Sydney Criminal Lawyers® Named as Finalist in LexisNexis/Janders Dean Legal Innovation Index 2015

The team at Sydney Criminal Lawyers® is delighted to announce that we have been named as finalists in the LexisNexis and Janders Dean 2015 Legal Innovation Index.

The Legal Innovation Index is an annual award which recognises outstanding innovators in the legal profession, and:

‘the profession’s absolute commitment to continuing to find new and dynamic ways for adding significant and previously untapped value for firms and their clients.’

Sydney Criminal Lawyers® is a finalist in the ‘Organisation’ category – with many other finalists being ‘top-tier’ corporate law firms which employ thousands of staff and have a strong global presence.

In comparison, the team at Sydney Criminal Lawyers® consists of just 19 brilliant, dedicated, hardworking individuals, led by our principal Ugur Nedim, who has built the firm from the ground-up since starting it back in 2001.

Our Story

From day one (back in October 2001), Sydney Criminal Lawyers® has stood out from other criminal law firms by focusing on results and client satisfaction, rather than profits and budgets.

We were the first criminal law firm in Australia to publish ‘fixed fee’ arrangements back in 2004, which promoted transparency and certainty – so that clients could know exactly how much their cases would cost from the very start.

We were criticised by other lawyers at the time, but our lead has now been followed by many other criminal law firms – although not all of them actually publish their fees.

We have fixed fees for a whole range of cases and services; including:

• Local Court Sentencing Hearings – where our clients wish to plead ‘guilty’ and get the best possible outcome,
• Defended Hearings – where our clients wish to plead ‘not guilty’ and have us defend them in court,
• Bail Applications,
• ‘Severity Appeals’ from the Local to the District Court, and
• Driver Licence Appeals.

But fixed fees were just the start – indeed, our commitment to making legal information more accessible to the public is exemplified by several of our initiatives, including:

• Our main website, which contains thousands of pages of original criminal and traffic law content,
• Our easy-to-navigate NSW Courts and Downing Centre Court sites which instantly provide a great deal of information about courts and the criminal justice process – much of which is not available on the government sites, and
• Our publication of 18 original blogs per week, which are distributed through our various social media platforms.

We also produce YouTube videos about a wide range of criminal law issues to assist people in understanding the law, their rights and their options when it comes to criminal and traffic cases.

And earlier this year, we produced the very first iOS App in Australia to provide instant, easy-to-understand information about legal matters.

Named ‘NSW Pocket Lawyer‘, the free, user-friendly App contains hundreds of blogs and short videos produced by our firm that are available at an instant, with an index that makes it easy to find exactly what users are looking for.

Members of the public can now pick up their iphone and quickly become informed about just about any popular criminal or traffic law topic, without having to call a lawyer – here’s a short video.

The community can engage in the criminal justice process without being in the dark about information that criminal lawyers take for granted, and sometimes protect jealously.

Winners of the 2015 Legal Innovation Index will be announced in Sydney on the 20th of August – so all the team at Sydney Criminal Lawyers® are keeping our fingers crossed!

From all of us at SCL, thank you for taking the time to read our blogs, for downloading our Pocket Lawyer app, and for providing feedback and blog requests so that we can continue to provide relevant and useful information to you.