FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Legal systems regulate human behavior. They do this by regulating 2 things – Policy and Power.

When people have legal trouble it's more often a power problem than a policy one. People generally seek out a lawyer because they believe that the law has policy-solutions that can be applied to a power problem.

Immigrant's constantly encounter power problems because they unfortunately are in many relationships where they have minority/participatory power. We are Norway's:

• Spouse of a reference person
• Skilled worker with no rights to remain when unemployed
• Tenants
• So on and so forth.

Immigrants also don't understand local policy well enough to recognize or mitigate power problems, defend against them or respond to issues properly.

We also have zero political representation because we can't vote, which means there is no political will to address issues that affect groups of us, or us collectively.

The power that most think they have available is shaped by the options that a society discloses and makes obvious to them. If you are only required to "participate" in a situation, your options are to:

• Comply
• Agree or
• Appeal

However, Norway is a country that offers so much more 'administrative' power to individuals with access to:

• Diplomacy
• Negotiation/Bargaining
• Planning and Strategy
• Influence
• Enforcement

The system itself feels anti-immigrant for this reason, but it is not designed to be. It's a bug not a feature. One's capability to exercise administrative power, however, comes with 3 things: Knowledge, understanding, and practical application (practice). We worked out the bug, and this system is the solution.

If this is a problem with the system, I can't do anything that will guarantee any useful outcome trying to change it.

I can however change you and give you more options to help you deal with all the power and policy challenges of such a system.

It's a systemic problem and requires a systemic solution to give you administrative skills and power without hurting yourself or other people.

It is reliant on our delivery and your participation.

The services are available for people generally, but the "system" requires people to go through its membership scheme for continued advisory through a mix of:

• Group sessions covering various concepts and skills relevant to a given problem
• Membership consultations (1hr) for things you need help with directly
• Non-consultation contact – a fancy way of saying 'talking to you outside of a scheduled consultation, like responding to an email or 10 minute phone-call.

To start, you pay 1900 + your first month's subscription. This subscription pays for the costs to deliver services.

The monthly subscription is 950kr thereafter.

Membership consultations are decided at our discretion. If it is appropriate, we will direct you to some group sessions as an alternative to prevent overloading the model.

Membership consultations are limited in scope and will only concern things you engaged the system for. Assessments required for these consultations are not included and will be charged separately.

For services we provide for non-members, their information will be destroyed and not kept after this is done. It costs money to house and protect this information and defeats the purpose of having a membership scheme.

These are consultations where YOU want to change something concerning a legal relationship you engaged us for OR you want help with another legal relationship we are not aware of.

This fee doesn't pay for the consultation; it pays for the time spent onboarding this part of your life that we are going to have to follow and advise you on going forward.

The scheme is supposed to encourage you to use us and engage us, not to punish you every time you do.

If something goes wrong with the legal relationships you currently have covered with us, consultations are covered by your membership, and we can be there to explain the law and how it applies in such circumstances. You will not be required to pay for this.

If these changes involve you needing us to assess what is happening and make decisions about what is relevant and what you need to be aware of or pay close attention to, it will involve going through your situation directly and applying the law.

The more reliance you are going to place on what we decide for you, the more intense these assessments become because we then take on some responsibility for what happens going forward.

If you hire us to prepare you for a downsizing process and assess the circumstances at the time, this is very low intensity work as it is quite straightforward.

If you hire us to assess your legal position during or after a downsizing, this is mid intensity because we are going to make strategic and legal decisions that impact your options going further in the process if you dispute the dismissal and want to fight it in court.

The services are priced according to intensity, for good reason. Members should update us about different parts of their life quite regularly. Assessments for significant changes should not incur so many resources by us or the system, because we already know so much about you, and of course, know enough about the law.

If we do our job, assessments should not go beyond mid intensity for members. If they do, it will likely be because you have not used the system enough or as intended.

(i) SUBSCRIBE AND ONBOARD

After you subscribe and pay, you will be sent a form to fill out. This form is important for us to map out your legal relationships in Norway, and it would make little sense for us to learn about them during the onboarding session.

Before the session, someone will go through everything you have included in the form and assess what is relevant, what might be problematic, what can be improved, and what is critical.

During the session we will discuss your legal relationships with you, so you get a clear picture of things. We will provide you with access to a folder where you can upload documents that are relevant then and as time progresses, each folder will be split up into your real relationships.

You will get a summary of your consultation within 7 days outlining what was covered and what we recommend. This will function as kind of a "prescription" that you get from a doctor, all assessments will function this way.

(ii) OVER TIME

As time progresses, you can contact us via email to discuss each legal relationship that has been covered and keep us updated about what is going on. If you need clarification, you can ask then. If it requires a consultation, we will schedule it according to when you are available or respond to the email directly.

If we decide against a consultation but you feel this is necessary, you will have to pay the 850NOK for that.

If the consultation we will have concerns something other members would be interested in covering (lets say it concerns a downsizing at a specific company where your colleagues are members) we can hold a group session and discuss this as a group, this is covered by the membership. If someone attending is a non-member, they will have to pay 850NOK to participate.

(iii) GROUP SESSIONS – CONCEPTS AND SKILLS

We will hold open group-sessions split into 2 categories – Concept sessions and Skills sessions.

Both sessions are covered by the membership and free for members, but skills sessions will have a prerequisite of having attended concept sessions that cover the material that the skills are based on OR having had a consultation with us covering the concepts that are necessary.

If the skills session covers drafting a samboeravtale, you will have to have attended the corresponding concept session for it.

All these skills are of general importance to protect the interests of a client in legal practice, but they don't come from going to law school, they come from years of experience dealing with law and power issues. These sessions are designed out of this experience, with some legal knowledge here and there (I'm joking of course).

Non-members will also be subject to any prerequisites and have to pay 850NOK to attend.

(iv) ASSESSMENTS

If you would like us to apply the law to a specific problem situation, or we advise this to be necessary, you will need to pay for this being done – it is not covered by the membership scheme.

You are free to request assessments, but whether or not this is appropriate is at our discretion. If we feel the assessment requested is not sufficient to address what you need, we reserve the right to decline this.

If this system was designed with the primary objective of making money off people, we could of course get you to sign a waiver removing our liability if things go wrong, but this system is not designed to enable people to hurt themselves. It's better to set a policy to decline doing it than deal with the moral and legal consequences of allowing this to happen.

Definitely not, but there are many things that don't require a lawyer. Just a solid grasp of certain concepts, the mastery of the Norwegian or English language, and a fully functional brain (this is important).

A few classes of jiu-jitsu is not going to prepare you for a title fight. It will, however, enable you to overpower an assailant that threatens your life or those around you.

Arguing cases in a court room setting involves clearly understanding legal ideas and concepts at a strategic level.

This system cannot replace the skills one gets from going to law school and working as a lawyer or jurist. It can, however, keep you from being overpowered in a dispute where you are a weaker party, or getting yourself into trouble, or making those problems more complicated and difficult.

Most people end up with cases that are unwinnable when they didn't have to be, or encounter issues that were unnecessary.

With regard to disputes legally speaking – this system will provide you with 'preventative' skills not 'cure' skills to your legal problems.

In any case, if you are in a situation with quite a high-risk environment or complexity (like going through a legal process), it's never a good idea to represent yourself.

"A lawyer that represents themself, has a fool for a client" – old proverb

When you encounter a problem, your objective is to solve them, not find reasons to fight them.

When individuals encounter a power problem, the instinct is to fight almost always. This thinking is ubiquitous in society and characterizes politics, law in the media, minority rights culture etc. If you are going to approach your life this way, you will be fighting for the rest of your life, and often, it won't be worth it even if you win.

It is understandable for people to feel their only instinct is to fight. This is 'participatory' thinking, and when things go wrong, participants feel like victims. Professionals approach problems as 'administrators' not participants, because they understand enough to think this way.

Fortunately, Norway is a country that provides individuals options to administrate problems.

Our system will open up options for you to apply 'administrative' solutions to disputes. Diplomacy, negotiation, influence – all of these things require people skills with some knowledge of legal ideas in the background. There are also options like forliksrådet for dispute assessments or nammsmannen for enforcement of rights – open to the public and designed for people to be able to administrate problems without an expensive lawyer.

This business model is going to grow and develop, and yes eventually it will have all the features a normal law firm does, but it is not sensible to jump into those without sorting through how to do this most effectively for you, the user.

I have to solve the price problem mainly, ideally having this covered by the membership fee like unions do, but that means making decisions for other parts of the model.

I won't know how to do this until people start using it and give feedback. I also need to see how economically viable things are, make resource decisions about how we do the work and see if tech and AI can help with that without compromising on the quality of what we are offering, and mitigating any effects this might have if it does so it serves its purpose in a different way.

With this data, I can then make development plans towards providing legal representation. You, however, have to use the system first.

I am incredibly noob with tech and unfortunately starting this solo. Email me at james@aequitas.no confirming your interest, and I will then send you an invoice to pay for the first month and we can take it from there.