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Two Bees is a great example of taking something complicated & turning it into an accessible online tool.

Unless you’re a lawyer or involved in litigation you probably haven’t thought about court costs. Under New Zealand law it is possible in some cases for the successful party to recover their court costs.

But the exact court costs they can recover are prescribed in pieces of legislation like this. 

Those of you who’ve been brave enough to look at the legislation will have noticed it contains many calculations of varying complexity. Some lawyers have taken to creating their own spreadsheets to make sense of these calculations.

UpShift was approached by Steve Keall - a civil barrister based in Auckland, New Zealand. Steve wanted to create a tool for his profession that would take the legislation & turn it into an easy to use online tool.

Over the past few months we have worked with Steve to turn this:

 

 

Into this calculator:

 

Which can generate this report:

Like many of the online tools we develop Two Bees was a voyage of discovery. Calculations that seemed relatively straight forward at the beginning of the project became more complex & customised as we peeled back the layers of legislation.

The challenge - as always - was to hide as much of the complexity as possible from the user so they can focus on what they know & let the code logic deal with the rest.

Two Bees was launched last week & the initial reaction from the legal community has been very positive.

We are proud of this tool & really enjoyed working with Steve to develop it.