Then COVID-19 struck and the “tenancy space was blown away by the pandemic”.

In response, co-founder and chief executive Noel Lim and the Anika Legal team spent about a fortnight building a new function, dubbed COVID-19 rent reduction support, which provides assistance for tenants seeking a rent reduction.

As a result, Mr Lim says Anika Legal has gone from five clients a week to five per day.

And that’s “without marketing as hard as we could have”.

“The challenge is that we have this really great service but we need to figure out how to make renters aware of it, in order to help as many people as we can,” Mr Lim told Lawyers Weekly.

Unexpected beginnings

Anika Legal began as six friends who entered the 2016 Melbourne Global Legal Hackathon. 

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What started as a weekend to hang out and solve some legal problems culminated in the winning idea for Anika Legal, a whirlwind two months of building on the initial idea, and then what progressed to the Global Legal Hackathon final at a gala in New York City. 

“After placing runners-up at the global final, united by our passion for access to justice and the idea, we decided to turn our idea into reality and became co-founders of Anika Legal,” Perveen Maan co-founder of Anika Legal and legal counsel at LOD said.

“Our first year was a baptism of fire where we had to build a team, develop a tech product, and fundraise from the ground up.” 

Anika is now a registered charity and has become an independent legal practice that provides free legal assistance to people who can’t access it, as well as practical legal education to law students. 

Connecting those who need help with those who need training

Ms Maan said that there are 490,000 people each year who don’t get the legal help they need. At the same time, countless law students are desperate for legal training. 

Anika Legal connects people who need and want legal help, and a practising lawyer reviews all advice to ensure they are of the highest quality.

Tessa Ramanlal, co-founder and head of user at Anika Legal, said the next major step in the post-COVID legal environment is launching the pilot of Anika’s practical legal training unit with a number of Victorian universities next month.

“After a year of [user testing] this unit with volunteer students, we are thrilled to roll it out at universities (where students will receive university credit towards their law degrees),” Ms Ramanlal said.

“As we saw with the quick rollout of our COVID rent reduction service (which saw a 600 per cent increase in client demand for Anika), our ability to move quickly as needs emerge allows us to maximise community impact.” 

With the economy expected to recede by 10 per cent over the first half of 2020, Mr Lim says Anika Legal is seeking partnerships with other formal bodies including Tenants Victoria and Consumer Affairs Victoria to cope with growing demand.

Anika Legal is also planning to shift their revenue stream from grants and fundraisers to a business model where “universities pay for the training we provide.”

“The vision is a world where everyone can access justice,” Mr Lim said.

Mr Lim hopes that they will be able to expand their service to consumer and employment law in the future.

“These are pretty [straightforward] legal areas, but people would greatly benefit from our legal advice and assistance,” he said.

“Simply put: our goal is to continue coping with the new demand post-COVID-19.”