Noel Lim On Democratising Legal Aid And Support With Radically Resourceful Innovation
Noel Lim is the Founding CEO of Anika Legal, a not-for-profit reimagining how free legal help reaches people who are locked out of the justice system.
Anika Legal has supported over 1,400 renters to live in safe, secure homes. Noel has led the development of Anika’s unique service model, using technology to harness the power of supervised law students to deliver sustainable, high-quality legal support that helps renters not just stay housed, but thrive. The model also turns casework into data and insight that has driven systemic reforms benefiting all renters in Victoria.
The 2025 Victorian of the Year and a Westpac Social Change Fellow, Noel is a thought leader on housing, access to justice, and social entrepreneurship.
Noel discusses how reimagining legal services through student-led, tech-enabled models is driving community impact and unpacks the role of collaboration, integrity, and innovation in reshaping access to justice and tackling Australia’s housing crisis.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in social entrepreneurship?
[Noel Lim] - I was born in Singapore to parents who were very impact-driven. They actually met while volunteering, and we moved to Australia when I was six. I’ve realised later in life how some of the peculiarities of my upbringing really shaped Anika and the organisation we’ve built.
One example is something I didn’t realise was unusual until recently. We had this unspoken system in our family around clothes. We were all quite frugal, so we didn’t buy much new clothing. My two youngest brothers would shop at op shops, and since they were the most fashionable in the family, they’d always find the best stuff.
They’d wear those clothes for a few years and, when they were done, they’d offer them to the rest of us! I’d usually take them next, wear them for a few more years, then offer them up again (often to my dad). He’d wear them for a while, and by the time he was done, fashion had usually come full circle, and my younger brothers were keen on them again. It became this informal cycle.
Asking, “What do we already have, and can it meet our needs?” rather than constantly seeking more really stuck with me. I didn’t realise how much it had shaped my mindset until I started talking to friends and hearing how unusual it sounded to them.
As for my studies, I went to law school, but I was honestly pretty disengaged early on. The lack of practical application made it difficult for me to stay interested. It felt like we were learning a lot of theory without being shown how to actually use it.
But one thing I did take away from law school was a real understanding of the justice gap. Most people assume that if you’re facing a serious legal problem and can’t afford a lawyer, you’ll just get help through legal aid—that the government will provide support. But that’s just absolutely not the case.
People with serious legal problems, like being unlawfully evicted and facing homelessness, or not being paid by their employer, are dealing with issues that fall squarely under the law.
only one in five people will receive the support they need to access justice. That statistic represents a huge gap, and it was one of the major takeaways for me during law school.
Soon after that, I knew I wanted a career in social impact. I came across this organisation called 80,000 Hours, which is based around the question: how do you use your 80,000 working hours in life to have a positive social impact?
I ended up travelling for a few years and mapped out an entire career plan that would help me contribute meaningfully. But just as I was about to apply for the first job on that plan, I was invited to participate in the Global Legal Hackathon. Over the course of one weekend, a few friends and I came up with the idea for Anika Legal, a platform to help more people access legal support.
That idea ended up winning the Australian competition and placing as runners-up globally in New York. Things started to move from there. I had been working on Anika part-time and kept telling myself I’d start applying for other jobs “next month.” But eventually I thought, this idea is showing promise. We came second in the world. People were saying it had real potential. Maybe I should try doing it full-time.
I was 25 at the time, and I figured that if I’m ever going to take a risk, this is the moment. That was really my entry into the world of social impact and social entrepreneurship. It was a switch that flicked: I knew I wanted to work in social impact, and while I had a carefully thought-out plan, this unexpected opportunity with Anika felt even more aligned with that goal.
I took the plunge and started working on Anika full-time, unpaid, for a whole year. Eventually, we reached a point where I could draw a minimum wage salary. That was the start of the journey.
As the founder and CEO of Anika Legal, please share a bit more about the organisation and tell our audience what is it doing to provide free legal support, and how is that empowering communities?
The vision of Anika Legal is a world where everyone can access justice. Right now, only one in five people do, so how do we get to five out of five?
We started with the realisation that the justice gap is massive, and the resources currently available are incredibly limited. No amount of additional funding alone was going to solve this. There are over four million people in Australia who need legal help. So instead of starting by asking for more, we asked: where are the resources that already exist but haven’t been fully leveraged?
The big one was law students. In Australia, there are tens of thousands of law students who are desperate for practical legal experience, but they just can’t get it. Legal centres have worked with students before, but never at the scale needed to unlock this huge, untapped resource.
We asked ourselves, “How can we work better with law students? How can we channel their time and energy into helping people who need legal services?”
We created a unique service model that uses technology and process design to enable law students to make meaningful contributions to legal work. The key was to do this without requiring so much supervision that it drained lawyers’ time.
With this model, we’ve been able to double the capacity of our lawyers. From there, we thought that if we can grow Anika, and if others adopt this model, maybe we can double the capacity of the entire legal assistance sector.
It’s not a silver bullet that will solve the entire problem. But even getting from one in five to two in five people receiving help would be a huge step forward.
That’s been a big part of Anika’s focus: leveraging law students as a resource. At the same time, while we’re providing free legal support to the people who need it most, we’re also helping foster a more socially responsible legal profession.
While there are many areas of law needing support, we’ve chosen to focus specifically on housing. It’s such a critical issue, especially now with Australia facing a housing and rental crisis.
Just a couple of weeks ago, we held an event where one of our clients, Joanne, shared her story. She’s a single mother with three children and had been living in the same home for three years. She always paid her rent on time. Then, one day, she received an eviction notice.
She applied for around 30 rental properties but didn’t get any. She went from searching for four-bedroom homes to three, then down to two. She even re-homed her dogs just to improve her chances. Despite all that, she still couldn’t find anything. She convinced her 14 and 16-year-old kids to go back to sharing a room in bunk beds, hoping it would help. But nothing came through.
She was on the brink of being evicted into homelessness and was even facing the devastating prospect of having to place her children into foster care.
That’s when she found Anika. We were able to provide the legal support she needed to challenge the eviction and, at the very least, buy her the time she needed to secure a new place to live.
What made a big difference in her journey was having a student paralegal by her side through the entire process. Of course, the legal work is reviewed and signed off by a qualified lawyer, but that student also provided something equally important: emotional support. When you’re going through one of the hardest times in your life, having someone beside you who cares can make a huge impact.
Joanne’s story is a powerful reminder of the kind of people who fall through the cracks, who won’t get the support they need unless we change how we approach access to justice.
There are still four in five people, like Joanne, who face these kinds of challenges alone. That’s what we’re trying to change. We want to ensure more people can access the legal support they need so that everyone has a safe home, and so that justice is truly accessible to all.
How do you navigate the balance between progressing innovation and technology while still connecting meaningfully with the communities you serve?
The core innovation at Anika is how we’ve leveraged the time and energy of law students. That’s really where the technology comes in. It’s not just about tech, though, it’s also a lot of process design. I usually say “technology” because people often don’t understand what process design actually looks like in practice.
For example, we’ve built systems so that when a law student is drafting legal documents and has a question, there’s a piece of technology that can serve up the information they need before they even ask for it. That means lawyers don’t have to sit beside them through the entire process. Instead, the technology enables the student to do about nine-tenths of the work a lawyer would usually do.
That’s how we’ve doubled our capacity. But, as you said, we’ve also had to ensure the service remains human-centred. Efficiency-driven innovations sometimes get a bad name, and sometimes that’s justified. We approached it with curiosity and just explored ideas to see if they work.
What we found, quite unexpectedly, was that law students ended up being the most human part of the experience. That was the number one most positively reviewed feature of Anika’s service: the personal support students were able to provide to clients during one of the hardest times in their lives.
Think about a very busy lawyer. They have to see so many clients and can only give each one the minimum time possible—just enough to explain their rights and what to do before moving on. That’s not because they don’t care, it’s because the time they spend with one person means someone else might miss out on support altogether.
Law students, on the other hand, are in a completely different position. They’re compelled to help. They may not have seen a thousand cases before, but they do have the time, energy, and empathy to walk alongside a client. That became the defining strength of our model. It was such a pleasant surprise.
When we started testing this idea, we weren’t sure what the outcome would be. But seeing the student support emerge as the most valued part of the service made us realise it’s not just a nice add-on, it’s essential. If we want people to access legal support and keep that support human, law students need to be part of the picture. That’s now something we hold as a core principle.
As a Westpac Social Change Fellow, you’re working at the intersection of social enterprise, nonprofits, and government. Are you seeing any opportunities for collaboration between these broader sectors to help impact-led organisations grow the pie and drive systems change?
Absolutely. I think collaboration is key when we’re trying to do new things and discover novel solutions to entrenched problems, especially when we’re using what I’d call a “radically resourceful” approach. The question is: how do we find untapped resources and bring them in?
More often than not, those resources sit with a potential partner, whether it’s a private company, government body, or a university. In Anika’s case, for example, we collaborate with universities. They provide us with law students, and we, in turn, give those students practical legal experience.
The student wins because they get credit and valuable skills. The university wins because they’re offering quality practical training. And we, as a social enterprise, are being funded by the university to deliver it.
That’s a social enterprise business model born directly out of collaboration. Now, think about where those resources would have gone otherwise. Without that volunteering experience, those law students might’ve taken jobs at private firms and never contributed to access to justice. That university funding might have gone to something far less direct in terms of social impact.
What collaboration does is unlock new resources and redirect them to meaningful work. That’s just one example of a new service model and business model, but there are so many others out there. My passion lies in enabling more of those models to exist, because the only way we’re going to address these problems meaningfully is by identifying the resources already on the table and figuring out how to bring them into the social impact space.
I think of this in terms of unlocking people, technology, or money. For instance, in social enterprise, money is often channelled in creative ways to support impact. But even beyond traditional social enterprises, there are organisations finding new ways to bring in funding or in-kind support. That’s the opportunity, if we adopt the mindset of exploring new approaches and bringing in additional resources.
That said, systemic change really needs to happen at a belief level. In the not-for-profit world (and definitely in the legal sector) there’s often this aversion to change.
There’s a belief that innovation is risky, expensive, and likely to fail. But take Anika’s platform, for instance (we call it Clark). It was built by a volunteer software developer. It didn’t cost much, but what it did take was driven people with a clear vision. That’s what needs to shift: our thinking.
If we can challenge those limiting beliefs, then the systems and structures that flow from them will start to change too.
What do you think are some of the most important traits you’ve observed in change makers helping them to generate impact in their respective fields?
Through the Westpac Social Change Fellowship, I’ve had the privilege of meeting nine other fellows (most of whom are not-for-profit founders). They’re just an incredible group of people, and I’ve also travelled across the US and Europe as part of the fellowship, connecting with like-minded change makers from around the world.
What I’ve found, and what we always look for when hiring at Anika, are three core traits: integrity, determination, and humility.
Integrity, for me, is the foundation of every good team. It’s all about trust, and hopefully that goes without saying. But determination is just as vital, because, honestly, this work is bloody hard. It really is.
Every single Westpac Fellow I’ve met has shared a similar journey, filled with not just the highs, but also the challenges, setbacks, and even what you might call borderline traumas from walking such a difficult path.
If you’re going to create meaningful impact over the long term, that determination must be there. Then there’s humility.
The work we do is tough and constantly changing. As a social entrepreneur, you’re thrown into a lot of unknowns. If you have a big ego, you learn more slowly and don’t ask for help. You also don’t take advice as readily. While people can still succeed without humility, I think it just makes everything harder, for them, and for the people working with them.
The people I admire most (and the ones I see having the greatest impact) are those who embody all three of these traits. That’s what stands out in my peers.
What advice would you share with emerging change makers looking to create an innovative, mission-driven organisation?
I probably have two main pieces of advice. The first one I’ve kind of touched on already: if you’re going to create an organisation, you have to do it for the right reasons.
There are a lot of people (and I hope even more in the future) who don’t feel the need to create something new. They’re happy to jump on board with an existing organisation doing great work. But for those who do want to start something themselves, I’d say: make sure your motivation is truly purpose-driven, because it’s going to be incredibly hard. Unless you’ve done it before, you really have no idea how hard it’s going to be.
If you’re not in it for the right reasons, you won’t make it through. You’re not doing this for money or accolades; you’re doing it because you genuinely want to make the world a better place, because that work fills your cup, and because you’re willing to make the sacrifices required.
What also helps is making peace with the reality that the most effective change (the kind that really matters) is often the kind you don’t get to see. We work on a long-term horizon, it’s like planting a tree you may never sit under. You might not even know if that tree ever grows. But it’s still worth doing, because that’s the work that leads to sustainable systems change. It’s a slow burn.
The second piece of advice is about building a great team, which I think is Anika’s greatest strength and the reason we’ve succeeded so far. Specifically, we’ve been really good at recruiting what I call “undiscovered talent.”
When you’re starting a not-for-profit or social change organisation, it’s rare that you’ll have much money to begin with. But you still need the right people. You need the best people to help build something strong enough to attract more funding over time. The reality is you usually can’t afford to hire “discovered” talent, people who already have that track record and profile. What you can do is find “undiscovered” talent.
At Anika, that’s been our approach, finding brilliant individuals who demonstrate integrity, determination, and humility, and who are motivated by the right reasons. Then, it becomes about building the kind of brand and culture that draws these people in.
When they apply and go through the interview process, they meet the existing team and think, “I want to work with you.” If they’re truly that good, they’re only going to want to work alongside others who operate at the same level. That’s how you build a team of exceptional people.
At that early stage, those first hires are your culture. You can’t just say “we value integrity” and hope it sticks, it’s who you bring in that defines the organisation’s culture from day one.
The other benefit of hiring undiscovered talent is that they often haven’t yet had the opportunity to lead. They might be disillusioned from past experiences and believe there’s a better way of doing things, if someone would just give them the chance.
When you do give them that chance, they tend to jump at it. And because it’s often their first executive role, they show a level of ownership that’s almost like that of a founder. That’s how you consistently bring in leaders who are just as committed to the mission as you are.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive change?
As you might guess, the organisations that inspire and motivate me are the ones that embrace this radically resourceful approach. One classic example is OzHarvest. They saw a simple but powerful mismatch: there’s all this surplus food going to waste, and at the same time, so many people going hungry. Their model brings those two realities together in a really smart and impactful way.
I also think Wikipedia is a brilliant (though perhaps unexpected) example. Before Wikipedia, access to knowledge was largely controlled by printed encyclopaedias, which were expensive and often authored by a narrow demographic. Wikipedia completely flipped that model. It said: “Let’s democratise information. Let’s find a way to get volunteers all over the world to write, edit, and moderate content, and make it freely accessible to everyone.”
Not only did that make knowledge universally accessible, but it also gave a voice to people who’d never had one in those traditional publishing spaces. That’s the kind of radically resourceful thinking I love, it’s creative, scalable, and deeply inclusive.
There are also some amazing innovations happening around funding. One initiative I came across is Community Capital, which provides catalytic funding to early-stage social change organisations.
What’s fascinating is how they do it. They’ve convinced fund managers and investment firms to donate their fee revenue, and that’s money that would typically go into private profits, now redirected to support social impact.
Another great example is VivCourt, a trading firm structured so that 100% of its profits go to social causes. Instead of shareholders or founders taking home large sums, they’ve intentionally designed the business to channel wealth directly into the not-for-profit sector.
These are the kinds of initiatives that fire me up, organisations that bring new resources into the sector by doing things differently and creatively.
To finish off, are there any books or resources you’d recommend to our audience?
The number one book I recommend to just about everyone in this space is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. While it’s written from a for-profit tech entrepreneurship perspective, the lessons are incredibly relevant no matter what sector you’re in. That book really guided me throughout my journey with Anika, and I’ll probably revisit it again because the insights are so evergreen.
Another great resource is the Common Cause online course. It focuses on how to evoke the right values and frames when advocating for progressive policy. It’s changed the way I communicate entirely. The course is not only incredibly useful but also very affordable, which makes it super accessible.
