Truth Legal have teamed up with the creators of the evidence gathering app, ONRECORD, to help them in their search for testers for their new mobile app.
ONRECORD helps you gather and prepare evidence in a secure and simple mobile app. Log each incident as it occurs, create a timeline of events, generate reports and share your records with professionals if you choose to.
We need testers!
We are reaching out for volunteers to try our new, evidence gathering mobile app.
ONRECORD is designed by Jill Canvin, a lawyer with many year’s experience in the criminal and family courts and by Dr George Hibbert, a psychiatrist with additional extensive experience as an expert witness in the family courts. ONRECORD was originally designed for litigants and lawyers but is also suited to all kinds of ongoing problems where record keeping would be helpful. In the legal context it enables users to record and organise their evidence into a chronology which they can either take to a lawyer or other professional, saving time and money, or take to court themselves if they are litigants acting in person. In non-legal situations, ONRECORD provides a powerful way to record events in order to ensure that others understand their circumstances and to get help. For a full description of what it offers and how it can help, go to our website at www.myonrecord.com. We have soft launched ONRECORD, so there may be some bugs we haven’t yet squashed, but we would greatly value more feedback before we fully launch.
How ONRECORD Helps in Legal Cases
Legal processes are so daunting to the public, who usually find themselves in litigation only once in their lifetimes, that there is a sense, and probably a hope, that the lawyer they instruct is going to do some kind of magic to help them win their case. Little do the public usually realise that much of the time taken by the lawyer, and therefore the costs involved in making their case, must be spent simply listening to and then writing down their story as an account of what happened, supported by whatever evidence the client can muster. Obviously, though, the person who knows most about their story, who is in possession of the evidence and who knows best what impact events have had, is not the lawyer but the client themselves. As the client, spending time, and fees, telling their story simply so that the lawyer can write it down, link it to supporting evidence, and start to make their case can be expensive. Lawyers are pricey note-takers! In a time of restricted Legal Aid and increasing fees, anything which helps clients to get professional advice within their budget will be helpful. And in the case of litigants who have to go to court without legal representation, at least they can be helped to gather relevant evidence in a clear and efficient way, organise it by date and time and present it in an acceptable form.
We created ONRECORD as a means for litigants themselves to do as much of the basic work of putting together their evidence as possible, by creating a chronological account of events. If a client can come to their appointment with evidence already organised into a chronology with attachments, they will save time and money and help their lawyer get on quickly to understand their case and move it forward. Further, a lawyer who provides their client with a means to be more closely engaged in the development of their case by encouraging them to upload information about any new developments which is then immediately available in a coherent form, will greatly enhance the client relationship. ONRECORD also provides a channel within the app to communicate between client and lawyer which is more secure than email and further engages the client in making their case.
More Than Just a Legal App
The beauty of a mobile app is the immediacy and convenience of its use. The particular beauty of ONRECORD is that although it was originally designed for the legal purpose it is equally suited to any other situation where a record of events needs to be kept. Everyone with an ongoing problem, whether destined for the courts or not, is well advised to make a contemporaneous record of events and to provide supporting evidence, such as photographs or documents, where possible. In our experience, though, few but the most obsessional clients or patients do it thoroughly enough because it is a difficult and tedious chore with any of the previous technologies, whether paper and pencil or digital diaries and notebooks. It is cumbersome to assemble a mixture of narrative, documents and perhaps photographs into a chronology. ONRECORD, unlike any other existing record keeping software, not only links all kinds of attachments to the relevant points in the narrative, it verifies time and location and, most important, it uploads data to an online platform as a chronology from where it can be shared securely with a legal adviser or other professional. From the platform the evidence can be sorted and edited and a well structured, easy to read chronology can be downloaded. In-app confidential messaging is an additional unique feature.
We are not software developers but as a lawyer and a psychiatrist, we have a depth of professional experience of the problems people face and how they can be successfully addressed. ONRECORD is built around this expertise but as non-computer people, it’s been a hard road to drive this idea through the world of software development to get to where we are with a fully functioning app and web application. Now we are ready to launch. We’ve listened to testers’ feedback and that of experts in the app business and we now have a tool to help anyone, whether a litigant or not, needing to keep ongoing records.
Get in touch
We need pioneers who are interested in empowering litigants and others who are in a vulnerable situation. Whether you are a litigant yourself, are facing some other ongoing difficulty, someone who supports or advises clients, or are simply interested, please be a tester of ONRECORD and give us feedback. We want to hear anything you have to say about it, whether good or bad. Please feel free to suggest it to clients or people you know who could benefit. Testers will get 12 months free use for themselves or for someone they nominate. You can learn more on our website at www.myonrecord.com.
Get in touch with us at admin@myonrecord.com with a name and email address and we will send all volunteers a link to the app with an explanation of how to get the app for free.
