 Hello, this is Brian Rowe with LS NTAP here with a training on follow-up for brief service put on by Atlanta Legal Aid. This training is being recorded and will be posted to our YouTube channel. We definitely encourage questions. By default, everyone is muted. If you use the raise hand function, we can unmute you so you could ask questions directly. There is also a question box where individuals can type in questions myself and Kat from Northwest Justice Project. We'll be monitoring that and getting those questions out to people. This recording is going to be available online on our YouTube channel, and I've got a link to that in the chat right now. The slides are also available to download under the handout section. You can download the slides right now. Thank you so much, and I'm turning this over to Allison and Kristen. Okay. Thank you, Brian. Good afternoon or good morning depending on where you are. My name is Allison Stiles, and I'm here with Kristen Verrell from Atlanta Legal Aid Society. We will be presenting on following through by following up, which is what we call taking brief service pro bono to the next level. I'm going to provide a little bit of background about the project that we work on, and we've worked on for several years now called the Enhance Services Project. That's here at Atlanta Legal Aid, and it's primarily funded by the pro bono innovation fund grant that we received in November 2014. We ask and have pro bono volunteers come to our office and make follow up telephone calls to clients. Our clients that we call have received only brief service or advice from our staff attorneys, and then what we ask the volunteers to do is to provide additional or repeated advice to clients. Identify cases for us that need more assistance, and then collect outcomes. So that's what the Enhance Services Project does right now. When it started, a little bit of history, we work in a metro area in Atlanta, and our downtown Atlanta Legal Aid office is our flagship main office. It has several different units covering different topics or different legal areas, and one of those units is called the Georgia Senior Legal Hotline. Our hotline here at Atlanta Legal Aid does what many hotlines across the country do, and they provide only brief service or advice to clients, but they cover the entire state of Georgia and a broad variety of case work. And so because all of their case work is brief service and advice work, in 2010 the hotline wanted to know exactly whether that brief service and advice was effective, so they completed an outcome study. And what they found was that the advice and brief service clients that they were serving had relatively low rates of success. They were seeing about 50% of the clients that they spoke to when this study was conducted found that they could actually convert the legal advice to a positive legal outcome. And unfortunately what they also found was that despite the fact that the attorneys were telling them, if you have any trouble, if you don't understand, if you have questions once we get off the phone, please call the hotline back, the clients really just weren't doing that. We don't know why. We don't know all the reasons. Of course we can speculate or think through that, but in the end they just weren't either able or willing to make a second call back to the hotline, so they just weren't getting the results that we had hoped for them. So what the hotline started doing very informally was asking volunteers, just people friendly with the hotline, friendly to the program to call clients back and provide extra assistance. And then once they got to the end of the case, whether it was a good outcome or a bad outcome, they would record that for us and they would do that in the binder that you can see on the right-hand side of the slide. It was very low-tech, very informal, and so that's how the follow-up study turned into a volunteer project. What they found is that they got good results for the clients when they provided that extra bit of assistance. So what we're going to do now, we have a poll set up and I'd like for people to give a guess on what percentage of Atlanta Legal Aid cases are at Vice or Brief Service only. You have some options there and we'll see what we come up with. Okay, so we have about 70% of people voting and with that, you guys can see most people believe that 75% of Atlanta Legal Aid cases are at Vice and Brief Service and that is the correct answer. So with a program of 68 staff attorneys and about 20,000 cases a year, we have 75% of those cases are getting at Vice and Brief Service. So that is, as you, I'm sure, familiar, is a lot of time, a lot of attorney time, a lot of time on the phone with clients and a lot of legal advice being pushed out into our community. So we definitely want to make sure that it's effective. So we're going to go to another question. Okay, so our next question, people want to answer on this question is without a follow-up call, and I think I maybe already said this number. What percentage of clients successfully obtain food stamps? This is just one of the topics that our volunteers were calling about in the early days of the volunteer project at the hotline, but what would you think the success rate would be for our clients without a follow-up call? Okay, so it looks like most people have casted a vote and the answer is 50%. So a little more optimistic than a lot of the folks on the call, but it was about 50%. So about a chance of a coin flip, whether they would be successful or not. So we didn't think that was high enough for our success rate. All right, we have one more question. Okay, so same parameters with the food stamps with a follow-up assistance. And this, I will say, was at the time of the more informal project with the volunteers. What percentage of clients successfully obtained food stamps when we had a volunteer call them back? You can see the options there. Okay, so it looks like most people got it right, 80%. So with a volunteer calling them back in that context, 80% of folks were able to obtain food stamps. So it was a positive legal outcome and a 30% jump in that short amount of time with that tiny bit of assistance. So we were pretty encouraged. I will say now for anyone who is familiar with our program now and knows that it's more formal, which of course we'll talk about in a minute. We're seeing close to 90% success rates for our clients now that are receiving follow-up. We have a larger sample now, more clients that have received assistance and the process is more formalized. So that may be some of the reason for that. But it's very encouraging. So outside of the poll. Okay, so I think I've said some of this, but we were able to secure once we realized it was a good idea and that it was working in an informal setting. We decided that perhaps we should make this more formal and we were happy to receive a two-year pro bono Innovation Fund grant from LSC. Over time, we formalized the follow-up process, meaning we incorporated it into legal server, which is our case management database. And we expanded the scope in terms of topics that were covered and units within Atlanta Legal Aid and offices within Atlanta Legal Aid that would be able to participate in the follow-up project. So we have five units downtown, we expanded to all of them, and we have since also expanded to two of our other county offices. So we've grown in scope. And we also hoped at the beginning to be a model that could be replicated for other programs should anyone want to also do some follow-up work. Well, we have a quick question. As far as food stamps, does this mean people were applying for food stamps or were they terminated and then trying to get food stamps back? Okay, that is a great question. So for our follow-up work, we have decided and it is a decision. You can do either one of them, but we have decided to follow up on clients that we've told to apply for food stamps. It was our opinion that if someone had been terminated or needed to file an appeal of some sort that we really wanted that person to go back to a staff attorney at Atlanta Legal Aid with the hope that maybe they could get more extended representation in the hearing. So we do not do follow-up work on the hearing if they've been terminated or just need to appeal for some reason. Does that answer the question? Yes, thank you very much. Great. So just a little bit about where we are now. I mentioned we've expanded throughout our offices in the downtown office and then two county offices. I think this number is probably a little low now, but we've seen and collected more than $350,000 in annualized outcomes for clients. Now I have to say, this program, we started it based on client need and we're very pleased about the outcomes that the clients received. But also from a programmatic standpoint, it's helpful. We have outcomes to report and show folks in the community and funders that we just didn't have before. They were out there, more than likely, and we didn't know them. So it's very encouraging, it's very nice, we will collect those outcomes in a way that we just didn't have a mechanism in place to do that before this program. Again, this number of 350 cases received follow-up, that's probably also at this point a little bit of a low number. We've probably added to that and more than 400 people have been helped with our follow-up work. I would say within an 18-month period of really being up and running with the volunteer pro bono project, because we took probably six months in the beginning to build, which Kristen Barrell is going to show you, the function in legal server and sort of the system and protocols that we put in place internally, training staff. That took a good six months of the first part of the grant to get up and running. So these numbers are pretty exciting for us and they've happened within the last, I'd say, 18 months. Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit about some things to consider as you apply this model to your program. And then Kristen is going to show you how to actually make it work. With this next slide we were showing, it's just to represent that at Atlanta Legal Aid we consider this project and probably projects that would be done in other places to have three sort of distinct audiences or stakeholders. Certainly funders, ours is primarily LSC, volunteers, of course, and internal staff. And so as you consider expanding this or creating this within your own program, I'll just share some experiences that we had with each group. For our volunteers, we believe that having experienced attorneys, some of them approaching retirement or in retirement, really this project speaks to that group of folks. It's very flexible. They don't have by and large any qualms or trouble just sort of jumping in and making cold calls to clients that they don't have a relationship with. And so that's really been where we had the best luck getting really regular volunteers who really enjoy this particular type of pro bono work. We have networks and done various events but really the personal referrals and friends bringing other friends in. That has really been the most successful way to gather volunteers. And people have varying backgrounds. I mean they can be from firms or in-house lawyers. We have one woman who was an attorney and then was out of the workforce for a little while taking care of children and then came back in and is enjoying kind of doing some legal work. And we also found that while we've done big volunteer trainings, some in the evenings, some lunch and learns, mostly short pitch meetings to volunteer groups to sort of give them an overview of what the program does, followed by one-on-one trainings, that really works the best. It's the most efficient use of time, both of our time and the volunteer time. So those have been some things that we have learned and you might consider. Training internal staff. Now this has been, I think, one of the more unexpected places where we spent a lot of time. I guess for anyone who's implemented a new project, that's probably not a surprise. Change is always time consuming. I've said previously we have 68 staff attorneys and we handle 20,000 cases each year. So Atlanta spreads out, not up, so there has been some traveling to different county offices and that sort of thing. But we've just taken a lot of time to try to teach and motivate the internal staff on what we're doing, why it's different from what they've been doing previously, trying to encourage people to think about follow-up topics in a way that maybe they hadn't before. What I found for staff attorneys and when I was a staff attorney what I remembered doing is working with a client on a given case, but giving them lots of other legal advice on other topics. And I don't know if that ever really converted to a good legal outcome for them. So we tried to get staff to really think through what they were telling clients and allowing us to then help leverage that advice with follow-up work. And I don't know that there's much else to say about funders other than just to sort of think about what local organizations might support your work, as well as sort of the overall funder who might be interested in this type of topic. And finally just a few keys to success using existing infrastructure. Kristin's going to show you how we use legal server to do some of this work. We did sort of evaluate our stakeholder interests. A great example is just our volunteer attorneys about, you know, they wanted to have a flexible opportunity, volunteer opportunity. And in order to do that we don't assign clients to attorneys. We have a queue and you'll see that in the next few slides. The volunteers can come in, make a list of, make a series of calls, and then leave and come back whenever it's convenient for their schedule. They're not attached to any particular list of clients or case handling. So we also found as we were building this just to be open about the fact that we were working through an experimental new project, and we would accept and we did accept and adjust our work based on advice that we got from our stakeholders. So that's just some background information and some takeaway keys to success. And so now Kristin I think it's going to transition into telling you actually how to do the back end work for legal server. So my name is Kristin Varrell. I'm the director of grants and innovation with Atlanta Legal Aid. And among the several things I do I'm our case management guru and we use legal server. So I'm going to show you the bits and pieces of the front end of our system and then the back end of our system. And really if you have legal server and want to implement this, feel free to call me. Some of the screenshots should give you a lot of direction on how to configure your system in legal server, but if you need more detail, feel free to reach out. So what we did know when we were setting up this system is we did not want these follow-up volunteers having access to our whole case management system. We didn't want them taking notes and cases or kind of getting confused by the massive features that are available to our case handlers in legal server. So we knew we needed to sort of create a place of their own for these volunteers. This is a screenshot of part of our home page in legal server. And what I did is I made the volunteers, I made this project a separate tab and I modeled it after our hotline callback system. We knew we didn't want our volunteers in the callback system sort of in the middle of new cases. We wanted a separate place for follow-up cases. And so this is a screenshot of what the volunteers go to when they log into our system. They immediately click this follow-up tab and they see a list of cases that are in the queue to be called for follow-up. And on this next page you can see back here see all the little columns. The volunteers can use any of those columns to sort so that they can sort of customize their volunteer experience. So for example, if we have a volunteer that really just has an affinity for the Cod County work and they want to just follow-up on our Cod County cases, they can sort by program and only follow-up on the Cod cases or only follow-up on the hotline cases. Or if they want to only follow-up on food stamps, they can do that. What it defaults to is chronologically giving them the oldest case. So we encourage them to not be as picky as they might want to be, but to just take the cases that are in need of follow-up that day. So lots of options. So here's a little bit of how you would do that in Legal Server. I made a custom home page and I used report part to make the custom home page. And this is how I did it in Legal Server. And I made a custom report for the follow-up queue, and then I inserted that report into a tab block. So that's essentially how I made the home page customizable for the follow-up volunteers. If we didn't have that, we would have very confused volunteers, and we had that for about a day. We had a volunteer who clicked the wrong tab and ended up just picking a random case and calling the client. So the other thing, so once, let me take you back to this home page, really quick, back. So what the volunteers do is they pick a case they want to follow-up on, and then they click the case number, they right-click it, and then it opens up the case. And that's the case just like any other case handler would see, except we created a special place for them to go. So when we train them in how to use our case management system, we say, look, here's the big broad world of our case, but you don't need to go in all these other places. You just click the actions tab and go to this follow-up menu. This is just created for you. And that is everything that the volunteer needs to do is in this action menu, in this follow-up action menu. They can contact the client for follow-up, and that's where they find the client's phone number, and any notes the case handler has left them about the reason for the follow-up, and it has a call log, and then there's once they reach the client, they can record the answers to the series of questions that we ask them to ask, and then if they have any problems, they can email staff. So that's all they need to do, and it's all right there in a sort of concise place so they're not wandering around our case management system trying to figure everything out. So here's how I did it. This is the back end of how to create a custom action menu. I made a link box, custom link box in the action menu. This is where it is on the back end of Legal Server. This is in the main profile. It's what we call our case profile. And here's how it looks. And so I made these processes with forms, and then I included those forms in the action menu. The other thing, so this is a close-up of the front end of the contact client for follow-up link, which is the first link that our volunteers will use after sort of scanning the case for case notes. This has everything the volunteer needs to contact the client. This again is sort of modeled on the callback system that our hotline uses, but again we knew we could not use the callback system for a follow-up because we would be getting, we'd be mixing up new client callers and follow-up calls. So what I did is I made a custom form with these, lots of these are custom fields, and some of these are not custom fields. These are just fields from the intake that are just carried over for convenience into this form. The main sort of hack is I used this activity block to create a separate call log, separate from the callback system and legal server, and I think I have a more detailed view of what this is. So this is how I made the custom form that is contact client for follow-up, and these are the fields that I used. Most of these are custom fields, but they're not all. And this is the activity block, the back end of the activity block, and this is what it looks like. It basically records the date of the contact, the user, whether the call, the user left a message, didn't receive an answer, had a line busy, client asked to call back, you know, three days from today. The volunteers enter any of those notes so that, say, volunteer number one, attempts to reach the client today and doesn't reach the client, and then volunteer number two comes in and sees that it's still pending in the queue, so they go to make a call, but they can see the call history, and then we have, I think, a policy of four attempts. If there are four attempts to reach the client for follow-up, we don't reach the client, then we just close the case. So that's how we sort of record those attempts to reach the client. This is what the call log screen looks like. It's not really a call log screen, it's an activity screen that we're using as call logs, but it also has everything that the volunteer needs to do to continue the case or reset the date for follow-up or close it up. We originally did not have some of these fields at the bottom and added those after feedback from our volunteers didn't want to go, wanted to, you know, if the case was over and done with it because the client didn't want the follow-up services, the volunteers wanted to be able to just close it all up then. So if you'll remember the notebook that Allison showed in one of her slides, the follow-up questions link in Legal Server is essentially the notebook 2.0. What we did is we very carefully analyzed the questions in the notebook and tried to search for commonalities. And so this top screen, the top set of questions, these are multi-select options. It's not a script. These are, the questions are really bits of information that we want the volunteers to collect if applicable. And because our volunteers are, for the most part, experienced attorneys, this works very well because they have the level of sophistication with client interaction to not ask a question if it's not applicable. That makes sense. So these are sort of common, the top set of questions are common questions that everybody asks in every case if it's applicable. And down below are follow-up results, which are not exactly outcomes, but it's information about the results of the follow-up call that we want collected. And then, let me see if I have another screenshot. No? All right. Below the follow-up results is an option for the client, for the user, for the volunteer to enter outcomes in our outcome system in Legal Server if there are outcomes. And so it used to be we had another link that said record outcomes. And our volunteers said, look, just put it all on one page so we don't have to go from page to page. And so we've done a lot of that sort of work in progress modifications based on feedback. So here's a little bit of the back end of the notebook. I use lots of branch logic and lots of custom fields. These are almost all custom fields. And the branch logic is depending on the topic of the follow-up, there may be, like, we have a set of specific questions that get asked in addition to the general ones or public benefits. And then there are some specific questions that are asked for a loan modification case and a different set of questions that are asked for estate planning. And branch logic handles all of that. In addition, we use branch logic to have the outcomes fields show up. So this is the other part of the notebook 2.0. And this is what Allison was talking about, about training staff and sort of managing change in staff work habits. So the way we set up the system in order for the outcomes to show up properly in a follow-up case, the legal problem code of the case has to match the follow-up topic. So in the beginning we had case handlers marking a housing case for food stamps follow-up. And then in our system, yeah? The question here is why did you choose not to use legal servers-built callback system? Because our hotline is already using it. So it was for to keep the data separate? To keep the data separate. Okay. So could a flag have been added to those to use that? We tried that in a past project, sort of having volunteers filter for the project within callbacks filtering for the project that they're working on. And it just did not work. It was more data manipulation that our volunteers were willing to do. So the key for volunteers in legal server, in my opinion, is to keep it just extraordinarily simple. That makes sense because volunteers live there a lot less than other staff. They're completely unfamiliar with the system. It's very intimidating to them to use our system. We actually have our paralegal sit with a new volunteer, basically for a day when they start, half a day. You know, and sit with them and do calls together with them and help them learn the system, even the system that we've set up. So I think we would end up with, if we use the callback system, we would end up with volunteers calling new intakes, not by mistake and not calling just follow-up calls. That's just my opinion. So that's why we didn't use it. So back to staff participation. So because we needed our staff to open a new case, if they had a housing case and they wanted the client to receive follow-up services for food stamps, traditionally our staff attorneys are just simply recording the advice that they gave regarding both legal matters in one case and not counting it as two cases. And so we've had to train them to open a new case. And we've timed the process in legal server using Quick Client Add, and it is three minutes. But it has taken a lot of, really, it's only three minutes. But because a lot of our case handlers are not used to doing intakes from the beginning, intake staff does that. That also is an unfamiliar process to a lot of case handlers. So that was intimidating to our case handlers. So there's been a lot of training on that end to encourage them to do that. So when our staff has an appropriate case with the right problem code matched to the follow-up reason, when they close the case, these follow-up cases are essentially closed cases in our system. The case is marked for follow-up. They pick the follow-up reason and enter any notes that the volunteer might need to know about the client. Like client son is going to try to talk to you, but you should talk to a client instead, something like that. Those kinds of notes just go in this follow-up note case. And here's the back end of it. This is just branch logic and our normal case closing screen to get the follow-up, custom follow-up questions to show up. And here's a screenshot of the, it's blurry, but here's a screenshot of the current topics for follow-up. We follow-up on Affordable Care Act, food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, SSI, Social Security, TANF guardianship, unemployment, powers of attorney and advance directives, housing, loan modifications, overpayments, private landlord-tenant actions, fair debt collections practices, and wills. So those are our current topics, and what we do is when Allison expands the project to another officer unit, she sort of goes through these topics and says, why don't we try these out, or if you've got a reason, a specific reason to add a topic, then she will do that and then give the volunteers the training materials they need. So, and here is a quick client ad feature that we have had. I have a quick question here, which seems to be some confusion over here. How is follow-up on a new case under LSC regulations? So if you have talked to somebody about a housing issue and you have a case open for an eviction and you notice that they are eligible for food stamps and are not getting food stamps, then that is a different legal matter completely to the housing issue, so we open a new case. Does that make sense? I think so. Yeah, so it wouldn't be a new case if it was a housing issue and we wanted to follow up on the housing issue. That's the same case. But traditionally, our attorneys are just basically under-reporting our cases, in my opinion. Maybe David can come in and tell me I'm wrong, but that's what I think we're doing, is that we're traditionally handling more than one legal matter in one case than we should be. More legal matters in one case than we should be. And especially if there are additional services the client can receive, that's a reason to go through that extra step to have a separate case open. So, all righty. Let's see what's on the next screen. This is the dashboard that I made for Allison's youth, in particular. The dashboards, I'm not sure everybody can do this without the right modules and legal server. We got this dashboard feature through TIG grant a while ago. And so I use it at every opportunity. And when this project started up, I immediately made a dashboard for Allison. What this shows is like just a live, ongoing tally of the outcome in the case. The pie chart gives her a snapshot and the chart next to it lets her sort of drill down and see by office and outcome what is getting followed up on successfully. And then we also tally the number of people helped in a pie chart. And let's see. So, for those of you who have, I think that the module you need in legal server is called the interactive graphs and charts. I think that there is limited functionality to insert graphics on a home page without it. But I'll go ahead and tell you what I did. So, I made a follow-up reports view in legal server. And then I made a form. And in that form, I inserted report parts. I think it's the reporting, inserting report parts that you need the module for. I think anybody who's using the new interface in legal server can recreate a separate view. So, from the home page, you just click views and then you click the follow-up view and you get the follow-up dashboard. And if anybody wants to talk to me more about that, dashboards are near and dear to my heart. I'm happy to talk to anybody about that. And then finally, one of the other technology bits that we did in this project is we had, we originally started doing a big training of potential volunteers. You know, it was a two- or a three-hour training. And we trained everybody, you know, all these private and retired attorneys on various public benefits and landlord-tenant poverty law kind of issues that were kind of new to them. And when, a month later, they decided to schedule a time to volunteer, they had completely forgotten what we had trained them on. And they were uncomfortable with the topic because the subject matter, because it wasn't something that they had done in their private practice. So Allison made these one-sheeters that she made available to the volunteers. But sometimes that wasn't even enough. What we did is we made, we have a fabulous paralegal named Gabb who took Allison's one-sheeters and she made videos. She made little short five-minute videos narrating the PowerPoints and illustrating them. And so if our volunteers want, they can watch the video instead of read the one-sheeter and they love the videos because it is just a quick, easy way for them to re-familiarize themselves with the topic before they make a food stamps call. So what we wanted to do, we found that they were not returning, they were avoiding the food stamps and the TANF follow-up calls, and they were all doing the power of attorney follow-up calls because everybody was familiar with those from private practice. And so we really needed to do more to encourage them to take on the traditional legal aid type follow-up work. And so these videos have helped the volunteers be more familiar with the topic. So they're on our YouTube channel. You can go look at them. And I think there are four or five of them. And the bonus for you all is to replicate them. They have been modified for easy replication on sharelawvideo.org. So if any of you want help accessing that, let me know as well. They're really great and pretty generic, easy for volunteer training. So I think that is all of our presentation and I guess we have a few minutes for questions. Any final words or thoughts? Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Yeah, thank you guys so much for putting this on. There's definitely been a very positive feedback from the community. Individuals who attended will get a survey. Please give us any feedback. This is the first time we've covered this topic. Let us know if there's follow-up or other things like that that you would like to learn about with regards to this.