Volunteer opportunities

Law for Life is looking for a practising solicitor who specialises in civil litigation, or similar, to peer review five short guides in our range of guides to help litigants in person to determine if they have a potential civil claim and if they do, how to manage their application to the civil court. These guides were published last year, and we are seeking to ensure that they remain accurate and up-to-date. The right person will know about personal injury and be able to help us ensure the guides remain accurate.They will need to be practical and sensible about what LiPs can manage. Our aim is not to produce an exhaustive guide to civil litigation but to produce something an ordinary Litigant in Person could use. 

If you know anybody who might be willing to help, please ask them to get in touch at guides@lawforlife.org.uk

We are also looking for a peer reviewer  to help us ensure the accuracy of a new guide 'How to appeal against a county court decision'. This could be the same person as above, or a different person.

The role of the peer reviewer is to ensure that the guides are accurate without compromising their readability or re-writing them. The guides fit together and reference eachother, so it would be easier if it is one person who peer reviews all of them.  

About Law for Life

Law for Life is a charity dedicated to ensuring that people have the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to secure access to justice. They run Advicenow, an independent, not-for-profit website which provides accurate, practical self-help guides, tools and film on rights and the law in England and Wales and draws together the best information about the law and rights available. Advicenow is the user-facing website of the Litigants In Person Support Strategy.

November 2020

We test our guides with a mixture of people who have tried to solve their problems on their own and experts before publication to ensure that they are as effective and helpful as possible. It's a really valuable stage in the process of producing legal information for the public. If you have experience of dealing with a legal problem this would be helpful, but don’t worry if you haven’t.

Your role

We will ask you to read a guide and let us know what you think of the structure, content, and tone of it. We'd also like you to think about your answer to these questions when you read something for us:

• Does this guide give me all the information I would need to do the task or deal with the legal issue it aims to help me with?
• Do I have any questions that the guide doesn't answer?
• Is there anything in the guide that I don’t understand? (It's really helpful to know if there's stuff you don't understand. It means we need to try harder!
• Are there any words or phrases in the guide that I don't understand or don't like?
• Is there anything that isn’t as clear as it could be? (It's helpful if you are as precise as possible about what it is you don't understand or are left feeling uncertain about.)
• Is there anything that needs more explanation?

As a member of Advicenow's users’ panel, we may contact you when we are updating an information guide or other resource for our website. We will email you a document to review. We will give you a week to look at it and send us your comments via email.

What do I do to take part?

If you are interested in becoming a member of our panel, please complete the contact form (click on 'Contact Us' at the bottom of this page), giving us your contact details and we will be in touch. Thank you!

We always need new photos to liven up our website and help our readers identify with our information.

Research has shown that web pages and leaflets with interesting images are more likely to catch and keep people’s attention. Pictures of people who readers identify with also help them take information in and remember it. So your photos can really help us get our message across.

Advicenow is an award winning website which provides information on the law and rights, for example, on things like benefits, employment, immigration and divorce.

You can even view information on Advicenow about photography and the law.

What we need

We need photos of real people in real situations. For example, at home, shopping, at work, waiting for a bus, in a cafe, or on their way to school. Pictures of people looking at forms or bills, opening letters and on the telephone are particularly useful. Head shots are great too. 

We don’t need pictures of really good looking, or dressed up people – just ordinary people going about everyday tasks or activities in what they would normally wear - the kind of people who might use our website.

People from many different backgrounds, cultures and walks of life use our service and we would like them to feel represented in the photos on our site. So we like to include images of  many different kinds of people – in terms of ethnic, cultural, social and religious backgrounds, age, disability, gender, gender expression and sexuality.

What you get

If your photo is suitable we will include it in our image library. This means that your photo could appear on the Advicenow web site (which last year received over a 1 million page views) or in one of our PDF guides.

You’ll also get a mention on our Thank you! page and our gratitude. And the satisfaction of knowing that you have helped a small charity reach more people.

If you are interested, please email guides@lawforlife.org.uk.