Helping lawyers change the world, one pot of money at a time. Developed around lawyers’ obligations. Keeping donors safe with Stripe.
Only lawyers can list campaigns on Article Two. This protects clients’ best interests, such as confidentiality and privilege. Any funds are paid into an account, sometimes a trust account, controlled by the lawyer. Any misconduct can be investigated by the legal profession regulator.
Funding for litigation is already common, like legal aid grants, litigation funding, or parents chipping in. Our Compliance & Precedents Guide helps lawyers crowdfund responsibly and confidently. Our How It Works page helps donors, lawyers, and clients to see if Article Two is right for them.
We partner with Stripe to process donations, so we never see donors’ account details. Your donation, minus processing fees to Stripe and 5 per cent to us, gives teeth to the law.
Fund anything legal. We trust you to know what you need. If you have clients, we trust you to advise them on their best interests, using our Compliance and Precedents Guide.
Cover solicitors’ fees; disbursements, including barristers’ fees, expert report fees, filing fees, search fees, translation and interpretation, and travel costs; protective costs orders, security for costs orders, and adverse costs orders. Fund for investigations, submissions, litigation, internships, whatever will fill the gap. Mix and match your funding sources.
If crowdfunded legal services are provided for no fee to the lawyers, or at a “substantially reduced” cost, those hours can count towards the national Pro Bono Target.
We hope Article Two will enable lawyers to do more public interest law in their expert practice areas, where they are familiar with systemic issues. We hope crowdfunding will redress some of the pay inequity at the private Bar. We hope more people can be public interest lawyers.
If more public interest litigation can be crowdfunded with the appropriate safeguards, this also supports the role of the judiciary in holding the executive and legislature to account. There could be fewer large, expensive, slow class actions in the future if more systemic issues can be litigated earlier at the individual level for less cost. Proper basis certification and civil procedure litigation requirements would still limit frivolous cases.
We will advocate for increased funding for legal aid and community law using campaign data. We aim to conduct impact studies to measure the effect of Article Two on lawyers, clients, and communities.
Every dollar through Article Two shows solidarity to ordinary clients. Donors get to fund their values.
Every dollar through Article Two supports the public interest law ecosystem—lawyers, paralegals, psychologists, scientists, engineers, translators, interpreters—who work no-fee or low-fee and risk burnout because the need is so great. Donations set us up for a future of lawyers who bite back.
Every dollar through Article Two shows support for better funding for community law and legal aid. We will use funding data to help advocate for more government funding for law to help more people, so they never need to become clients.