Seasus has delivered the Legal Aid Management System (LAMS) for Legal Aid Malta Agency (legalaidmalta.gov.mt), replacing a paper, spreadsheet and Access-database process with an online system covering eligibility assessment, case assignment and communication for the Agency, its lawyers and the public it serves.
Legal Aid Malta assigns lawyers and legal procurators to people who cannot otherwise afford representation in civil and criminal matters, as well as victims of crime and domestic violence. Before LAMS, every stage of that process, from an applicant's first contact by email, phone or in person, through means and merits testing, to the assignment of a lawyer and procurator, was tracked across Excel spreadsheets and an Access database, with supporting documents scanned to a shared network folder.
LAMS brings that process onto a single secure platform, accessed through Government Corp accounts, e-ID or eIDAS depending on who is signing in: Agency staff, assigned lawyers and procurators, and members of the public applying on their own behalf or for someone else. Applicants can start an application, save their progress and pick it up again later, with identity, address and other available details drawn automatically from government registers where that data already exists, reducing how much they need to re-enter by hand.
Every stage of a case, means testing, merits testing, lawyer and procurator assignment, appointments and closure, is tracked in the system with an audit trail, and clients are kept informed automatically by SMS and email as their application moves forward. The platform also incorporates the Agency's public-facing website, built bilingually in Maltese and English to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level AA standard, and manageable by Agency staff through its own content management system.
The project was delivered as part of Malta's digitisation programme for the justice system under the EU's NextGenerationEU Recovery and Resilience Facility, giving Legal Aid Malta Agency a modern system to replace manual record-keeping while keeping its services accessible to the clients who rely on them.
