Peam

Using AI to help parents achieve more reasonable and fairer agreements within mediation.

Co-created alongside 14 mediation centres and 31 end users, our service is a website that uses AI sentiment analysis to help people transition from an emotional state to a problem-solving state. Just as a coach or lawyer would prepare a parent by asking them questions and working with them to rephrase their responses, the website provides the users with similar prompts to those used in mediation, using the AI it then provides feedback on each of those prompts, users can thereon start thinking critically and rephrase their responses. This preparation changes a mediation session from being full of anger and blame to one of understanding and agreement.

Being in an emotionally complex space, the design of the website has had careful consideration to be inviting, simple, reassuring, and helpful. Building the website alongside customers and end users have resulted in the product being re-built 6 times; each time greatly increasing its value. Additional features which were added as a result include: cleaner interfaces, educational animation videos, a clear hands-on walkthrough, simplification of language used throughout.

Last year 50,977 parental separation applications went through court, and this only represents 3% of all cases in Australia! Due to financial burdens, 80,000 people represented themselves last year. This is the largest point of frustration for the courts, lawyers, and the other party... but most importantly of all, going through this process is devastating for all.

For parenting matters, the dispute resolution/mediation stage is most emotional. Here, a mediator helps the two parties resolve root conflicts and produce a mutually acceptable agreement, making these agreements 78% more likely to be upheld, as opposed to simply giving a court direction. Therefore, supporting mediation can significantly reduce the number of cases burdening the court. With traditional mediation preparation sessions with lawyers and coaches costing between $350 to $700 AUD per hour, most skip directly to mediation.

Two core reasons inhibits innovation. Firstly, traditional mediation preparation sessions are very profitable. Secondly, section 121 of the Family Law Act restricts collecting and distributing information, making it difficult to identify SRLs.

The neglect of this problem leaves people unprepared, but generally certain that the emotional story of their love for their kids and anger at the other will be persuasive evidence.

Our target population consists of parents who cannot afford the legal fees involved with family law litigation. The technical difficulties involved in electronic court hearings (introduced to cope with the covid-19 pandemic) have made litigation even more drawn out, making legal representation inaccessible to many. Also, covid has increased family violence and financial strain, leading to a higher predicted divorce rate across the coming years. Our technology supports the “missing middle” who do not meet the Australian LegalAid means test.

Mediation involves ex-partners attempting a civil discussion. According to the mediators we have consulted, this often leads to high tension, trauma, and ineffective solutions. If parties are unable to reach a problem-solving state during mediation, not only would the financial burdens from litigation be devastating, but they may be left with rigid, unfair, and unreasonable living arrangements (a cause of further tension between ex-partners). For the children involved, research suggests higher probabilities of substance abuse, academic struggles as well as behavioural and psychological problems.

Acknowledging that emotional and rational states of mind are very distinct, mediators support their clients by requesting them to rephrase their statements. This has an incredible impact as it starts a transition from an emotional state to a problem-solving state. However, to increase the impact of mediation further, this process must be more accessible. Peam thus allows for fairer agreements and a decrease in the number of unresolved disputes.

We have critically approached every step of the process, outlining our assumptions, seeking expert guidance, and validating what we know. 50hrs of stakeholder interviews were held including professional lawyers, family law specialists, key industry influencers, social enterprise/impact business experts, mediation centres, and self-represented litigants. 26 reports were read covering the theory, problems, and trends within the space.

This collaboration and desk research provided for deep understanding of the core problems within the space. This has allowed us to refine our problem area towards a highly neglected yet impactful area. This in turn allowed our customers and end users to connect, see the value, and want to be part of our journey. Section 121 of the Australian Family Law Act prohibits the identification of any litigant undergoing the court-process - this is one of family law’s key barriers to innovation. However, utilising our relationships, we overcame this and worked with 31 self-represented litigants. Additionally, we’ve been in contact with 21 professional mediation centres to validate the idea - 14 of which have been crucial to the product’s developments. This allowed us to gain invaluable validation in the problem space, product development, and paving the way for a promising business case.

Working closely with impact business and leading civic-tech experts allowed us to build a robust business model. Primarily a model which facilitates large scale impact whilst having sustainable economic growth.

During the covid-19 pandemic, two key changes occurred in the family law space.

Firstly, family violence and financial strain (key drivers of divorce) increased. The number of Australian divorces is forecast to rise to 53,093 in 2022 (a 7.2% rise since 2019). This in turn has led to increased demand for at least a third of Australia’s family and relationship services, according to a December 2021 report. Notably there was a 40% increase for Family Mental Health Support Services in 2020 (18+ month waiting list) and the Family Court of Australia (FCoA) received 1.2% more applications for final orders in 2020–21 compared to 2019–20.

Secondly, the number of FCoA cases involving self-represented litigants almost halved from 39% to 20%. The FCoA Annual Report 2020-21 suggests that this drop was due to some complex matters involving self-represented litigants being postponed/ not heard due to the inherent difficulties of running electronic trials.

To summarise: an increase in the demand for family law services, paired with a steep decrease in the accessibility of litigation! This means that there is a huge unmet need for accessible, affordable support in preparing for mediation (an alternative to litigation). This is a massive (and growing) access-to-justice issue in Australia, which is leaving people behind when they are at their most emotional and most strained for resources. Our access-to-justice solution directly responds to UNSDG indicator 16.3.3.

The initial stage of problem research was reaching out to a variety of legal professionals (including ex Family Court judges, current barristers and in-house lawyers at large international companies). The interviews allowed us to pivoting and refining our problem area 4 times, landing us within the mediation space tackling emotions.

The prototyping stage saw extensive product development alongside mediation centres and the end users. The concept and initial prototyping stage is elaborated on here(https://festive-twist-b60.notion.site/PEAM-Journey-be8cc0e6eb634652b728474f7ad2b3d2).

The final outcome of the prototyping process saw:

• 6 product redevelopments; each improving usability, accessibility and friendliness
• quantifiable KPIs,
• sustainable financial & social impact business models.

With businesses re-opening for the new year, we have just entered our pilot phase. We are in the process of onboarding mediation centres with our pilot requirements and product updates. Some of the centres we are working with include: Flora Mediation, Madison Chambers, Stanfords Solicitors & Mediators, Psychlaw Australia, Bourke Mediation, Synergy Resolutions, Catholic Care Social Services, Black and White Mediation, CoParenting Kids, Olive Branch Mediation, DA Family Lawyers, Sharon Large, and Tom Stodulka.

The past 10 years have seen increasing work gone into natural language processing. Analysing emotions within words even more excitingly whole phrases was soon to follow. Training such machine learning models - primarily a neural network, can be a very expensive process - resource-wise and financially. However, with the rise of cloud-computing and commercialised models through APIs, Peam can leverage cutting edge-development in AI sentiment analysis.

Peam uses Microsoft Azure’s Sentiment Analysis model. Although it is primarily used to analysis customer sentiment within forms or surveys, its large scale usage and development means it is a powerful model which is able to distinguish the emotional state and the intensity of that state for large blocks of texts.

However, during our testing, we have realised that mediation has its own scale when it comes to the intensity of states. For example phrases such as: “I am concerned for my child” would typically be phrased as negative, yet is encouraged. Manually calibrating what Peam presents as acceptable is a short-term fix. By collecting de-identified responses we are putting ourselves in a position to train our own model on the back of Google’s natural language processing API – a powerful yet affordable solution.

Although we have not launched yet, our current partnership with 14 mediation would allow us to positively impact 3360 people/year; where a positive impact the number of additional successful resolutions (including and excluding SRLs). Where the metric is the decrease in the number of unresolved disputes, and the increase in fairness of agreements.

However, our targeted growth would have see us impacting 15,840 people/yr after our first year.

There are roughly 850 private mediation centres in Australia and 270 different government funded centres. Whereas the private centres may only have one or two mediators, the government funded or community centres are able to process much larger volumes. Getting in contact with and communicating with each of these is not a challenge. Using a web scraper and by accessing online directories we have collected a database of all their contact details. This has already allowed us to get directly in contact with so many centres so rapidly.

By leveraging the scale of community or government funded centres. We aim to get 36 private mediation centres on board and 6 government funded or community centres. These larger institutions are less risk averse than private centres, thus partnering and working with the private centres first allows us to prove our effectiveness, which can then be used to put through a business case to the larger centres.

Following through with this plan, after our first year we know we are able to have 23,760 successful resolutions a year. For us, the metric defining a successful agreement is the quantified by the decrease in the number of unresolved disputes, and the increase in fairness of agreements.

Consideration regarding the measurement of our progress was key to the developments of our KPIs. By utilising our direct relationships with the mediators we are able to collect survey responses.

A clearer explanation may be gained by understanding the design of our pilot. Within such mediators onboard with the pilot agree for their clients and they themselves to complete a short 3 question survey before, during and after the mediation. Half of the client respondents are users of Peam, the rest are a control group. Statistically analysing the results allows us to determine if, between centres, usage of Peam aligns with our KPIs and by what degree - per user. Associating such allows us to quantify the degree of impact per user - a metric readily accessible. Repeating this survey with centres every 6 months would allow us to determine whether this quantification still holds and to what degree.

Our largest barrier is gaining credibility and reach with new centres.

Our largest potential for impact is from community centres. Most of these are government funded, meaning any investment or new process requires a very clear business case and negotiations. Gaining exposure, reaching the right contacts, and being able to prove our value proposition is crucial in this regard. Advice on doing this effectively would be required and sought.

At the end of the year we would also like to pitch our progress to the court - as they are currently undergoing a large process of improving their methodologies and procedures. Gaining their support could be pivotal in gaining the credibility to reach more people.

We would love to properly introduce ourselves, so please view the 1min introduction here.

As a Team

We all deeply care about having and supporting social change - in a meaningful and impactful manner. We are an interdisciplinary team of critical thinkers with expertise in Commerce, Computer Science, Economics, Philosophy, Psychology, and Law. We enjoy working together and making a difference.

Individually

Grace:

• Understanding of social justice issues and perspectives on helping the vulnerable from working in Caxton Community Legal Centre and Jasper Fogerty Criminal Lawyers
• Legal knowledge from third year of a Law degree, and psychological knowledge from Science degree
• Broad network of legal professionals, and the confidence to reach out to them

Leidi:

• Experienced at stakeholder analysis and public speaking from a decade of competitive debating, Model UN, and working with non-profit organisations as a consultant
• Organisational and administrative skills as a paralegal
• Legal knowledge from being in third year of a Law degree, with finance and economic knowledge from my Commerce Degree

Felix:

• Worked 3 years as a developer (fullstack development, no-code development, rapid prototyping) and consultant for early stage startups, 
• Experienced problem solver 7 time hackathon/problem-solving challenge national finalist
• Startup industry connections and the ability to utilise these 

Nelson:

• Organisational skills developed through many event creation and management.
• A drive for making a tangible impact seen through my volunteering experience in Peru and France.
• Strong critical thinking and data analytical skills developed through academic and extra-curricular projects.

Empathy with those we serve

Connecting and hearing from 31 self represented litigants was crucial to truly understand and connect with those we serve. Hearing first hand the emotional stories and the hardships people have lived through has been crucial to our drive to want the best for them.

We’ve partnered with a range of organisations and individuals to help us grow into an impactful company.

• Product development, market research, pilot support
  • Flora Mediation,
  • Madison Chambers,
  • Stanfords Solicitors & Mediators,
  • Psychlaw Australia, Bourke Mediation,
  • Synergy Resolutions,
  • Catholic Care Social Services,
  • Black and White Mediation,
  • CoParenting Kids,
  • Olive Branch Mediation,
  • DA Family Lawyers,
  • Sharon Large
  • Tom Stodulka
• Industry influencers - these are people who are well connected and have a strong voice within the industry. They are key in continual guidance with direction and potential opportunities.
  • Tom Stodulka (AM)
  • Clarissa Rayward
  • Patrick Parkinsons (AM)
• Partnerships which allow us to tap into a strong community of end-user, allowing us to overcome the challenge of identifying end-users imposed by Section s121 of the Australian Family Law Act.
  • Jacquie Griffin - Family Law Assist

N/A

Peam’s success and impact depends on its scale of reach. 

The Posen Social Innovation Prize would largely accelerate Peam’s current growth. In particular funds could allow for gained exposure at key events (by covering travel expenses) or participation costs. Marketing to individual users who would be the target market of the community centres would be the next largest investment; again, to increase Peam Team’s exposure and increase the impact of Peam (the service).