Check if you can get legal aid
Check if you can get legal aid is a public facing service available on GOV.UK which gives members of the public clear guidance on whether they can receive civil legal aid for their problem, and provides guidance and next steps tailored to their outcome.
The service provides a route for users to raise a case and optionally book an appointment with the Civil Legal Advice (CLA) call centre if their problem is in-scope for Civil Legal Advice and if the user is financially eligible for legal aid, however, the financial eligibility check may be skipped at this stage in certain cases.
The application is split into three main components:
- Category traversal, responsible for diagnosing whether a user’s problem is in-scope for civil legal aid.
- Means test, responsible for checking if a user financially qualifies for legal aid.
- Contact, allows the user to raise their case with the CLA call centre and optionally book a callback.
Technical information
Check if you can get legal aid (Check) is a Flask based web service that is hosted on the MOJs Cloud Platform.
It resides in the live.cloud-platform.service.justice.gov.uk Kubernetes cluster in the laa-access-civil-legal-aid-[environment] namespace.
Docker images of the application are stored in a Cloud Platform AWS ECR defined by the Terraform configuration in the laa-access-civil-legal-aid-production namespace.
Environments
The service is deployed across four environments (Dev, UAT, Staging & Production) these environments can be accessed at:
- Production: https://checklegalaid.service.gov.uk/
- Staging: https://staging.checklegalaid.service.gov.uk/
- UAT: https://uat.checklegalaid.service.gov.uk/
- Dev: A new deployment and URL is dynamically generated based on your branch name once a branch has been pushed to remote.
All non-production environments have an IP whitelist.
Support
This service is maintained by the Civil Legal Aid team within LAA Digital.
If you need to get in contact please email us at: cladevs-gg@justice.gov.uk