LSC's 2020 Innovations in Technology Conference

This session will highlight how legal services providers are using technology assessments to improve their technology infrastructure and management. The session will provide an overview of technology assessments, looking at the issues commonly encountered as well as some unique challenges and how they can be addressed. Additionally, this session will review factors that should be included in technology assessments and road maps including technology planning goals, staff's technology needs, and how these needs can best be addressed with the available resources.

Affinity groups provide an opportunity for participants to discuss ideas and topics of mutual interest. Each group will have at least one discussion facilitator, but this is a chance to learn from one another by asking questions, sharing information and engaging in informal conversations.

Pick up your boxed lunch from the Plaza Level Foyer and bring it with you to eat during the affinity group session.

Joshua Crabtree (Legal Aid of the Bluegrass) and Shah'ada Shaban (Legal Services of Northern California) will serve as facilitators for this discussion. 

The American legal system is designed for use by highly trained professionals, but most people who engage with the system do so on their own behalf without formal legal training. Numerous examples of legal self-help materials have grown out of this reality. What experience has shown, however, that while there is wide-spread access to legal self-help information and materials, users have difficulty deploying such information. In order to be effectively used by those who need them, self-help materials must acknowledge and address the barriers to deployment in the context in which they are faced. These barriers include users’ overtaxed bandwidth, their anxiety and feelings of threat, their unfamiliarity with the details of the legal system, and self-help materials’ excessive focus on conceptual understanding and well as the materials’ lack of analogies and visual imagery. This session will discuss the development of an ongoing randomized control trial in which we are testing the effectiveness of re-imagined self-help materials. This field trial has the potential to transform the experience of self-represented users of the legal system.

Tired of leaving message after message on your client's voicemail? Spending too much staff time trying to reach the clients you serve? This session is for you! Join a variety of legal services programs to learn how to use existing or easy-to-add features in your case management system to improve communication with clients. Presenters will show how they've used a variety of case management systems – LegalServer, Pika, and Kemps – to remind clients of appointments, send text messages, collect digital forms, and more. Presenters will demonstrate tools, discuss development process, and provide feedback on pros and cons of each tool so that attendees walk away with ideas to put into action.

Collectives form to bring together cross sector organizations focused on solving common community problems. California-based Eviction Defense Collaborative and Health Consumer Alliance target two separate, but equally important, legal issues that contribute to poverty. They do so using the same technology: JusticeServer. JusticeServer is a unique TechBridge solution built on the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Success Platform as a case management solution for legal services organizations. In this session, learn how the Eviction Defense Collaborative used JusticeServer to create an algorithm to ensure clients connect with the right organization to meet their needs through a single entry point. Also hear how the Health Consumer Alliance used JusticeServer to engineer a solution which serves the needs of the Alliance's individual programs, while providing excellent data validation, anonymization, and flexible and consistent reporting capability.

When you embark on a statewide tech project, the tech itself can be the least of your worries. Cross-organization collaboration is always a challenge, and this challenge is magnified each time a new stakeholder comes into the conversation. Add in the complexity of dealing with your state’s unique legal system, and it can feel impossible to implement new systems or significantly redesign existing solutions. This session will explore lessons learned from one state’s experience tackling the redesign of their statewide website—including perspectives from a legal aid director, a project director and former funder, and a user experience expert. This session will provide practical takeaways and insights, including: best practices for stakeholder engagement; how to keep your stakeholders focused on the end user; and strategies for developing a unified solution, even if your state’s court system is not.

Many low-income people struggle with the collateral consequences of involvement with the criminal justice system. The stigma of a criminal record, as well as burdensome court debt, are root causes of poverty. Increasingly, LSC funded legal services programs have found creative ways to try to help their clients overcome these barriers. In 2017, Iowa Legal Aid developed the Criminal Records Spreadsheet (CRS). This spreadsheet automates much of the analysis for record clearance, court debt bankruptcy dischargeability, whether debtor’s exemptions apply, and how the client’s debt affects their ability to drive. The spreadsheet is based on Iowa law and principles laid out in NCLC’s 2016 treatise Confronting Criminal Justice Debt. The CRS has allowed Iowa Legal Aid to help many more clients with collateral consequences cases than before. In 2018, a partnership with Code For America added a web scraper interface for accessing court records, which exponentially increased the capacity of Iowa Legal Aid to do this work. Coders from Iowa Legal Aid & Code For America will discuss the project, the numerous barriers that had to be overcome, and how the project plans to expand in the future.

A fast-paced session covering features of Office 365 and Office 2019 that legal organizations can benefit from. Get an insider’s perspective from a Microsoft Office expert on new features and the best way to get the most from Office in your organization.

This session will highlight activities and updates in Pro Bono Net's State Justice Communities Network, and provide an opportunity to connect with peers working on allied initiatives. Pro Bono Net staff will discuss new and upcoming developments for the LawHelp.org and probono.net platforms, including LawHelp projects funded by TIG and other sources driving accessibility, analytics, and user experience innovations, and initiatives that are leveraging the probono.net platform as a central hub for pro bono mobilization and advocate support. Several project coordinators will also share highlights of technology initiatives in their communities to bridge rural justice gaps, expand early intervention and outreach strategies through new issue-spotting tools and LiveHelp, and support local access to justice initiatives.  

If you don't have the funding to do a full redesign of your statewide website, or you're planning a redesign that won't launch for a year or more, what can you do in the near term to improve user experience so it better meets user needs and expectations? In this session, panelists from Georgia, Louisiana, and Montana will share the strategies they employed in three TIG-funded projects to enhance their sites' user experience by focusing on content improvements including resources, navigation labels, and overall information architecture. We'll also discuss some lightweight, high-impact design changes you can make that don't require a full redesign of your site. Attendees should bring laptops and be prepared to take the first steps toward applying these strategies to improving user experience on their sites with the support of the panelists.

This session will provide an overview of recent studies that leverage state court data to address important public issues. These reports use data from state courts to illustrate debt collection patterns; identify serial eviction practices; profile the civil asset forfeiture process and more. We will discuss the important intersection of court data and access to justice research and explore what we might gain by linking data from different sources. In the second half of the session, we will transition from policy to practice, identifying key differences in the quality and character of court data in six states: Alaska, Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Dakota and Oklahoma.

Technology encompasses our daily lives. Whether we like it or not, it has also become essential for legal work. Is tech the panacea that will allow us to provide true access to justice? Or does it widen the access to justice gap in unforeseen ways? The truth lies somewhere in between. This hands on work shop will explore technology’s ideal role in the effort to close the access to justice gap. It will also explore methods that will allow skeptics and enthusiasts to sit at the same table and work together towards a common goal. A2J+Tech projects truly thrive when non-techies and even non-lawyers contribute to their development. Learn how to engage such widely different audiences and get them to collaborate. Participants will be asked to actively participate and interact with basic strategic planning tools.