 This is Brian Rowe from LS N-TAP. Thank you guys for all coming out today to be using technology to enhance legal services delivery opportunities for innovation. This is the first time that we've done this particular series. So we will have a survey at the end where we'd appreciate your feedback. The slides are online and we're finished doing the introduction. I'll get you guys a link to the slide. If you have any questions, please feel free to put those into the chat channel. You may also unmute yourself and ask those questions aloud. Star 6 will mute or unmute also. Thank you guys so much for coming out to this. We've got about 10 more webinars coming up throughout the rest of the year, and those are all listed on the lsmtap.org website. Thank you Laura. Very excited about this. Absolutely. Yeah, hi guys. This is Laura Quinn. I think many of you have met me or heard me speak before. I am now the Director of Partnerships and Knowledge at IdealWare. IdealWare, just quickly for those of you who may not know us, we are a nonprofit ourselves who does research to help other nonprofits make smart technology decisions. And we have been working with the legal aid community for years now, three or four years to, in a lot of different ways, help folks in that community, in your community, make your own smart software decisions. So we're talking today about opportunities for innovation. And when we say innovation, we don't really mean what one might initially think. We don't necessarily mean, you know, rocket ships and then jet packs and things like that. We really think of innovation as the ability to use what already exists, so even what you already have in the office, or things that are out in the world, potentially not at vast additional cost, the ability to use those in really innovative ways. So like we're looking at here with a duct tape hammock, to the extent that this hammock actually works, then it's not going to fall apart as soon as you fit in it. It is kind of an innovative way to fill the need of wanting to, you know, hang out in your backyard. Probably at less cost than actually buying a hammock. So that's kind of what we're talking about today, is the idea of not necessarily what's super bleeding edge, so things that are kind of interesting to think about. Both things that are going on in the relayed space and things that are going on in a wider nonprofit context. And it can get yourself in this mode by kind of thinking back to when you were a kid. Kids are natural innovators. They do all sorts of, like they give them something and they'll do all sorts of crazy things with them. You give them a box and it becomes anything. It becomes a Ford, it becomes a robot. And so basically putting yourself in that mindset can be really helpful. We generally as professionals don't as easily come up with lots and lots of creative ideas like this. And we need to spark our own innovative tendencies more. So we need to actually say, what is it that we need? What are our organizational needs? And then what technologies are there in the world? And let's actually spark them. Let's attempt to connect them. So to kind of say, what is it that I can do, like for instance attending the seminar or a conference or reading stuff, to connect those thoughts together? Let me actually pause there and let, I realize we didn't let our expert guest speaker introduce herself. So Kathleen, can you just take a moment to introduce yourself and maybe give just a thought or two of what innovation means in your mind? I am the administrator of the Pine Tree Legal Assistance website in Maine and some other delayed websites in Maine. But some of you knew my mentor Hugh Calkins. And to the extent that I have become a more creative web administrator, I think it's because of Hugh. Because when I see the pictures of those kids, that's what he was like. And those of you who knew, it was just always about the old proverbial thing about playing in the sandbox and jumping off the cliff and jumping in over your head and all those kind of things. And when you're willing to do that, it's amazing what can happen. Absolutely, absolutely. So we're going to get to that in just a second. And basically the format for this session is we're going to walk through a lot, like maybe about 30 different tiny mini key studies to hopefully spark some thoughts in your own mind as to what you might be able to do in your organization. Before we get there though, we want to just make sure that you think about not just these nifty ways to use technologies, but just the nuts and bolts. So before you really start to think about innovating, you really need to make sure that you have the essentials in place. So you've got computers, you've got a file server backup system, email, calendaring, office software, case management software. So you don't want to start thinking, you know, really more advanced thoughts about what you can do until you've got those essentials in place. But then when you've got those essentials in place, there's also kind of a middle tier of technologies which are pretty well proven. I'm not sure that people would say that they're innovative, but they're beyond the basics. So things like document assembly. We're currently working on a different project for LSN TAP where we've talked to a number of people about a number of different technologies. And to a person, folks are saying that document assembly is really an enormous bang for the buck. It's an enormous time savings for staff, very much worth the money, and everybody should do it. Kathleen, you wanted to say a minute or two about why, or why not, potentially people should use document assembly? Yeah, I think, you know, before we had access to the school, we had a lot of court forms, particularly family law court forms, programmed as fillable PDFs. And we were pretty happy with that, and we were, I think, at first reluctant to let go of that, although, of course, Hugh wanted to jump in by the way. But as time has gone on, and it's still handy sometimes to just be able to do a fillable PDF, but as time went on, we saw more and more the advantages of being able to do way more complex things with document assembly than we were able to do with JavaScript and PDF. For example, most of us have really complicated child support calculations, and we were able to do that with HotDoc much more easily, and we can edit it much more easily than we were with fillable PDF and JavaScript, so we've kind of actually let that version gone over just to the HotDoc. Great. Another one that's in this vein, so kind of not really innovative, but a little bit beyond the basics is the idea of online intake and maybe some basic triage. We're going to be talking about more of what's going on with innovative triage in a few minutes, but kind of this whole idea of allowing people to input their information online, describe their legal problem, get connected in the right way, at least to be able to say, all right, you are or not eligible for help, and here's the next step for you. Kathleen, just you want to talk for a minute or two about online intake? Actually, I told Laura when we were preparing not to let me talk about online triage because that's what I'm in the middle of doing right now, and I'm very jazzed up about it, and I could talk about it for about an hour. But as some of you know, Three New Englands are developing this year an online triage system based in Drupal, and a few folks have done this ahead of us at Northwest and Massachusetts and a few other places, and we sort of built on what they did and we're really, really excited about what we've done with it, and we want to roll it out to anybody else on a Drupal platform with better documentation than we've got right now. We're going to wait until we have the documentation better put together, but before the end of the year for sure. And I know there are a lot of other experiments going on out there, and people are trying different tools and being able to logic when in Illinois, the fruits use something called cool. So I think this is just a very exciting area and I'm really pumped up on it right now. And the first month, we got a ton of traffic on our triage. So we're really excited about seeing the results and how it's looking for folks, and I think it is working. Fantastic. And last, we're going to talk more about mobile also. So in more kind of innovative ways to use mobile, but it's a really interesting area here that there's a lot of straightforward things possible with your mobile that are really work out to have really high bang for the buck. But it's also really important to think about the wide number of people who are using mobile. So especially among lower income populations, there are, in fact, there are a lot of communities in which it is more likely that people have a phone, at least a text enabled phone if not a smart phone. It's more likely they have one of those and then they have a computer. So it can be a really important way to reach out to lots of different audiences. Kathleen, just a few thoughts here. Yeah. On the pineapple site, which is a very heavily traveled site, our mobile use exceeded all of the use including laptop, desktop, tablet in, I think, it was October of 2014. Mobile tipped over the 50% mark. And I'm sure that those of you who follow your analytics have similar experiences, either you're over 50% at this point or approaching that. And of course, the curve is very steep. It's probably old news to a lot of you, but I think it's worth repeating over and over until everybody has heard it, that if you're redesigning the site or redesigning your site, the whole thing now is really to design for mobile. And then you build out using responsive theming from there for larger screens. But it's not just anymore, oh, you think about, oh yeah, and mobile, it's mobile first. And mobile has really emphasized this by prioritizing now in search results, mobile optimized sites. So it is essential for our clients who are going to use search as the first place to look for us, that we'd be at the top of those search results. Absolutely. Fantastic. So that was a look at some of the basic infrastructural stuff and then getting beyond the basic to pretty well proven technologies in the legal aid world. But we're actually focused on beyond that. So what's the next step? So assuming that you're doing some good stuff and at least one or two of those beyond the basics area, what can you think about in terms of taking it further? Or in fact, just adding on to your basic infrastructure with some low cost ways to potentially really make a big impact. So let's start, we're going to walk through a couple of different areas. Let's start by thinking about the idea of helping clients learn. So letting themselves serve without necessarily you or a lawyer being directly involved in the interaction. So SMS is a really useful thing to think about here. SMS or texting on phones, almost everybody now has access to SMS and you can construct very robust branching structures to allow people to get, kind of to walk through answers to simple questions on via text. So for instance, we've got here an example of someone getting help in regard to their license being suspended. So the text drive to this particular, some particular number and it gives them options to say, all right, which of these is true? And they say one and they ask them some questions. So we can essentially do a bit of triage and referral via SMS. Kathleen, what have you seen in the realm of, or Brian, either one, in the realm of this kind of automated SMS type stuff? You know, I think back to, I forget what TIG conference it was, but it was quite a few years ago. I was asked at the last minute to give a little session on this because the person who was supposed to do it couldn't be there. And there happened to be some people from Canada at the session. And they were the only ones that were really plugged into it. Everybody else looked at me like I was kind of nuts. But I think that in other countries where texting started in a big way before it started here and other in European countries in Canada, that a lot of this is automated SMS stuff is already happening a lot. And I haven't gotten my executive director on board yet, so I can't speak from my own experience. But also if you look at this, Laura's slide and the organizations that are doing this to me, that says this is where you want to be. Absolutely. And in good company. Just kind of another example in this realm that I think a lot of us are familiar with is the idea of doing a mobile app. So as opposed to SMS or opposed to a mobile website, an app is something that you actually download onto your phone. And there's actually, to my mind, somewhat limited reasons why you would use a mobile app as opposed to a mobile website. But here's a good example of something that you might do. So this is people who are studying for citizenship. There, among other things in this mobile app, is a kind of a flash card, test study type thing, which is something that you can totally imagine saying, yes, I'm going to download this onto my phone so I can do it without necessarily when I'm online. So another interesting use here. Yeah, I just want to mention, Laura, I just want to mention that, you know, native apps are a big deal and we've experimented a lot with them. And I think, again, there are certain uses for them that really make sense. But I think before you go there, you really want to think hard about the advantages of a native app and what your purposes are and who you're trying to reach before you go to a native app. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and Brian, any thoughts in general about kind of ways that people can provide more innovative ways for clients to stay informed by a mobile? Well, one of the big things about a mobile app is that you can give them a significant amount of information that they can then download and access into areas where they don't have cell coverage. Some programs have looked at doing wage tracking apps for their farm worker outreach units so that they can track those hours, even though they don't have access and then upload them at a later point in time. It's just taking advantage of the opportunity to provide content when they don't have that broadband connection. It's one of the big advantages. Yeah, that's a great example. All right, and so then you have kind of moving over into another way of thinking about helping clients learn is the idea of kind of providing online trainings, including allowing folks to watch videos, take tests. You can online learning tools that are very tailor-able now will allow you to do branching logic, take people down different pathways to learn about different types of topics, and including you could do potentially an entire online course. So, for instance, Illinois Online is doing something where they actually allow people to step through a number of modules. So it doesn't have to be just a short, whatever, five or ten-minute module, but it could be a series of modules that are taken over time or another, a different model on this could be the idea of a long-distance university-type model where people can actually get information from a live instructor. So there's lots of, actually me and Brian were just chatting before the call. There's been lots of advancement in kind of online conferencing and online learning tools just in the last couple of years, because there's been a bunch of new entrants into the market at the low end, which is both makes a lot of things more possible and it also, or more affordable, and it also brings the top end pricing down to compete with it. So there's some interesting stuff there. Kathleen, what do you think about the idea of providing kind of online modules or online courses? Yeah, well, you know, I think the work that the universities have done have really advanced this and really made tools available and the concepts around it just so much more sophisticated by the year, and it's really so viable both inside and outside of legal services now. I just wanted to mention, too, on the Drupal side that Connecticut folks have built a very nice online classroom tool that you can basically use as an architecture and then dump your content for your particular course into it. And I don't know a lot of the details, but I know Kathy Daniels mentioned to me recently that they're currently working to have a cloud-based version of that for folks. And also, of course, if you want to incorporate the classroom module onto your side if you're Drupal, you can use that code. We're going to be doing that actually this year for some state-side stuff. Fantastic. And Brian, I know you guys obviously do a ton of modules of various sorts, online conferences, recorded modules. What have you observed about as we move to the future? What is working well and not as well? Well, I would say one of the biggest tests is if there's pieces that you can integrate into other platforms where people already are that make things very easy, I would end up using those in conjunction with some type of built-in e-learning platform. So a big reason that we have all of our videos over on YouTube is that they optimized for mobile well before. That was really an option on our website. And it has just made it so much easier for people to access. So instead of always making them come to you for a particular platform, make sure to get it out there on different places where people can find it where they already are. Absolutely. Great. And taking this down the logical extreme or one logical extreme would be to think about aspects of game design as part of your online learning. So this could be things like reward systems. So if people take five modules along this line, they get a virtual award for being really informed in this area. Or what we're looking at here is a simulation that helps people walk through what it's like to be in the courtroom with the idea that it can obviously be really intimidating to show up and represent yourself in a courtroom to kind of get some sense as to what's likely to happen. So it's less scary for people to decide to do it and to then actually go through the process. Yeah, I think the gamification realm is somewhere where we have a lot of innovation that is still to happen. I think we occasionally take ourselves a little too seriously and we need to look at ways to get rid of the intimidation that is around the court system and give people a reward for learning about it because it's really going to help them get the concepts and ideas before they're there. Absolutely. Yeah, let's just switch gears slightly in the realm of helping people to learn without necessarily your own staff time involved and talk a little bit about expert systems. We've got a couple of different examples of expert systems including a really kind of interesting, so this I think is a perfect example of what we mean by kind of our definition of innovative is using the tools you've already got. This is a pine tree, so actually Kathleen was very involved and I'll let her talk a little about it, but the idea of using legal-law-health interactive and hot docs to create just a simple expert system. Kathleen, you want to talk about what you did here? I mean, I don't necessarily want to push hot docs for this purpose. I think there's more and more great software out there that's designed for this kind of logic tree sort of stuff, and we're experimenting with some of that now, but we have been able to use hot docs for some successful projects beyond just document assembly. And this is one example. This is a pretty popular hot docs piece of ours where we basically just worked out all the logic for determining if somebody would be eligible for food stamps or not, and then we incorporated that into the logic into a hot docs module. We did a similar thing for state-side legal with a kind of a benefits checkup tool. So hot docs is a pretty good tool for this kind of thing, among others. And then here's another so as you get to more sophisticated expert systems and branching logic, Neonatalogic is kind of a leader in the legal aid space for this, and they had a competition at Georgetown Law, and they came up with a lot of really interesting possibilities for what one can do with an expert system. And in fact, going back to infrastructurally how to innovate, this idea of putting a specific problem statement in front of a group, in this case a group of law students, can be a really interesting way to just generate a lot of ideas. Logically, some of them really terrible, but some of them pretty good. There's a comment here in the chat, which was in response to using YouTube that one of the Florida programs uses Vimeo for the same reason, and I just also wanted to point out that with Vimeo you have an extra ability to add a password in the accounts so that if you are creating content that you only want certain people to see, especially if it's around an issue where you're litigating and you don't want the other side to see some of your strategy, CLE type stuff, then you can put that behind that password and then give that password out. It's a nice feature that YouTube has not integrated at this point. Fantastic. And this is kind of a last example in the realm of helping the clients learn for themselves. This is a Dutch site that has a big concentration in family law. I think it is not only family law. They've done a lot in regard to both expert system and kind of triage, including, I think, really interestingly, they've integrated with an online dispute resolution system, which is, dispute resolution is something that is really quite widely used in kind of the NGO realm, peace movement. There are a number of online dispute resolution solutions that are already available. So the idea of helping people not only understand their legal rights, but possibly even kind of getting around the need for any legal process altogether by helping them in a place where you might be able to help someone, like potentially family law, to work out an arrangement amongst themselves. Kathleen, I think you mentioned this is a site that you were really kind of jazzed about. What seems exciting to you about what they're doing? Yeah, those of you who were at Tinglass January probably saw their demonstration. I just thought it was one of the most exciting things that it takes this year. And we even looked at it for a Ting proposal in Maine, but ironically, I think that they have developed something really elegant, really clean, and they've thought through kind of all of the steps and all of the technological issues. I think it's really adaptable as is, and I would encourage other people to look at it. What held us back, and maybe true for you, but if it isn't, I would say you should go for it, is that we didn't think that our court system was ready to embrace this. If you come from a state where you have a pretty progressive court system in the family law arena, I just think this is a fantastic model. Fantastic. Great. Brian, anything else to add, or actually while Brian's talking, this would be a great time if you have questions about any of it. We don't know tons about all of these, but we can do our best to answer questions either about these specific examples. Or we'd love to hear your thoughts as to either what this sparks for your own program or other kind of innovative ways potentially to provide resources without actual staff time behind them and self-serve. Brian, any other thoughts in this whole area before we move on? I guess there's one thing, just going back a little bit before that, when you were really talking about those baseline technologies, I wanted to remind people that LSE re-invives a document known as the Baselines, kind of what the basic tech that a legal services organization should have in place is, and I put a link to that report from 2015 here, and that is one of the things that we're going to focus on a lot more. With regards to triage, the first thing that's very interesting to me is the idea of something I haven't seen done yet is giving clients more access to storing some of that information that they may give you through a triage tool to create kind of the equivalent of what you would see in a health vault where you have all your health information stored securely. You could then pass on to an advocate or use several months later for document assembly or then use in a matter a few years after that. I think that that could save a lot of time long-term because there's a lot of duplication as they call source-to-source or run into a legal matter a year or two later that they then have to go research all that old information. There's no real secure place in control and has the opportunity to keep that information from matter to matter. Fantastic. We've got a comment in the chat, which is a really interesting one. A couple of different vendors that provide automated SMS intake, so TextIt or RapidPro, allow you to build an intake system based on SMS and presumably intake, so like we looked at in the first example, a branching structure to provide information without actually involving folks at all. Yeah, it'd be really interesting to potentially think about the overlap there into the legal age. In fact, I was not aware of those folks at all. Awesome. Fantastic. So let's talk a little before... Sorry, before I go to that case, then I was just going to. Let's talk just a little bit about the idea of making connections. So the idea now is that beyond obviously self-serve information, there's the idea that we'd love to facilitate the passing of information in a quicker way, good information in a quicker way to be able to serve more people. LiveChat, not a very innovative solution in the legal aid world anymore, but it is a pretty good bang for the buck people are finding, so the ability to allow people who are browsing through online information to be able to just chat somebody on the other end. If you want to take kind of a chat and SMS to another level, there's the idea of, like somebody would with a live chat, instead doing that via SMS, so phone texting. And this is something that there's been a reasonable amount of traction on in the realm of hotline areas. So text for life, for instance, is a suicide hotline. And about two years ago, they moved to support requests for help via text in the same way that you would call and say, I'm thinking about hurting myself. Can you help? And they have found that they get dramatically more volume via text than they do phone calls. And I know this can sound really alarming with the idea of providing legal information close to legal information via 140-character text message. But I would counter it that I'm not any easier to counsel people and prevent suicides via text. So I think it's a really interesting area to explore. Kathleen, what are your thoughts in this particular realm? Just one really simple thing that I've been thinking of is not very ambitious, really, but it seems obvious to me. I haven't convinced my executive director yet, but in the context of online intake and online triage, one of the things I think programs have struggled with and that we're beginning to struggle with is being able to get back in contact with people after they apply online. And I know the rate of callbacks varies from program to program, but it's a lot of times a problem. And it seems to me that using texting for that, just to arrange the first face-to-face or telephone contact, just makes total sense. Even if you're going to go into complex legal conversations through texting. Absolutely. Yeah, and texting, you can do it in a number of different online interfaces now, including just straightforwardly Google Voice. So it doesn't necessarily mean that your lawyers or other folks doing intake and calendaring need to actually be sitting there on their phone. There's a lot of more straightforward ways than that. And also, you know, for simple referrals and, you know, the kind of simple referral and advice sort of things that we do, it seems really well suited to that also. Great. Brian, thoughts on this area? Yeah, I think you also really need to look at the target demographic or population that you're working with for younger clients. This is definitely a preferred method. We have also had our veterans' units specifically have individuals who run out of minutes on their cell phone, but they have something like Google Voice where they get unlimited free texts. And if it's a cost issue, this can be a cost savings way for individuals to communicate. Yep, absolutely. Great. So here's another example of connecting. This is a really, it's a little unclear whether this is a triage, whether this is, but a really interesting example out of the direct services world. So this is a organization in Basin Minneapolis called Bridge for Youth. It's a mobile app. So people download onto their phone and it allows homeless youth to look in real time for where they can go for either food or for shelter. So it's literally, it has the availability right now of food and to me, where you can see at the top of it, an obvious question that was not top of mind for me is, is there a warrant for your arrest right now? Is going to be a, obviously, contributor to where you can show up to get food, and some places in fact do not and specifically do not care about that. So this is an interesting example to potentially parlay into the world of legal aid to think about what can we give people in approximate real time, including things like status, so who to call with a particular problem, what hotline might be available, and like for instance in a disaster, maybe there are a couple of different places who can help and you could have different timelines or different hours for them, things like that can be really interesting. And got a comment in regard to this particular case study, the youth service network app. It sounds amazing. Working with those returning from incarceration, the biggest issue are that the services and resources are outdated or literally just not available. Absolutely, so it helps somebody understand exactly what's available just for them based on their particular status. Another example here, this is another something that really is not, I don't think we think of as innovative in a traditional sense. We're certainly not breaking any technology boundaries with the idea of a kiosk, but it can be something, it's just a different way of thinking about the information you're providing. You're reaching out in a different way to potentially a different audience than you are through a traditional website or a traditional one-on-one, because you can put them at the spot when people really need the help. So you can put them in a courtroom or a library or at a community center. So this is an example of Montana Legal Bays. Kathleen, any thoughts about kind of any of these so far in the realm of kind of helping to connect legal aid organizations to potentially somewhat different audiences than they might otherwise? Laura, I'm drawing a blank. No problem. It's a general question. Fantastic. So there's a good question here, which is, have any groups crowdfunded cost of kiosks? How are agencies paying for them? Northwest Justice Project actually got money through a federal BTOP grant, a broadband grant, some of the communication-based monies that go out specifically look at reaching out to vulnerable populations, providing resources to them. We partnered with one of the local tribes also in Washington State to put that together. Finding creative sources of funding is definitely important on some of these things. I don't know of many crowdfunded projects that have worked in legal services. Part of it is a critical mass. We need to get more people from legal services on social media and on crowdfunding sites so that when we try to launch programs like this, they are able to get the salience in the community. I know that Stephanie Kimbrough tried to do some crowdfunding stuff around gamification about a year or two ago on trying to teach the basics of probate and estate planning through a game. A great idea, but it didn't catch on in that area. I think it's because a lot of us don't have those communities already built. You need the fans or the followers to use crowdfunding effectively. I agree with that, but it seems like a... Go for it, Kathleen. I think primarily, Brian, correct me if you think I'm wrong, that most of the court-based ones have been funded by the courts. Some of them have been funded by the courts. There's also, usually every year or two, there's some ABA and some state court money that is available for innovation. Our Access to Justice Board has went after that for things like electronic filing, but a key asset or outreach would definitely be in those areas as long as you get a court as a partner in that funding proposal. This would be another really interesting area to think about community collaboration. If you think about legal services as only one of potential things that people in need might want, then you could get a whole coalition of community organizations together and go after things like United Way money or community-building-type money, which could be another really interesting source of funds. We've also got a comment about... One more on the funding side. Although funding... I think it may be another webinar topic that we need to do on its own at some point. Especially since the budgets of legal services organizations tend to be pretty stretched. City of Seattle has specifically digital literacy money that works around reaching out to vulnerable populations. Anybody who has community-computing centers, other things like that, they traditionally have kind of went after the health and library groups, but they're very interested in partnering with legal groups. They just haven't really thought about that in the past. Absolutely. In the realm of the idea of reaching out to folks that you might not otherwise connect with, there's always the possibility of the bus-mobile model where, for instance, NILAG has a literal bus that travels around the five boroughs of Long Island. There is actually an attorney on the bus, but you could also staff this with the idea of somebody who's not necessarily an attorney, but is able to help make the connection. And then both the NILAG bus and I think most other models have a video connection. So you can video in attorneys, pro bono volunteers, potentially even if the court is willing, so to really make folks who are otherwise have a hard time getting help to bring the help to them. And for those of you who aren't very familiar with the five boroughs of New York, you can actually be a long way away from much. Like, on the end of Long Island, you're three hours out into ruralness, so it is actually a... not compared to some states, but it is, in fact, fairly broad widespread. And a last thought here. So as we're thinking about connections, important not to forget about the connection with pro bono attorneys. This is an example from outside the legal aid world. This is a site that is geared to connecting skilled technology volunteers with nonprofits. In this particular realm, I know all too well, there is a very similar problem to that in the legal aid world, which is that it's fairly straightforward to find skilled volunteers who are willing to put in a small amount of time to do a small chunk of work, and it's hard to get organizations, and so in this case we're helping nonprofit organizations, to have a chunk that is well enough to find that they are easily helped. So this is a site that actually uses a very specific template model for the nonprofit to be able to say, I need help with exactly this. So I need help, like for instance, with search engine optimization. And there's an actual definition as to what that means. This is what you would...ization needs to provide in advance. This is what the skilled volunteer is going to help you with. Here's how many hours is expected on both our time. Here are the templates that are going to be used. So in the realm of thinking about unbundling, this can be a kind of interesting model to think about are there particular things that can be chunked out in such a way that they become less scary for a pro bono attorney to take on. Kathleen, any thoughts about this particular model? I love that idea. I'd like to explore that. But that's about all I have to say about it. Absolutely. I mean, I think that's a great concept, but I hope it works and I'd like to try it. This is also an interesting area because there's a lot of excitement around how do we come up with new things for pro bono attorneys? How can we really connect people with new different audiences? There's a separate set of grants that are available around those separate from the 10 grants that are new. I think that looking towards other communities, trying to find some of those best practices and importing them here is a great way to do that. Great. This site has actually been around for a couple of years and it's been full in attracting volunteers. Interestingly, they have the organization that runs it doesn't have quite as many connections with the nonprofit world. So they have, in fact, a lot more volunteers than they have nonprofits. But they are gradually evening out that ratio with the idea that logically nonprofits are eager for skilled tech help. But it really technology, I think even more than the legal aid world, you have the view of problem that you have a lot of skilled technology volunteers who know many things, but not necessarily the technology space, or sorry, not join me, decided to disconnect me. I apologize for that. Fantastic. So let's move on to our next section. The idea of, ah, sorry, there is a question in the chat. I have a question about the community core. Their website says bring real-world tech experts to encourage your clients to pursue a career in STEM. What does this mean? How does it apply to legal services? Interesting. So that means one of the options for a tech, so basically as a nonprofit who is looking to bring on a technology volunteer, one of the things that you can do is you could potentially bring in someone to speak to your group or to mentor kids or something like that to encourage folks like for instance your high school kids or things like that in education. So that would be the equivalent of connecting up pro bono lawyers to a after school group or a group of folks you're doing job training for to talk about going into the legal field. This would be the translation there. Yeah, there's also a really interesting program that we've just started to talk to that's out of Boston University that takes individuals who are interested in learning mobile web development and app development connecting them with nonprofit organizations and a mentor in that field and then creating resources for the nonprofit while they're learning how to use the technology. Hopefully we'll have a webinar on that later this year but any time that you can kind of harvest that volunteer group that's interested in learning technology it can definitely cut down the cost on developing this stuff. Yeah, more and more law schools as some of you know are getting into tech training for their law students and I think it's a really fertile area for us. We've been doing some projects with a new law lab at Northeastern and of course there's Kent and Suffolk in Boston and a handful of others. I think it's a growing trend in law schools and we should be absolutely fantastic. So Jimmy mentions that my local law school, Florida Coastal has a project on law and technology. Fantastic. All right, let's talk a little bit about directly having conversations here. So starting with the idea here's kind of the ultimate of a low cost solution that could have a big impact is just the thought that there are a lot of folks now sorry, Google Translate for instance now makes it free to translate things okay like it's not a perfect translation but to do a comprehensible translation from virtually any language to any language. So there's a lot of potential applications including simply like someone shows up at the office to be able to ask some simple questions like are you hurt I can now ask are you hurt in Albanian I can guarantee you I couldn't have done previously. And Kathleen you had another interesting application of translation in the creation of website content. Right, some of you have heard Gwen Daniels at Illinois Legal Aid talk about when they put up their Spanish mirror site and as you all know they have a lot of content to keep up with and so what they protocol they adapted was to run their English content through Google Translate and then give the English version along with that Google Translate version to the translators and it's been a while since I heard Gwen talk about this but I think she said it saved them about 50% of the time they would have without the Google Translation at the beginning but I suppose there are some translators out there who wouldn't like to operate that way but she said that it saved their translators a lot of time. That's fantastic. Yeah, with the idea that it's certainly no one's going to mistake it for a native speaker the translation would well be at least comprehensible as a starting point. Yeah, wait a minute. Caroline from Mass Legal just said she thought that they use something different than Google Translate or a different version than Google Translate but anyway they used a and I use it sometimes I don't use it for full but we still use community translators for that but a lot of times if I just have a little bit of text or a phrase or some link language or something I'll use Google Translate for that. Absolutely. Caroline has mentioned apps like Illinois did you need to get the translate API which is you can get for free but you need to apply for it. Yeah, there's also a great comment here from Jessica Frank over the A2J author course projects at law schools. They specifically look for legal aid clients to teach and work with as partners for the projects that the students are putting together. Fantastic. Great. So more on facilitating actual conversations. Here's another not believing edge technology but something that you can really get a huge bang for the buck for the idea of video conferencing. So if somebody is across the state as opposed to making them come to your office or your lawyer go to them to have a conversation by a video conference or potentially to some courts are even now allowing in video conferencing particularly from specific locations. So you can for instance hardwire video so there's really inexpensive versions of obviously things like Google Hangouts or Skype. There's also you can create hardwired connections to potentially connect your office to a couple of courts around the state or things like that to make it easier for clients who can this easier than make it show up at court. If the court allows that. Kathleen, I know you guys have a hardwired video conference system. How are you finding that? It makes me think of Hugh again. We bought a system when it was ridiculously expensive. I don't know how many years ago but because we have a lot of offices across the very well not by western standards but by New England standards large state it's saved us a lot in transportation costs for just even internal meetings. And this was before any of the kind of software we're using now is available. So I don't know that I would necessarily recommend the capital outlay for one of these systems now, but I do know that because of the opportunities we have to loan our equipment out to lawyers for depositions, Social Security Office up in Presgyle uses it for their remote hearings that I think we're making more money off of our system now than it costs us. So that may be something to think about. Fantastic. And here's just an example of so even more than just having a conversation between two adults this is an example of a child foster care actually having a these are official check-ins for the agency although they are not right now currently allowed to count towards their state that the state defines a certain number of check-ins. These video conferences unfortunately right now do not count as check-ins but they do more than are mandated by the state and they use them for this. So you can see you've got this five-year-old who is perfectly comfortable with this technology to check in. Any other thoughts? Brian thoughts on kind of just ways that folks are using technologies to facilitate actual human-to-human conversations? I mean the cost of doing this type of technology has just plummeted so much for the last two years the maybe even three I did all of the supervising of an AmeriCorps VISTA who was located in Montana to work with the LSNTAP program it's just so easy to have that rich communication at a very low cost at this point. 100% especially for internal yep absolutely yeah in fact for those of you who are looking around at different options we over at Idealware we're also converting to be a remote office and we've done a fairly rigorous look at a bunch of different and some kind of field testing of a bunch of different options and we've come back around to Skype as the most reliable and reasonable of a lot of five free versions right now. Alright so let's just in our last section talk a little about analytics and data the idea of as lots of people are talking about these days the idea of using data to provide better services or more services. So dashboards are a this is another way to sometimes in very straightforward ways like for instance using Excel dashboard to pull together data from lots of different places to be able to kind of see at a glance and allow you to make more programmatic decisions for your organization. So a lot of people talking about dashboards these days. You've also got the idea of mapping so the ability to make visual information available this is outside the legal aid realm maybe a familiar example to you guys. The foods desert tool provided by the USDA allows you to see in your own region where there's little access to supermarkets so and this is a planning tool that a lot of people are using now to say alright well we need to make a concerted effort to bridge that gap and so you can imagine as well like for instance plotting the number of lawyers per capita or something like that for particular maybe by postal code something like that. Really interesting looks at where there's virtually like no lawyers for miles and miles around and you could do lawyers that accept public interest cases or provide any discounted services at all. Which is then it kind of helps to make the case for potentially some of these innovative technologies that support more remote interactions. I mean any thoughts about either dashboards or maps? Yeah I really think of mapping is up there with SMS. I just think it's something that you know growing so fast and here to say I can't say that we used it for anything very innovative yet you know I have used mapping based on census data to figure out what languages to do different client information and on different topics that kind of thing but you know it's just it's everywhere now and it's not going to go away. I noticed just in reading about the Obama Administration new initiative this week on desegregating housing you know that's all based a lot of that is going to be based on maps and all the online media outlets were showing maps of Chicago where black neighborhoods were and you know it's just we all know it's everywhere and I think it's just so important that we need to pick up on it more than we have even though people like Gabe Hammond have been talking about it for the last ten years. I strongly agree there there's a lot going on in the private sector that we really haven't integrated in legal services we've got a webinar coming up that's going over Google Analytics that will have a little bit on dashboards but our case management systems have so much information in them that could be cross-reference with census data to put together real-time dashboards where technology exists there in the private sector and I look forward to it coming to legal services because I think we're going to find big gaps in service areas, populations, groups that we could deal with better in real-time if we can see trends that are happening in cases and identify those earlier and then share best practices around how to deal with those cases. It's an exciting area just barely we're starting to move into in legal services. Absolutely. And there's a question in the chat. Are there data sources available as to where there are lawyers? I don't know the answer to that. Brian, do you know are there like for instance are the folks are ABA roles or the folks who have a law degree are those published? Most are. They keep statistics around that. Whether it's in a format that you can easily import into some type of a dashboard or something like that it usually has to be massaged some but that is information you can usually find and there's usually a big geographic difference between where the lawyers are and where the populations that need help are. Absolutely. Yep, yep, that we've gotten a list of attorneys from the state bar often with Michael says often with addresses that we can then map if we wanted to do so. Great, fantastic. So this is basically what we've talked about. So the idea of showing how great the need for legal aid is and how your work is making a difference. Here's another example of this is kind of the idea of going very big with big data. This is an organization called Polaris which does a large multinational international organization that runs a anti-human trafficking hotline with just an enormous amount of volume. So they partnered with Google and Palantir. Palantir is not as well known as Google but is I think almost as large at least in terms of market cap is a very profitable business but they do specifically interfaces to help people large, large, large volumes of data and so they are this is a visual which I know is not very useful but basically this type of thing is designed for kind of a deep dive into particular questions. So like, you know, like an SPSS or a statistical mining tool, not really designed to make pretty pictures that are easy to understand as much as for the experts to be able to see trends and patterns. They are using the large volumes of data that they are getting from their hotline which includes not only like what people actually say but an analysis of background, noise whatever they can get off that line they are obviously their location. They are using it to mine to find patterns and to actually find particular people and organizations that are engaged in large-scale human trafficking and to bring them down. So it's a realm in which as Brian mentioned there is a lot of stuff that is possible on a large scale in the realm of having lots of data. This tends to require this type of mining requires lots of data like at the scale at least statewide if not nationwide to be able to see kind of across trends but this is the type of thing that if someone wanted to take on the idea of consul across the nation that sounds like a gigantic project but that there could be I think really interesting trends seen in what kinds of services patterns in what works and what doesn't in terms of getting folks to a good outcome that type of thing. That is actually the end of our kind of rapid fire list of case studies and ideas. Kathleen, actually before we go big thoughts on this idea of just data mining and things you might be able to get at if you had a robust look or way to kind of troll trends in your own data. Boy really put me on this spot there Laura. I think that you know we just a very simple thing that comes to mind is that we have I think other rural states may have the same issue have always been able to better serve the areas right around our local offices and we underserve the more rural counties of our online triage and intake. I'm very serious to see if we're going to be able to reach some of those more rural areas better. I think that's a pretty obvious example of where we could map those changes and see that visually that that would be very helpful. The other thing that comes to mind is I think Ed Marks in New Mexico with their online triage is talking about mapping trends in terms of emerging case types, emerging issues. I've heard Ed talk on that and maybe some of the rest of you had to and I think keeping an eye on what happens in New Mexico with that is going to be interesting. Absolutely. Fantastic and now let's toss it broadly. I'm going to toss it to Brian in just a second but to you guys out there first if you have questions about any of this stuff this is a great time to ask it. Also I'd love to hear from you either what kind of sparks for you, maybe one idea that you're taking back for your organization or it's one thing that you've heard of that sounds pretty nifty or pretty interesting that might be interesting so put one of those things into the chat if you would, so either one thing that's sparking for you and one thing to take back or one really interesting thing to add on. Brian, in general as you think across all of the areas that we've covered are there innovative projects or uses of technology that come to mind that you'd like to see done more in the legal aid space? The dashboard and anything we can do along with our data is most interesting to me followed by what we can do to really empower clients to have some control over their information and provide for their legal welfare long term whether that's teaching them through games or a client portal that connects to our triage portals I'm not sure what that is but I think we need to empower clients to have more agency in what's going on with their legal issues. Yeah, and actually I'll say for me and then I'll warn you Kathleen I'm going to throw it out to you just kind of thinking through and putting all of this stuff together one thing that really stuck out to me this isn't necessarily a trend but just one thing that I hadn't really thought about before is the idea of pulling into like for instance the Dutch site that has online dispute resolution to think through what can be done if we assume that what we're doing is not just providing legal aid but potentially reducing the number of people who actually need a lawyer so how can we how can we provide online tools that will ultimately get clients to their goals as opposed to just assuming that they are not that we all are but assuming that they need a lawyer I think was a really interesting thing that stood out to me Kathleen is there kind of just one thing that is or multiple things that are kind of your just left as a takeaway? Well I'm really excited about how we're going to be we are starting to and are going to be able to deliver more self-help tools more appropriate referrals to clients through the triage without and to reserve our in-office resources one-on-one resources for the more complicated problems and I'm really excited about that because we're just kind of buried in phone intake and it's just not working for us and I think that resonates with a lot of people so what do they say you know practicing at the top of your license so to speak and using the online health tools for the simpler things I just wanted to mention also in response to what Brian was saying about client portals that a few of us are involved with the National Center for State Courts right now in designing an online client portal that will be court-based there will be a pilot in some court in the country or some state court system in the country I think it's going to be a good model and something that I think legal aid can learn from and so I think it'll be good to keep an eye on that and see how that works out and to utilize the model that comes out of that for maybe some legal aid project absolutely and viewer number 56 who has been a very prolific chatter thank you so much person entering things into the chat thanks so much for all your participation has put in the youth service network is pretty amazing but the problem or challenge or opportunity is that you need buy-in you actually need housing organizations to care about updating other service providers and their capacity without worrying about their image like for instance the fact that they are literally over capacity turning away clients 100% agree and this like all projects in which you've got multiple organizations coming together which is I think more and more of the stuff that's really worth doing is going to involve more than just one organization that requires people to really clearly think through what's in it for every piece of the system so what is actually in this why would a housing organization care because it helps them achieve their mission is a reason but probably is not sufficient because there's a lot of ways that they could be using their time and resources to pursue their mission so kind of thinking this through as as much an operational and logistical challenge as we look to collaboration as much as or honestly probably considerably more than it is a technology challenge fantastic Brian let me turn it over to you for possibly a closing thought on innovation and then turning to what's up next in terms of those untapped webinars so very excited to have done this webinar this was a brand new topic for us if you've got any feedback especially particular things that you saw in here that you think might make a good webinar in and of themselves please leave that feedback in the survey the survey in the chat over on SurveyMonkey a lot of these ideas like triage and online intake we definitely do a webinar in every year that has a significant turnout lots of these ideas though are new ones that we have never done a webinar on and we'd be happy to go in deeper on any of those that are of interest to people thank you guys all so much for coming out especially Laura and Kathleen I really appreciate it we've got some great trainings coming up we've actually got nine more trainings coming up this year our next one is July 29th on Google Analytics and Google AdWords in partnership with Atlanta Legal Services over their Olmstead rights website that they just put together and then we have one in early August on expert systems tools that is a demo of an expert system that was put together those are both new ones that have been added to our calendar that weren't there a few months ago they've been added in the last 30 days