A new chapter for digital justice
For many people, the end of a relationship marks the beginning of the far more complicated journey of navigating a family law system that’s often slow, complex, and out of reach. Formalising parenting arrangements, dividing property, managing superannuation; these are sensitive, life-altering processes that can be financially and emotionally overwhelming. And yet, unless someone qualifies for legal aid or can afford private representation, support is difficult to access.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
At Portable, we’ve spent nearly a decade exploring how technology and design can help close this access gap. Through our work in family law, we’ve learned that the challenge isn’t just about streamlining legal pathways. It’s about building services that are safe, intuitive, and grounded in the realities people face during separation.
Civily is the latest step in that journey.
Launched as the next generation of our award-winning online family dispute resolution platform, Civily is designed to meet people where they are, and to scale where systems often cannot. Drawing from years of collaborative design, research, and partnerships across the justice sector, it offers a new kind of infrastructure: one that puts everyday people at the centre of legal innovation.
This is the promise of digital justice, delivered through deep collaboration.
The origins: From research idea to internationally awarded product
Civily didn’t emerge overnight. Its foundations were laid in 2016, when Portable began exploring how digital services could support people navigating separation and divorce. At the time, few legal tools prioritised the user experience, let alone offered safe, guided pathways for resolution outside of traditional courts. But on a study tour through Europe and the United States, we saw early signs of what was possible.
One tool in particular stood out: Rechtwijzer, developed in the Netherlands, offered self-guided legal support for separating couples and inspired a new wave of thinking in online dispute resolution. Around the same time, we connected with international leaders in the field, including Colin Rule of Modria (now ODR.com), and began to map how this emerging field could take root in Australia.
We shared our early concepts with key stakeholders in the justice system. The response was clear: there was interest, but more importantly, there was urgent need. Backed by the Attorney-General’s Department and championed by National Legal Aid, the Legal Services Commission of South Australia partnered with Portable to develop a pilot tool for family law. That pilot became amica.
What set Portable apart in the procurement process wasn’t just our technical capability, it was our design-led approach. We weren’t proposing a product and looking for problems to fit. We were already embedded in research, already prototyping solutions, and already speaking to people with lived experience.
The result was a globally recognised, award-winning, collaboratively designed platform for resolving family disputes. One that’s supported thousands of Australians and continues to evolve five years on.
What we learned from five years of service
Over five years of service delivery, research, and iteration, amica taught us what it takes to design digital legal tools that are genuinely useful, safe, and equitable. These are the lessons that informed the development of Civily:
- Separation isn’t experienced as a legal problem; it’s a life problem. People seek guidance that speaks to their emotional, financial, and family context, not just their legal obligations.
- Clarity is critical. Users need plain language, clear next steps, and no assumptions about legal literacy. Content must work under stress, and at all hours.
- Trust is built through design. People want to know their data is secure, their situation is understood, and that the platform is acting in their best interest.
- Safety can’t be assumed. Shared accounts, controlling behaviours, and family violence histories must be accounted for in how questions are asked and how options are presented.
- Cultural relevance matters. Language, imagery, and pathways must be inclusive of Australia’s diverse communities and family structures.
- Complex topics need more than digital forms. Areas like superannuation, property settlement, and child arrangements require carefully scaffolded decision-making, not just document automation.
- Iterative design works. Regular releases based on real usage and feedback allowed amica to stay responsive to legal changes, evolving user needs, and partner input.
- Collaborative design is the foundation. Working alongside legal experts, service providers, and people with lived experience ensured the platform stayed grounded in reality and not assumptions.
These learnings set the stage for Civily, a next-generation platform built not just to serve, but to scale.
Enter Civily: A platform for flexible, people-centred justice
Civily represents the next step in Portable’s journey to reshape how legal systems serve the public. While amica showed what was possible within a single jurisdiction, Civily was built to meet the broader challenge: how do we design an online dispute resolution system that adapts across legal systems, cultural contexts, and service ecosystems?
The answer lies in Civily’s architecture and intent.
- It’s modular and multi-tenant. This means jurisdictions, from a single court in California to a state-wide service in Australia, can customise workflows, integrate with their own systems, and deploy quickly, all from a shared technical backbone.
- It’s ready for white labelling or standalone branding. Courts, legal aid bodies, or NGOs can present Civily as their own public-facing tool, or partner under a shared model. Either way, the service feels local and trusted.
- It’s SaaS, not static. Civily is built as a cloud-based platform, with scalable infrastructure, analytics, and support baked in. This allows for continuous improvement and simplified maintenance over time.
- It’s built for connection. Whether embedding into a court’s digital front door, or operating independently, Civily complements existing justice pathways. It doesn’t replace professionals, it extends their reach.
What makes Civily different beyond its feature set is the values built into its core. Everything from the onboarding journey to the data governance model is shaped by the principle that technology must serve people, not the other way around.
What makes Civily different beyond its feature set is the values built into its core. Everything from the onboarding journey to the data governance model is shaped by the principle that technology must serve people, not the other way around.
A replicable model for reimagining public systems
Justice systems aren’t broken. They’re just not yet built for the people who need them most. With Civily, we’ve taken five years of research, iteration, and delivery in online family dispute resolution and transformed it into a flexible, scalable platform for human-centred legal services.
But this model isn’t limited to family law, or even to justice.
What Civily demonstrates is that with the right partnerships, lived experience insights, and a commitment to collaborative design, we can remake the most complex public pathways into services that work. Services that feel less like navigating bureaucracy, and more like getting support. Whether it's resolving parenting arrangements or accessing affordable mental health care, the need is the same: digital infrastructure that meets people where they are, adapts to their lives, and builds trust from the first click.
At Portable, we see Civily not just as a product, but as proof. Proof that it’s possible to deliver safe, ethical, and accessible pathways in systems long thought too complex to fix. And proof that, when we centre people from the start, we can go beyond improving services to actually changing lives.
This is what it looks like to design for public good.
Let’s build what comes next
If you’re working to make legal systems, health services, or government programs more accessible, we’d love to collaborate. Portable partners with public leaders to design and deliver ethical, scalable solutions for complex challenges.
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