Legal Aid Eligibility App

13/05/2026
Knowledge

How To

Legal Aid Eligibility helps law firms quickly determine whether a new family law enquiry qualifies for civil legal aid, right from the first interaction. By embedding a simple, secure family legal aid questionnaire into your website, prospective family law clients can submit key details instantly, reducing manual intake and delays.

The app guides users through a clear set of questions aligned with civil legal aid criteria and delivers an immediate, structured outcome. This allows your team to assess suitability faster, improve consistency in decision-making, and focus on viable family law matters. It enhances the client experience with greater transparency while reducing administrative workload, minimising errors, and streamlining your family law intake process.

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Widget Setup Guide: This guide explains how to setup the questionnaire for prospective clients to complete, utilising your firm’s website and branding.
Staff User Guide: This guide explains how staff can handle incoming eligibility questionnaires from prospective clients within LEAP, streamlining the process from legal aid criteria to viable case.

Widget Setup Guide

To download a PDF version of this article, please click here.

This guide is for whoever is responsible for getting the Legal Aid Eligibility widget live on your firm's website, typically a practice manager, IT contact, or administrator. You don't need to be a developer to follow these steps, but if you're not comfortable editing your website, we'll show you exactly what to pass on to someone who is.

The widget is the short questionnaire form that sits on your firm's website and lets prospective clients submit their eligibility information before you open/link a matter. You only need to set it up once.

Before You Start

Before you dive in, make sure you have the following to hand:

Access to Legal Aid Eligibility in LEAP - via LEAP Menu > Settings > Apps
The web address of the page where the widget will appear (e.g. https://www.yourfirm.co.uk/legal-aid). This needs to be the exact page URL, not just your homepage.
Your firm's brand colours - specifically the HEX codes for your website's background colour and your primary brand colour. If you're not sure what these are, your web developer or marketing team will have them.

Widget Setup

Step 1 - Open the App Settings

In LEAP, click Menu in the top navigation bar
Select Settings
Select Apps
Find and click Legal Aid Eligibility

Step 2 - Fill In the Setup Form

After clicking Legal Aid Eligibility, the Settings window will open, displaying the Create Widget screen.

There are three things to fill in:

Website Address

Enter the full URL of the page where the widget will appear. It must be an exact match for the page address, including https:// at the start.

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Copy the address straight from your browser's address bar when you're on the right page. This avoids any typos that could prevent the widget from loading.

Widget Background Colour

This should match the background colour of the web page where the widget will sit. Getting this right means the widget will blend naturally into your page rather than looking like a floating box.

To set the colour, either:

Click one of the preset brand colour circles, or
Click the + button and type a HEX code directly (e.g. #F9F6F7)

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Not sure of your background colour? Most websites use white (#FFFFFF) or a light grey. Your web developer or brand guidelines will have the exact value.

Widget Primary Brand Colour

This is your firm's main brand colour, the one used for buttons and highlights inside the widget (such as the "Start New Submission" button).

Choose the colour that best represents your firm's branding.

You can pick a preset or enter a HEX code using the + button.

Step 3 - Generate the Widget

Once all three fields are filled in, click the button.

You'll see a Your Widget Ready confirmation screen. This means the widget has been created successfully. The screen also shows your Installation Snippet, a block of code that you'll need to add to your website in the next step.

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Your widget is ready, copy the installation snippet to add it to your website as explained in Step 4 below.

Step 4 - Add the Widget to Your Website

The installation snippet is a short block of code that activates the widget on your chosen web page. Here's how to get it live.

If you manage your own website

Click Copy Code to copy the snippet to your clipboard
Log in to your website management system (e.g. WordPress, Squarespace, Wix)
Navigate to the page where the widget should appear
Open the page's HTML editor or insert an HTML block
Paste the snippet in
Save and publish the page

If a web developer manages your website

Click Copy Code
Paste the snippet into an email or message to your developer
Ask them to paste it into the HTML of the relevant page, and let them know it needs to go on the specific page whose URL you entered in the setup form

Once the snippet is on the page, the widget goes live immediately. You don't need to do anything else.

Step 5 - Check It's Working

After the snippet is installed, it's worth a quick check:

Visit the page on your website in a browser
Look for the widget, it should display a form headed "Let's check your status."
Confirm the colours look right against the page background

If the widget isn't appearing, double-check that the URL you entered in the setup form exactly matches the page address shown in the browser, including whether there's a trailing slash.

Updating the Widget Later

If you ever need to change your website address or update your brand colours, you can edit the widget settings at any time.

Go to LEAP Menu > Settings > Apps > Legal Aid Eligibility
Make your changes to the form
Click Update Widget
Copy the new snippet and replace the old one on your website

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Updating the widget generates a new installation snippet. The previous snippet will stop working, so you must replace it on your website, otherwise the widget will disappear from the page.

Deleting the Widget

If you ever need to remove the widget entirely, scroll to the Danger Zone section at the bottom of the settings screen and click Delete Widget.

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Deleting the widget will permanently remove it and stop it from working on any page where it's currently installed. This action cannot be undone. You would need to go through the full setup process again if you want to reinstate it.

That's everything you need to get your widget up and running. Once it's live on your website, your team will start receiving client submissions directly in LEAP. For guidance on reviewing and managing those submissions, see the Legal Aid Eligibility – Staff User Guide section, below.

Staff User Guide

To download a PDF version of this article, please click here.

The Legal Aid Eligibility app helps your team collect and review the information needed to assess whether a client qualifies for legal aid, all before a matter has been opened.

Here's how the process works from start to finish:

A prospective client visits your firm's website and fills in a short eligibility questionnaire
Their answers come straight through into LEAP, ready for your team to review
Anyone in the team can open the submission, read the client's answers, and leave notes for colleagues
Built-in AI analysis gives you a quick summary of the case and flags anything that needs attention
You either decline the enquiry or approve it and create (or link to) a matter in LEAP
Once a matter is open, you can generate a pre-populated MEANS7 form and save any uploaded documents to the matter