Greek Citizens can have access To Legal Content through an online hub of legal information 

Lawspot Wants To Give All Greek Citizens Open Access To Legal Content

It’s no secret that, unfortunately, Greece is going through a very difficult moment. Economic crisis, social unrest, unemployment, refugees pushing at the borders. It looks, sometimes, as an headline went, like “an Odyssey without end”.

But even in these harsh times, there are people who are doing their best to let a glimmer of hope shine in the darkness. Launching new services, giving their fellow citizens more tools, and more information, to make the best of what’s still around.

That is the case with Manolis Manassakis, Vassilis and Stratos Karkatzounis, Thomas Minitsios, two lawyers and two engineers who, earlier this year decided to launch Lawspot, “Greece’s first open online hub of legal information”.

“The vision behind Lawspot is to open access to the law. The Greek crisis and bailout programs functioned as a catalyst. In a time when every month there is a new piece of legislation regarding crucial matters,” Manassakis tells me, “most of us have difficulty following and fully understanding the legal changes affecting us.”

The team works with a group of 10 young lawyers and law students from Greece’s top law schools, who help them with digitizing and maintaining legal documents, making it easy to access them online for free on the Lawspot website.

Lawspot is not simply a repository of legal content, though. The project is more ambitious and aims at engaging lawyers as well.

“We offer all citizens easily comprehensible information on legal issues of everyday life and the ability to find relevant lawyers for their cases,” Manassakis, a Stanford’s School of Business graduate, who previously worked for other companies, including Google, says.

“At the same time, we provide lawyers with services to make their work easier, like comparison tools for different provisions, weekly alerts for all new legislation in a certain field, as well as a organized environment for professional promotion and interaction with citizens.”

The website’s goal, in fact, is not to replace lawyers, allowing citizens to interpret the law by themselves. Rather, the legal information offered is meant to help people with little knowledge of the field, follow the legal changes around them, understand when they need a lawyer and hire the most relevant one for their case.

As for the source of the content posted online, Manassakis and colleagues are using a broad set of data sets: from public organizations’ archives, to legal journals and repositories. The material, often made of hard-copy documents, is digitized and converted using optical character recognition and automation tools, to make it more consistent and searchable.

Source: Forbes

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