging video-based tutorials, to empower people to resolve many of their own legal issues.

• Masenze Strategic Advisors: Masenze Strategic Advisors provides convenient, relevant and affordable education and information with respect to awareness of basic socio-economic rights, to enable self-representation by the vulnerable and marginalised.

• Buyisa Soul and Spiritual Centre: Traditional Healers in the Alexandra township convene a mediation court. The innovation is to establish a centre, replicate, and provide additional access to justice.

• Portable Lawyer (Pty) Ltd: Allows for easy, affordable access to more than 30 critical contracts, realtime on demand legal support, digital signatures, contract management and data protection compliant.

• PhoenixCMS: Phoenix Case Management System is a digital platform that enhances justice organisations’ case intake, tracking, resolution of reported cases, multisectoral coordination and data analysis.

• IPassist-zw: IPassist-zw is a web-based platform that enables start-ups and SMEs to access effective and affordable intellectual property services from a pool of experts and lawyers.

Finalists will be invited to a special training Boostcamp day on 3 September in Johannesburg, after which they will pitch their ideas to an expert panel of judges at the Leaderex conference at the Sandton Convention Centre on 4 September.

The pitching session will begin at 5pm, and members of the media, lawyers, technologists, social activist and others interested in justice innovation are invited to register for an evening of pitching and networking at www.leaderex.co.za. Registration is free using the code: HiiL.

More details regarding keynote speakers and a panel on justice innovation will follow soon.

For questions, interview requests, sponsorship queries or more information about the Innovating Justice Challenge, please contact Adam Oxford, adam.oxford@hiil.org or Themba Mahleka (themba.mahleka@hiil.org)