An access to justice project

A note from the founder

My name is Jared Persaud.

In 2006, I wrote a thesis paper on the Integrated Justice Project — the Ontario government's early attempt to modernize the courts. I interviewed court operations managers, judges, and even the Regional Senior Justice to understand why it never delivered on its promise. Good intentions, good people, but the technology never caught up to the work that lawyers and judges actually do. That stayed with me.

I've been interested in computers and writing software for as long as I can remember. After law school, I built my practice around two things: domestic violence law and access to justice for the most vulnerable people in our system.

For over fifteen years I've sat on Legal Aid Ontario's domestic violence panel. I've worked with four women's shelters. I serve as duty counsel at 361 University Avenue, 47 Sheppard Avenue East, 50 Eagle Street West (Newmarket), and 311 Jarvis Street courthouses. I'm in court three to five days a week. I know a thing or two about vulnerable clients.

Outside of court, I serve as a Director of the York Region Law Association and Chair of its DEI Committee, working to make the profession more representative of the communities it serves. Of my reported decisions, the one I am most proud of is Fahmy v. Ojeda, 2023 ONSC 6287 — kept two infant children with their newcomer mother in a women's shelter against the father's motion to flip primary care; “living in a shelter is only a temporary expedient.”

Following in the footsteps

This project is rooted in something older than my own practice.

My mother, Nirmala Armstrong, is a domestic violence survivor. She went to law school looking for social justice. In the 1990s her work was profiled on the front cover of a Legal Aid Ontario pamphlet, and she has served as duty counsel in multiple Toronto courts in the years since. She received the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002 and ten years later the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012 — recognition for a life of work in the public interest.

All four of her children are lawyers. All four are doing social-justice work in their own way. My wife is also a lawyer and duty counsel, fighting for social justice in her own practice every day. Family Court Toolbox is, for me, part of that thread. Canadians helping Canadians. I am following in her footsteps.

The team behind FCT

I'm the founder of Family Court Toolbox. The work is shaped by partners who share the vision — family law lawyers in court regularly, all with the same conviction that the system can be more efficient than it is today:

• Jared Persaud — Founder
• Ali Manavi — Partner at Family Court Toolbox
• Justin Persaud — Partner at Family Court Toolbox
• Vincenzo Ruso — Partner at Family Court Toolbox

Together we share a vision: that the tools family lawyers use should be as good as the work they are asked to do.

Why this matters now

Judges want an evidentiary basis to support the decisions they make. Sometimes lawyers just don't have the time to do that work for their client — not because they don't want to, but because there are not enough hours in the day. These tools are designed to help, so that the justice system can run that much better.

A lack of clean evidentiary record for the orders sought increases the complexity of cases. It turns a single hearing into multiple wasted appearances. It costs taxpayers. It costs the emotional health of the litigants. And sometimes it costs lives. I have seen it.

Self-represented litigants are arriving at court with more information than ever — and a lot of it now comes from AI tools that don't know what they don't know. Misinformation in family court is dangerous. Full stop. For lawyers to do their job — to correct that misinformation, to advocate properly for the people who need it most, to deliver on access to justice in any real sense — we need to be at least as well-equipped as the misinformation we are up against. That is what these tools are for.

Eight years, and a CLE in Toronto

For the past eight years, our team has been quietly building software for family law lawyers — the kind of tools we kept wishing existed when we are the ones in court at 9:00 a.m. with a stack of files and a client counting on us. Family Court Toolbox is the culmination of that work.

On Wednesday, April 29, 2026, we introduced the Toolbox to the Toronto family bar at the “Show Your Work” CLE for the 47 Sheppard Avenue East courthouse. The response from lawyers in the room — the ones doing this work every day, on every kind of file — is what tells us we are on the right track.

A project by lawyers, for lawyers

This is a project by lawyers, for lawyers. We won't always get it right. But we're trying, and we will ultimately need your help and your suggestions, because we're in this together.

Things won't be perfect right off the bat. Let us know what needs work — and it will be fixed.

We are just getting started

For too long, specific companies have controlled access to justice by controlling the software tools used to deliver on the idea of access to justice. No more.

We are looking inward, to Canadian ingenuity — because we have the know-how, and we just need to act. The Toolbox today is calculations, court forms, and agreements that lawyers can actually use. This is a movement. It will, in time, provide the seeds for the major structural changes our courts need — whether through public-private partnerships or otherwise.

The bigger goal is to change the entire system. There are far more efficient ways of doing things in our courts than the way they get done today, and the technology now exists to prove it. The Integrated Justice Project of twenty years ago aimed at the right thing and missed. We intend to finish what they started — quietly, one tool at a time, with the people who do this work every day.

This release is a beginning, not a finish line.