Built by a law student who thinks the law should be readable.
Business Law Help is a personal project by Bernard Kang, a law student: an attempt to show what honest, plain-English legal help for small business could look like — built carefully, on the right side of the line between information and advice.
The problem I kept seeing
Most small businesses can't justify $400–600 an hour, so they run without legal help at all. They sign leases without reading the make-good clause, engage "contractors" who are really employees, and put terms on their websites that quietly breach consumer law. None of it is malice — it's cost.
The information that would prevent most of these problems isn't secret. It's just written for lawyers, scattered across statutes and firm blogs, and rarely connected to the documents people actually sign. I wanted to see how far careful writing and a bit of software could close that gap.
The line I won't cross
In Australia, only admitted lawyers with practising certificates can give legal advice for a fee — and that restriction exists for good reasons. This project is designed to sit firmly on the information side of that line:
- It explains, it doesn't advise. Every page describes how an area of law generally works — never what you should do.
- Samples are for comparison, not use. The annotated documents are simplified and fictional — labelled that way on every screen.
- It routes to humans. Every topic ends with red flags and a path to real, qualified help — free services first.
- No fee-sharing, no referrals-for-money. The planned lawyer directory is exactly that — a directory. You'd find and engage a lawyer directly.
What's inside
Every one of the 23 practice areas gets the same full treatment — nothing is a stub.
25 annotated sample documents
From shareholders' agreements to leases to Division 7A loans — reviewed clause-by-clause with risk ratings, who each clause favours, and what to check.
35+ interactive tools
A contract clause analyser, paste-your-own document checkers, deadline calculators, decision wizards, and a live self-check on every topic.
Plain English, everywhere
Worked examples, template outlines, and a 42-term glossary — written at the level a busy owner can actually read.
How it's built
Deliberately simple: a fast, dependency-free static site — no framework, no build step, no tracking. All the legal content lives in structured data files, so every topic renders through the same carefully designed template and nothing drifts out of step. It's keyboard-navigable, screen-reader-conscious, printable, and works in light and dark mode.
Nothing you type ever leaves your browser. The self-checks save locally on your device; the document checkers run entirely client-side.
The honest caveat
I'm a law student, not an admitted lawyer. Everything here is general information, drafted carefully and hedged deliberately — but before anything like this went truly public, each topic would be reviewed by a qualified practitioner. That review step isn't a weakness of the idea; it's part of the design.
— Bernard Kang