Agility in Action: Lessons from UA.SUPPORT at the Business Agility Meetup Bay Area
When global crises accelerate, organizations need more than traditional structures—they need agility, transparency, and technology to respond at scale. At the Business Agility Meetup Bay Area, AgiLawyer CEO Ondřej Dvořák presented the journey of UA.SUPPORT, a volunteer-driven legal aid platform cocreated by AgiLawyer to support people displaced by the war in Ukraine.
1. From Outbreak to Organized Support
Within days of the invasion in February 2022, the demand for legal aid surged across Europe and beyond. Volunteers faced three urgent challenges:
- Managing overwhelming requests from displaced Ukrainians.
- Engaging lawyers worldwide in the absence of centralized resources.
- Coordinating volunteers effectively without falling into command-and-control structures.
By applying agile principles, the team rapidly created UA.SUPPORT, linking intake streams, Ukrainian-speaking intake lawyers, and local experts into a functioning system.
2. Scaling with Agility
In just weeks, UA.SUPPORT expanded across 30+ countries, processing 100+ requests per week, with more than 300 volunteers onboard. Kanban boards became the backbone of coordination—balancing incoming needs with available capacity, ensuring transparency, and enabling collaboration across borders.
3. Lessons in Agility & AI
Ondřej emphasized key insights from the experience:
- Agility matters in crises: Smaller batches, fast iteration, and constant feedback loops are critical.
- No command-and-control: Transparency and trust allow distributed volunteers to self-organize.
- AI as an accelerator: From drafting opinions faster to embedding AI assistants in Kanban boards, AI has become a powerful tool to allocate tasks, manage knowledge, and sustain impact.
4. Beyond Emergency Relief: Towards Sustainability
Over time, UA.SUPPORT evolved into a social enterprise model, aiming for financial sustainability. Today, it serves as both a legal aid platform and a testbed for applying AI to legal workflows—demonstrating how crisis-driven innovation can inform broader applications in law and business.
Takeaways for the Business Agility Community
- Crises test resilience—and create opportunities for innovation.
- Agility is transferable across domains—from IT and business to legal aid and humanitarian response.
- AI is not just a disruptor but an enabler, especially when integrated into agile systems.
Closing Reflection
The Bay Area meetup highlighted that the principles of business agility extend far beyond the corporate world. With UA.SUPPORT, agility and AI together created a transparent, scalable ecosystem—proof that even in times of crisis, collaboration and adaptability can drive meaningful, global impact.
