This started as a technical exercise. It became something I couldn't stop working on once I understood what I was looking at.
I am not a lawyer. I have no legal background. What I had was curiosity, time, and access to tools that have made certain kinds of technical work genuinely accessible to people like me for the first time.
I started exploring whether it was possible to build something that could walk a person through a legal question — not answer it on their behalf, but structure the relevant legislation, apply the right tests, and show the person where they stood. I wanted to know if it could be done clearly, transparently, and free.
The further I got into the research, the more I realised the scale of what I was looking at. Millions of people in England and Wales with legitimate legal issues — underpaid wages, wrongly protected deposits, benefits they were entitled to but not receiving, debts that may no longer be enforceable — who had no practical way to understand their position. Not because the law didn't protect them. Because accessing that protection required navigating a system that assumed you already knew how it worked.
Free advice services exist. They are staffed by people doing extraordinary work under impossible pressure. But the gap between the number of people with legal problems and the capacity of those services to help them is not small. And the first thirty minutes of almost every advice appointment is spent establishing facts that a well-designed tool could have surfaced in five.
This was never designed to replace advisers. It was designed to help them — by allowing technology to handle structure, repetition, and information gathering, leaving skilled people to focus on judgement, empathy, and expertise. If it works as intended, an adviser using this platform should be able to do more, with less administration, for the people who need them most.
That felt like a solvable problem. Not fully solvable — not by me, not by any single organisation. But solvable enough to be worth trying.
I want to be honest about how this was built, because I think that honesty is part of what makes this project interesting — and because I would rather be transparent about it than have someone discover it later and wonder why I didn't say.
I used AI tools — primarily Claude — extensively throughout the development of this platform. Not to generate legal content and trust it blindly, but as a coding partner: helping me build the architecture, debug the logic, and work through technical problems that would otherwise have been beyond my reach as a self-taught developer.
The structure, methodology approach, and implementation decisions were mine. Legal references were mapped against primary sources and are being prepared for independent review by qualified law clinics before public release.
I think this is an honest account of how a certain kind of infrastructure can now be built by a single person with the right approach and enough stubbornness. I don't think it diminishes the result. If anything, it's part of the argument: the access to justice gap is real, and the tools to start closing it are now within reach of people who care enough to try.
Your Rights Shield is not a finished product. It is infrastructure in preparation for responsible deployment. Six tools are built. A governance framework is in place. A Charitable Incorporated Organisation is being prepared for registration with the Charity Commission of England and Wales. The platform will not go live until independent review, proper governance, and compliance are in order.
That might sound slow. I think it's the only way to do this correctly. Tools that give people information about their legal rights carry a genuine responsibility. I am not willing to release them until I am confident they are robust, transparent, and subject to appropriate oversight.
What I am looking for now is that oversight — trustees with the right experience, institutional partners willing to engage, and law clinics prepared to provide feedback on the methodology before it reaches the public. If you are reading this and any part of that is you, I would very much like to hear from you.
One person in Burslem built the infrastructure. Now I need the institution around it.
— Matthew J Foreman, June 2026