Online dispute resolution
Improve access to legal services and reduce the burden on the court system.
Portable has spent nearly a decade building online dispute resolution tools that give people a faster, cheaper way to resolve disputes and get reliable legal information, without a lawyer for every step of the way. We combine human-centred research, plain language design, and artificial intelligence to build tools that ease the burden on courts and complaint bodies while getting people to a fair outcome sooner.
What we do
Research
Our design team specialises in legal innovation and starts every project by talking to the people living through a dispute, not just the systems built around them. We run user interviews, co-design workshops, and usability testing, building personas and mapping real experiences rather than assuming we already know the answer. We also work directly with lawyers, registrars, and decision-makers to translate legal complexity into plain English that holds up under stress.
Artificial intelligence
We build AI models trained on published case data and augmented with expert input from lawyers, registrars, and decision-makers, so a dispute resolution tool can offer people a realistic sense of how their situation might play out. Done well, this cuts legal costs and takes pressure off an already stretched justice system, without replacing the judgement of the people who run it.
We've built ODR tools for some of the toughest moments people face: separation, wage disputes, and navigating complaints against systems.
Built with the National Justice Project, Hear Me Out is a trauma-informed conversational AI tool that helps people navigate the legal complaints process without needing to already understand it.
Built with the Attorney-General's Department and the Legal Services Commission of South Australia, amica is an AI-powered tool that helps separating couples divide their assets fairly and affordably.
Civily is the next generation of our family dispute resolution platform, built on everything amica taught us so it can scale across different courts, jurisdictions, and legal systems.
Sweep helps retail workers check whether they're being paid correctly under the award, and prepares them for a conversation with their employer if something's not right.
Explore our access to justice design principles
We helped bring access to justice sector leaders together to define what good looks like for digital legal tools, and turned that alignment into five principles: start with people, build trust through transparency and accountability, design for equity, fairness and inclusion, provide actionable guidance, and use technology purposefully. Every tool on this page is built to hold up against them.