 Okay, welcome everybody. This is Sartreau with LSNTOW. I am here with William Guyton, and today we are discussing the LSE baselines. William, would you like to introduce yourself for a second? Sure. As Sartre said, my name is William Guyton. I am currently serving as the Director of Information and Technology at Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma. Excellent. So, a few quick things about the webinar here first. Number one, logistics-wise, this is a smaller group. I am happy to promote anybody up to a presenter so they can talk or unmute them. The default here is for individuals to be muted, but since this is a Q&A, feel free to type something to me either in the question box or use the raise hand function, and I can unmute people. Also, if you have questions any time throughout this, there is a question box. I will be monitoring those, and we will be answering any questions that are in there. Second thing is that this is being recorded. We will be posting this to our YouTube channel. Our YouTube channel is accessible. It's in the upper right hand corner of LSNTOW.org. We've got over 200 videos that we've done, including a whole series on security that we worked on last year with Tech Ground Table. All of our past trainings are made available to the public for free. In the handouts, there are five handouts for this webinar. There is the LSC Technology Baselines that were updated in 2015. There is a call center triage. Let me actually pull up a copy of that here. There are four guides that were put out in 2018, and I think that these are great supplemental readings for the baselines. One of them is on knowledge management, putting together things like a brief bank, being able to share knowledge inside of your organization. The second one is on information security. It's a tool kit that covers a lot of the physical security and digital security items out there, mostly on the digital side of things. We just did a webinar about a month ago on it. We have one on online intake and triage. We've done several webinars on this topic, and then we've got one on call center technology. Each of these are about 20 to 40 pages, and they go much more in depth on technology, and they were each published this last year. The baselines were written in 2015. These four guides work as very solid supplements to those baselines. The baselines that were published in April 2015 were an update of the 2008 baselines, and they had significant input from the community. They go into a lot more detail also compared to what we're going to discuss today. We're just going to go over a few of the basic areas, and then hopefully get some questions from the community with regards to each of those. Back up the slides here, presents. One of the major things in the baselines is how to work on the long-term technology planning and how to focus on the strategic aspects of hardware and software, management for client data, production and supervision, legal work, records, management and information management, intake, and telephonic advice. William, what is some of the stuff that you've worked on that you think is kind of essential on that intake or the ability to serve clients on the phone side of things? Well, my first real introduction to call centers was post Katrina in Alabama, where we spun up some call centers in 2005-2006 specifically to handle the volume of folks that we knew would have Katrina-related legal issues. Alabama got into online intake and call center as a mechanism pretty much by accident because we had to. The most important thing that we learned in developing that process was it really does take a cross-functional team. It takes leadership, it takes attorneys, it takes intake staff, it takes paralegals. We had one or two of just about every staff member in the program in Alabama involved in that process because at one point or another each one of those types of staff are going to have to touch that online intake or do something with that call in the call queue. This is my 15th year in legal aid and I've watched it go from a couple of different iterations of physical intake, online intake, call backs, call in. I think we're still experimenting on the best mix and match of those technologies and techniques as it applies to quality client service and we're doing that in Oklahoma. We're experimenting with our legal server integration for online intake and again doing some interesting things with call distribution using Amazon Connect to route calls across the state to try to deal with the volume that we know we're going to get. So there really is no one size fits all solution. It's a state by state or program by program solution based on technical capacity and capacity in general but there's probably not much of anything I haven't tried or seen in the last 15 years. So in kind of on the disaster preparedness side of things, what have you learned from that experience of that could be done in advance that would have made things much easier in the future? In terms of Hurricane Katrina, well there wasn't, I don't know if there was a whole lot we could have done because we didn't really know which way the government was going to be shipping people out of Mississippi and Louisiana. So Katrina impacted the entire southeast. There was a bunch of folks that got shipped to Houston and parts of Texas, so Texas programs got impacted. There were a bunch of folks that got shipped to Alabama and got shipped to Atlanta. So until we knew where people were going to end up going, we didn't really have a good idea of what to expect. And then you've got the long-term knock-on effects of that kind of disaster. In terms of foreclosure and family law and all of these knock-on effects, we were still seeing cases three, four and five years down the line after Katrina because of just the knock-on effects of those legal issues. But in a statewide program, at least from a hurricane perspective, you can try to put assets across the state if you're a localized program in New Orleans and there wasn't anything you could do. So we didn't really have a sense of how many people were going where until FEMA said, hey, we're shipping 50,000 evacuees to Alabama. Now that's a very good point. In being a statewide program, you get much more of an opportunity to be able to geolocate resources across the area. And in Washington state, we have put our phone system and our email system both on the east side and on the west side of the Cascades here so that we've got some redundancy in those systems and the ability to keep it going if there is something on each side. Next area that we've got here is on staffing and this, I was part of the process that helped discuss these and this was one of the more contentious areas in just making sure that as your organization grows that you've got enough IT staff. When comparing this to what is out there in the general nonprofit kind of advice area, I would still say that the staffing here is a little bit light in having two FTEs per hundred individuals. Those FTEs do not necessarily need to be in-house. Some of that can be an external help desk. But additionally, making sure that you also have someone at the strategic level of the organization that is looking at your longer term policy things that they're reviewing what your data retention policies are and data destruction. That's something that the baseline doesn't currently cover but there is a session coming up at the MIE conference and right before, I believe it's called ITCon now, the new TIG conference in New Orleans and data destruction is something we're going to look at there. But making sure that you've got enough essential staff to be able to answer people's questions, help them with a bring your own device policy, that type of stuff and as your organization grows or if it merges with other organizations in the state making sure that that IT staffing is there. So William, how do you handle the IT staffing there? Well, we're 180-ish staff and so we're currently at three and a half FTEs and that really is based upon the fact that people want to go on vacation, people get sick, people have kids, you always want to party on. I mean, if you're a program with one person, then that person's going to get sick is, so one's pretty risky, that's your all-your-eggs-in-one basket approach and some programs are small enough to do that but there's obviously a downside to having all your eggs in that particular one basket. We're large enough and diverse enough and have enough people across the state that we're lucky, we're probably above average in terms of bodies but we're doing a tremendous amount of technology in Oklahoma and no one of us knows it all so we know obviously we're multiple halves and we've got some cross-training and some redundancy built into it so if I want to go on vacation I can do that but we've lifted the entire program to the cloud so even if I'm on vacation I'm not really on vacation in fact there's a few people in this day and age that are really on vacation unless they want to turn their phone off but again it's one of those cross-functional conversations you have to have with leadership and it's nice that the baseline is at least addressed because I think on the first one I don't know that it did. Right, the first one did not cover staffing issues in this type of detail. Additionally we've got a question here, is it common to have a consultant in addition to in-house IT? I'll answer that first. At Northwest Justice Project we've definitely used consultants for particular projects and at other programs that I've worked with especially smaller programs they will if they've got one person who is in-house their second person is often a consultant or a help desk company or someone else that supplements what that one person does. I dealt with a program about five years back that was about a hundred person program they had one IT staff and that person just left and they had no idea even how the infrastructure was built how they could support that type of stuff and it became a crisis for them and they ended up spending a lot more money on consultants to come in and deal with the crisis of that individual leaving. Having at least two staff members that are aware of the IT infrastructure, the strategic plan, the password management system I strongly recommend LastPass which individuals can do for free. I use an enterprise version for LS NTAP and everybody who works with me which allows me to instantly like pull all of the passwords from somebody when they leave for all of our websites that type of stuff but just having at least two people and even if one of those if you're a smaller program is someone external consulting that knows what your strategic plan is when you need to rehire that tech position it just goes so much smoother. Great question there. Yeah absolutely. Yeah we've those of us that have done this long enough have all been in that same position. What's the router password? Where does that go? But absolutely. We use Dashlane for the same reason and you're using LastPass and we've looked at LastPass but not only do you get visibility into other secured passwords for critical infrastructure and that kind of thing. For us we use it as a tool to enforce our security policy which is you need to have a unique strong password for every website in every account that you visit and we've encouraged staff to use Dashlane for their personal use because invariably their personal account will get breached and they've used that same password at some other lasso account therefore we've been breached. So again we're trying to use the tool to raise all boats and to make it convenient to do the right thing in terms of password strength and that policy aspect of it. Right and I would definitely recommend with regards to the password stuff just do a training with and help staff set it up even setting up a personal account because if they don't use it personally the chances on them reusing passwords is really high. Yeah. Spend the extra time and help them create good security practices in their personal life also. Absolutely. So budgeting there's really three main things that the baselines hit is ongoing maintenance and upgrades of hardware and software personnel consultants and training in use of technology on the maintenance and upgrades. I've dealt with several different legal services organizations that kind of had the well we wait till somebody complains about their computer or until the computer crashes in order to save money but the loss of productivity of waiting on those computers is really really high. Most programs that I know have somewhere between a four year and the longest that I've seen as a six year replacement policy for desktops and or laptops and being able to rotate those through on a regular basis and not have to deal with crisis is when they crash can definitely help you a lot. Another question here that was back on the staffing is it common for an organization with 100 plus staff to have software hardware maintenance handled in-house? A quick way in how Northwest Justice Project handles that is that some of our some of it is in-house and some of it is external. So for example with our call center software and when we were using SharePoint before we moved to 365 when we had it on site we had external individuals who maintain those pieces of software and the rest of our software was in-house. SharePoint just had we had a lot of customization and it wasn't a skill we had in-house. When we moved to 365 we basically dropped the customization and in a lot of different both in using open-source tools or closed-source tools I strongly recommend limiting the amount of customization that you put into it so that when upgrades come along you're not beholden to a consultant or an external coder to make your customized system work with whatever the new standards are. But almost all of our other software is in-house although that has been recent. We are probably 150 almost 200-person org before we started to put all of that stuff in-house and we're at about 230-240 currently. Yeah and and we did the same thing we've we've we lifted the entire program to 365 Azure so we've reduced our on-prem footprint by probably 95%. So the maintenance there's not any maintenance the upgrades there's not any upgrades you let Microsoft do that. Your budgeting is fairly straightforward because you're paying a per user per whatever service that user has per month type of type of budget so the budget should remain relatively constant unless you've got a project or a program that you're deploying. So our so our cap X has been flipped into an op-ex in a big way so we're not having to save $100,000 over three years to do a big server upgrade like we used to do you know five years ago. So the the simplification of all of that is has gotten has gotten very very good with 365 and Azure. So that really has a positive impact on the budgeting obviously and it has an even bigger impact on the maintenance upgrade side because you're focusing on very specific things to your legal aid program versus exchange and active directory and you know all the other things we used to do five years ago. Yeah we we evaluated going online five years ago decided to stay in house we are redoing the evaluation now. The online tools have continued to significantly change over time so I think looking at those cloud solutions and how much you're paying in-house to maintain those things is definitely worth it. On the training side of things here I recommend trying to put technological training as part of your regular like CLE schedule throughout the year and pair the tech training with another training that individuals are going to show up to. We've tried to do like here's just a tech training and the attendance just dives but if we can get people coming in for something else and add on 10 or 15 minutes of tech training at either the beginning or the end of another substitute legal issue we get much better attendance and we just try to keep it short and practical. We don't want people sitting around for an hour or two listening to security standards or something. We want some identifiable short tips that people can use and so they feel comfortable asking the silliest questions possible like just treat them well answer the questions help them out because when your staff feels comfortable in being able to ask those questions they're more likely to ask you about that weird email that's asking you to click on stuff or when their computer is running slowly then they'll come to you and figure out what's going on so just creating that rapport is very very important. Absolutely big time you know ultimately the technology department in legal aid is a support organization you know we're about supporting staff to advocate for clients and you've got to remember your role in within legal aid organization for sure. We're in the same vein we find ourselves having to do the same training over and over and over again depending on which office you're in. We've taken to developing very short videos that we upload to the video section of SharePoint and so if you went up to our video section of SharePoint you'd see from very basic stuff to some fairly advanced stuff how do I log in what happens when I log in how do I load Skype where's my headset you know we took it from an onboarding perspective because we were we were redeveloping our onboarding process so we looked at it from an onboarding staff member's perspective and you know what are the what are the five things you need to know when you sit down at your new job at legal aid you know what are the five people I need to reach out to and so we approached it from that perspective and it's grown kind of like the LSN tab video library over time where we record the CLEs now and the CLEs were up there by subject matter and by location and by date and it's just and you know we've we've we've made people comfortable in terms of the open source tools and you know webcams and headsets are inexpensive now and the ability to have a subject matter experts sit down and do a 10-minute teaching session on some complex legal issue is really impactful and because you've got it in the can you can point somebody to it and we're developing those on a on a on a vertical basis as well so family law will have their own section of videos you know those kind of things so we took the video approach just because we kept hearing the same question so we got a question here William would you be willing to share some of those onboarding videos sure they're they're not glamorous but there's no reason why you can't have access to them the you know at the same time we we do a a about a quarter about once a quarter we do a Midwest IT director's conference call so all the all of the directors in the Midwest part of the United States get on a call and do this same kind of thing that we're doing today and we've opened it up to just anybody so if you want to pick the brains or or talk about a specific subject within legal aid technology we're doing that on a regional basis because it's you know we know none of us know it all there's some really fantastic people and great ideas and we need to we need to leverage all of those ideas that's the great thing about TIG I steal most of my ideas from TIG well and if if there is a piece of technology or something that you're using in your program that you would like us to either help you create a video for or create a short five-minute video for that is definitely something you can ask LSN tap to do we would prefer to collaboratively do it so that you get the skills to do future ones but then we will take those videos and share those with the community we were working on one currently for last pass because we're encouraging staff to use it but that those type of short videos do not worry about the production cost it is more important to keep it short simple practical and that is going to go so much further it does not have to yeah we don't do we ten minutes is our max if you can't if you can't condense that concept concept down into ten minutes then you don't know what you're talking about and we use OBS studio we've got OBS studio loaded on a bunch of machines specifically to encourage folks to capture that because we you know time is limited and we all get the same question you know advocates the advocates get the same questions leaders should get the same questions I'm like take your expertise pull it down to ten minutes and and put video out yeah I'm gonna drop a link here in the chat to OBS studio I I've used it for streaming and for other stuff it's very very powerful open source software that allows you to do screen captures video captures it it's great definitely recommend it I got another question here how do you guys handle hardware maintenance at your program well we from a from a desktop perspective we have a 36 month four-year replacement schedule for desktops and we we just went through a major hardware upgrade in fact we've got two more offices to visit for the end of the year in fact I'm heading to Muscogee Oklahoma tomorrow to do to do phones and and security cameras but the it is sort alluded to earlier it's significantly easier to develop a replacement schedule than to figure out five years down the road that you have to replace an entire office with the machines and and the negative impact of on on that staff's product productivity and their morale is going to be in the toilet I mean you gotta you have to if you want good quality legal aid out of support staff for clients you've got to get a you have to give them the tools they need in order to be able to supply that high quality legal representation there's just no way around it and and we're so you know we're so technologically focused now at the court level at the legal aid level you know being without connectivity being without a tablet being without the right software is in a lot of cases a disservice to the clients we're trying to serve but we we budget we do and you know within that budget since we're on the budgeting page we budget for disasters you know what do we do if the roof blows off an office what do we do if an office burns to the ground what do we do if you know you you can't budget yourself to the penny and then not not be able to respond to some emergency because invariably over the course of a year there's some emergency at some office somewhere but that's you know you have to make it part of your and that's part of the reason the baselines exist is you need to be able to articulate what this document is recommending as a good as a best practice for a legal aid program and you'll have you'll have leadership that push back on that well we simply can't afford to do that and then that that opens up that conversation about well what type of service are we willing to give clients great and finding the practical impact examples of these things does tend to work better with the executive directors and your leadership staff when when you end up having PCs dying or things the impact on clients is really high so that's kind of a follow-up to that it was does your in-house staff in install software that type of stuff on new PCs over here at Northwest Justice Project and we've basically got have a five-year replacement program and wet and we do go through and install the software but we pick up a series of computers that are the same we set one of them up and then we replicate that setup on all of them so the the having a bulk process for doing that and having it as part of our annual cycle cuts down on the time and the cost of doing those because we're not loading up every computer and then installing one by one each of those things but yeah we do do it in-house yeah and we have a similar approach we're we're a big we're a big Amazon smile customer I mean most most everything 98% of what we purchase is is on Amazon smile and so we've done our testing we've got a base package this is what your your you know your new hire staff members going to get in terms of the assets here's the desktop here's the laptop here's the phone here's the headset here's the webcam software and the software in the OS side has gotten easier only because we're really digging into the in-tune aspect of Office 365 where we can start to automatically deploy and give staff access to the apps via 365 and ultimately if we continue to work with in-tune it'll have that same kind of impact on the security side in terms of mobile device management endpoint deployment and notification and those kind of things in fact I'm looking at conditional access so you can now put a policy in place in in-tune that won't give somebody access to email a certain baseline criteria have not been met so in-tune at a buck fifty the nonprofit price per user per month is a has turned out to be a real asset literally because we use it for inventory as well so so we're again we've done the whole Office 365 Azure thing so we've we've had a big helping of the Microsoft Kool-Aid and part of that Kool-Aid is is using in-tune to manage your devices so there was a follow-up question here is who handles a procurement for IT so at MGP we have a a budget overall of what we're doing and then our head system admin currently covers all of that with oversight from one of our executive team we are in the next year going to be hiring our first chief technology officer that those responsibilities or at least oversight will move to that individual so the long-term there there will be somebody on the executive team there it's currently overseen by a member of the executive team but there is an annual budgeting process and then also check-ins on that budget throughout the year yep we're I'm a member of the executive team so as a director level position I'm that technology representative at the table but at the same at the same time we have a CFO and we have a formal budgeting process and I'm the person that's held responsible for being over under budget on an annual basis and we I sit down with the CFO quarterly and see where our spins are you know I'm over on hardware I'm under on software I'm over on services you know so you get you get feedback and reports that show you where you are on your spend and that all ties into your technology plan and what do we want to do in year two and year three what do we anticipate as a big technology project they all tie together because obviously without the financial resources and also dovetails into consultants if you don't have the if you don't have the internal capacity to develop that particular solution then you may have to hire a consultant to help you deploy a particular technology solution so the budgeting and the technology planning and and the leadership all dovetail together because they all impact each other. I think you're muted Brian. So case management systems is kind of the next thing that we've got here we keep a list on LSN tab of case management systems the features do tend to change on a regular basis these are some of the major systems currently used although Salesforce should probably be added to this slide as I know a few programs have started to use Salesforce also the feature sets for the case management systems are also when they get upgraded for a single member of the legal aid community those get pushed out to everyone so we're having discussion I know one of these case management systems has upgraded recently to make it easier to do data destruction and there's talks about doing it for other case management systems but the the ability for staff to be able to access them from multiple locations your report functioning out there is very important and then the ability to share those case information that you need when transferring it or sending it over to other programs are some of the fundamental pieces that are really in there so William in looking at a case management system what are kind of the major things that you look at and what was a deciding factor in the case management system you're using well we've I think I've done three conversions now between three different CMSs so I've I've been through the good bad and ugly of just about each of these on the screen it's you know for us the the watershed moment was when you went from something like Kemp's or Pico which was really client server based and if you weren't in the office you didn't have access to it and there was a time when when we knew that we were gonna have staff representing clients that needed access to that data and really we spent a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of effort trying to figure out how to take what is what was traditionally a client server architecture and virtualize it and put it up in the cloud and give people access to it and in most cases it didn't seem to work very well so we ultimately went with legal server primarily because it it it's specifically written for legal aid organizations which in and of itself is is unique although Kemp's did that and I get to that to a certain extent but it's it's it's biggest selling factor is accessibility it's a web-based application and more and more of the grants that we're competing for at a regional and national level require an embedded staff member and you you're not going to be able to support that embedded staff member in that hospital or that domestic violence shelter the way you support a staff member that's physically in one of your offices so we had to we had to think about you know how do we support a staff member that's not physically in an office anymore and that really drove us to to to legal server and the office 365 which gives everybody the ability to get to everything they have regardless of wherever they are which is a which is a which allows a lot of people to especially in Oklahoma you know we have some pretty dramatic weather events and invariably we've got internet out at an office somewhere in the state probably every day so that so from a disaster recovery capacity but more importantly from a from a staff accessibility capacity that's what really sold us on legal server yeah we we are also on legal server part of it is that our whole state is on legal server all of our volunteer lawyer programs and the other legal services orgs which has made it easier to transfer files I do think there is a need for a case data standard that was interoperable between all of them because the lock into a particular system I think is a long-term it prevents kind of competition and others entering that marketplace that's not something covered in the baselines but it's one of those things that could would be useful another question here is who does your RFPs bids solicitations etc so at NJP we've got a policy where over $25,000 we have to do a competitive bid process we write the RFPs in-house we often ask the community on the LSN type email list does anybody else have an RFP here we occasionally also actually in our last two RFPs that I've been working on we run those RFP also by the TIG staff because they've seen so many RFPs they're willing to just make improvements give you feedback on an RFP to help improve those and then we post them publicly we've got a RFP board and job board that was launched in the last six months on LSN type where anybody can post an RFP let me see about bringing up a copy of that but it also it covers jobs also additionally we then send it out to an email list that is everybody from the LSN type community and then we contact vendors one-on-one and we look for email lists or community groups that deal with those things so with our last Drupal upgrade we reached out to a bunch of different Drupal developers and some Drupal email lists to kind of share that broadly how do you guys do RFPs bids solicitation that type of stuff it's a similar approach for us we don't have a lot of projects anymore that that hit the RFP threshold only because a lot of what we're doing is a per month per user service type of charge and that's probably a consequence of being in the 365 Azure orbit there's not a single huge $30,000 project anymore you know most of those were done several years ago like the case management conversion and some other things we did in the past we just don't see a lot of very large dollar-denominated projects anymore they're really just made up of you know clicking this box and saying we'll sign up for N10 for 30 days and evaluate it and clicking this box and clicking this box it's we've decided what our technology architecture is going to be which right now is Office 365 and Azure and we know what our base hardware and software package is going to be for a given staff member so most of those you know there's not a whole lot of wiggle room at least in the last couple of years because one of the one of the major benefits of a platform like 365 is we've been there have been significant incremental improvements in all of the 365 services over time that haven't cost us any more money so it the way that you the way that you budget and plan for technology in a cloud-centric environment really doesn't lend itself to those large denominated projects anymore if that makes sense definitely the yeah moving things on to a per user or monthly or yearly basis definitely changes kind of the threshold there although even when we're picking up services like that although we don't go through a formula formal RFP process we definitely do an in comparative analysis point between what's available out there and that type of stuff so I think still having a process that looks at the features looks at the cost and looks at the impact and compares it is very very valuable up on the screen right now I've got the job and RFP board so if you're looking to hire more tech staff or if you have any RFPs out there please send it to us along with a close date we will put it up there we'll share it widely and then we will also remove it when it's done but we're we want to help share those things as broadly as possible the next area that we've gotten the baselines is the basics around supervision it goes into a pretty good amount of detail in the baselines but kind of the five things we pulled out of it here is calendaring that you need some type of software to be able to do that and share that and let people know when people are out that type of stuff a document production timekeeping most of our case management systems have that integrated I know a few programs use external timekeeping apps though supervised data and then online research and there are a lot of different approaches that I've seen programs take some of them go and entirely open access free tools that are online and train individuals on that which often takes a little bit of training because law schools typically don't teach how you can get access to pretty much all of the case data out there without going through some of the other services that are out there others do it with a Westlaw or Lexus or one of those type of accounts William do you guys use anything on the software side for supervision data for checking in on people seeing where cases are is that all in your case management system or how do you do that yeah those are reports those are canned reports within legal server although we are talking to Ed about some of the dashboard management tools that he's talking about he's got a tag to do some of the dashboard stuff that we're interested in in looking at have you seen what Ed's to grant yes yeah that's an interesting one I we did a short highlight on it and hopefully we'll be able to do some more yeah electronic records this is one of the areas that the baselines covers a little bit says you need things like a document retention policy policies regarding access which is really part of your security also and confidentiality the one area that's kind of missing and I think that whenever next update is we will definitely have a section on is kind of what exactly your digital destruction looks like slightly covered in the document retention but there is a need in the community to find better ways to get rid of pieces of data that you no longer need if you've got a 10 year old closed case you may need a client's name with regards to a conflict check but still having pieces of their medical record or personal information related to that case the longer that you hold on to it the more likely it is to end up in a data breach and I wish there was a way that I could tell you how to prevent data breaches but they're going to happen it's a matter of time no matter how good your security is we can do a lot of things to cut down the likelihood but one of the best things we can do is regularly purging data that is not needed that you don't have a business case or a client responsibility to hold on to what types of policies or procedures with regards to electronic records do you have William we're there they're they're being co-developed as we deploy in tune and some of the compliance tools that are built in the office 365 we're starting to have that conversation it's we're getting down to the point where we're having to tag data and qualify data and in based on those tags and qualifications we get to determine via policy in 365 who has access to them do you have the should you have the ability to print this data or download this data should you be able to email it forward it to somebody you get a you get a lot of digital rights management ish type tools with some of the security suites built into office 365 a lot of that's coming from our friends in Europe because of the data standards they've enacted and but there is a fairly as clear as it can be approach that Microsoft maps out in terms of the like the lifecycle of a particular piece of data it's a work in progress it's it's a heavy lift and we're still getting the infrastructure and the training and the policies in place to be able to do it well but it's it's part of our data architecture that we're working on excellent I know that John Griner has is working on a it's not model policies but it's more things that you a bunch of questions you should ask for creating particular policies that should be out early next year we did kind of a preview of it yesterday in a webinar but once the kind of toolkit there is done we will do at least an hour hour and a half long discussion around that topic overall also there the pace that we're going we're probably not well given 10 hours I don't think we could hit everything that's in the baselines but if there are questions even outside of the particular area that we're looking at currently or comments please drop those into the question or comment box we are definitely happy to cover different areas on the knowledge management side this is an area where the baselines cover a little bit we're looking at about a page two pages of some simple tax but this is somewhere where I really encourage individuals to pick up the handout that is I believe it's a 33 page document on knowledge management covers everything from brief banks to sharing letters to anything where you're trying not to duplicate work or you're trying to share internally the knowledge that your staff has over particular legal issues I think what what William has done with creating some short videos from experts so that if you've got an AmeriCorps fellow or you've got someone coming in that they can get that information as soon as possible and know who the expert is in your organization that is essential the particular software or hardware that's used is less important in my mind than the community management aspects we've launched a SharePoint site to be honest half of our org uses it very very actively and another half doesn't use it at all and the big difference there is the the portions that have used it there's been someone in our telephone hotline area or in the practice area that has really taken it on and decided to separate it and talk to people about it where in the other areas no one had really championed that and if you can find some individuals who are willing to champion that the the management aspect of finding those community managers and giving them positive feedback and showing them how useful it is I'd say it's more important than whether you build something on Drupal Drupal whether you use a Google search appliance whether you use SharePoint there are several other tools out there the tools all at this point have very good search that can be put into them but it's making sure that good documents go up and that only good documents stay in that and that individuals put into their daily workflow sharing that knowledge that they're creating for clients any tips on like putting together knowledge management systems or things that have worked or things that have failed one other thing I have seen knowledge management systems that tend to go outside of your organization do tend to have challenges when it comes to redaction confidentiality that type of stuff putting those together is much more challenging than doing it internally next area that we've got here is statewide websites and we've got several different ways that those have been done in smaller states we see a very basic website that is often built on something like D law which is a free open source distribution of Drupal I've seen a few particular programs or even parts of programs create a WordPress site for particular issues I've seen that happen definitely in the veterans community from time to time or for particular service areas pro bono net also provides some very robust statewide websites and urban insight on top of the D law template does a hosted version called open advocate that several different programs work with putting together a way to manage what goes into or comes out of the statewide websites and when they get updated is extremely important we've got basically two fte's in Washington state that update the website one of them is more on the tech structure side and the other one is a content editor that creates that content one of the things that isn't heavily covered in the baselines but I think should be added is making sure that whatever you're putting out there on the website that you have client user testing as part of the process both test can it be found online and also does the materials that you're creating create the knowledge in potential clients that you want it to and we did a bunch of focus group testing on some videos for part of a take grant and we found that there were a lot of what we thought to be very plain language things that were still embedded in legal terms and that the that we could significantly improve those videos by going through a round of user testing any thoughts with regards to statewide websites one of the areas that the that the new baselines added that was not there before is the legal information social media side of things and most programs at this point have some presence on social media I definitely recommend short videos for YouTube for common questions that come up a lot of individuals are going to be seeking assistance outside of the business hours of your hotline or of your office and YouTube's available 24 7 Facebook also now has an auto responder option if you've got a Facebook page that is an area where we get a lot of people asking us questions we put together an auto responder that sends them to our online intake we did test a chat bot that would interact with that that would try to serve them resources from our statewide website also dependent on what it thought their legal issue was that technology was a little bit clunky but has a lot of potential if you can go to where your clients already are instead of making them come to your statewide website your you're able to reach a lot more individuals overall and going to the clients is really one of the things that the baselines looks at when it's incorporating social media so it's not just a broadcast that we've got a clinic here or there's this informational thing going on or here's where our offices are but also providing a way for them to get access to yourself help resources through those is definitely beneficial overall there's a little bit in the baselines over pro bono support but integrating that into your technology systems is definitely essential and then we talked about this a little bit in the budgeting area but those continual trainings are also essential making them part of what you're doing. Additionally, one of the areas that we've seen a little bit of a lack from time to time is the training for tech staff also most programs do have a standard area where they cover CLEs continuing legal education for legal staff I would although it's not required for tech staff to keep a license it is essential for them to be able to update their skills send your tech staff to one or two tech related conferences make sure that they have access to online tools where they can get education and access to community to update their skills they will be much happier and much more useful as they update their skills and that should be part of the training I recommend considering shadowing what you offer for CLE training to your tech staff as part of a budget for them put that in that for each person we've got X number of dollars for each tech staff member to be able to do this type of stuff and I would also rotate tech staff through either the equal justice conference or the technology conference from LSC because both of those conferences have a dedicated technology legal aid side to it the tick conference is obviously all tech but equal justice conference does have at least one and sometimes two tech panels on every single spot so very useful for tech staff also on the security side once again I recommend the 2018 security toolkit because it goes so much more in depth into this but the four major areas that the baselines cover is maintaining backups updating your software educating staff and then limiting permissions and access and especially having a process in place for when all of your interns go when they leave when we bring in interns or fellows or pro bono staff not always a pro but at least on the ones where we have a limited time we get that end date at the beginning of the process and we set those calendars that we're cutting off permission or access at that date we will send an email to their supervisor at that point in time and make sure that that person has an extended because about 10% of the time somebody stays on or they still got an active case or something but having that proactively from the beginning eliminates the outstanding accounts somebody forgot to tell you so and so was leaving I would also consider having kind of a yearly audit where you go through and double check all of your accounts and make sure that they're still active staff because you'll find some accounts out there that we're just missed for one reason or another now we talk to this is an interesting one so William how do you guys cover bring your own devices you know I sound like an ad for Microsoft 365 because we're we're testing and deploying in tune almost specifically to manage the YOD the we we encourage staff to use their own devices to bring their own devices to connect to last resources by any device they want to feel comfortable with or have access to but that's a double edged sword obviously so part of what we're doing with in tune and the baseline policies that were that are being enforced by in tune go directly to setting some baseline standards for all the devices that we have access to so you know so the the Android devices the iOS devices the Chrome OS is the Windows devices there there's a policy and sub policies for each of those devices so we're we're beta testing the rollout of iOS now we've enrolled a bunch of people the endpoints on their device and it's only on their device because they downloaded the outlook app and connected to their mailbox and when they did that the endpoint got put on the device where we could actually audit the device to help us set our baselines for each device type or each operating system so that's that's the approach we're taking is we don't want to limit anybody from accessing the data they need in order to advocate for clients but we do need to have the ability to set some baselines and and to enforce some policies just from a risk reduction perspective or with regards to Northwest Justice Project we have developed a policy I will share that out a little bit more broadly we do have the ability to remotely wipe individuals who have installed the outlook app if they are just accessing their email though through a web browser on their phone we do not we strongly encourage people to both install the Skype app so that they can do calls from their cell phone that go through their regular phone number instead of their personal cell phone number and the outlook app so that we have that ability we don't sit down with everyone and double check that but that is definitely what we encourage out there and additionally with regards to laptops we do have a policy that if you are going to be doing anything that accesses client data through your laptop that we set up a VPN for you and we approve those on a case by case basis seeing that our case management system is accessible via the cloud we also have a separate policy for telework and for telework we require an antivirus as part of that a computer at a certain level and IT staff to have the ability to kind of review what that is I've seen some programs that will just provide the computer to use in that remote work situation as if it's a home situation I think that gives you a lot more control it does occasionally mean that someone has two computers at home one that is their personal computer and one is the computer that they are using for case related data but I think that long-term that is the better policy because it gives you a lot more control and you don't have to worry about external software or other things that individuals are doing with their own devices. Backups we've definitely seen a lot more organizations moving towards the cloud over the baselines do not specify whether you should do onsite or the cloud either way that you do backups it is essential that you test these on a regular basis we've definitely seen some problems with some of the case management systems in the past where they've gone down and the backup wasn't able to recover stuff backup was sitting there for five or six years and had never been actively tested I think you have to go through a process of making sure that the whatever system you have in place that it works get your IT staff together take a Friday or take a Saturday and pull everything down and try to pull it all back up and see what happened or see if you can pull up that backup to it. When I took over LS NTAP we were using a hosting company that literally had all of their backups in one closet and they lost everything that we had early on. We have switched entirely to very professional hosting company that has a backup service and we've tested it since then and we have lost no data in the last seven years but yeah any other advice with regards to backups. We talked to a pretty good amount about training. There's a bunch that is covered in the communication policy although there's also this is one of the areas that is really important especially when you include social media have a system in place for what is posted what isn't posted and who will review something if you have any questions because as you empower staff to be able to share things which is very, very useful just make sure that those processes are in place. This is one of the areas that I know the least about I've only dealt with the one telephone or the two telephone systems we've had here at Northwest Justice Project. We had an on-site telephone system that was literally dying when I got here and we replaced it with a Skype system that has had some minor hiccups but once we got through that has worked extremely well for us. The toolkit that is on here for call centers does cover a little bit about telephone systems but it is covered heavily in the baselines. William do you have any advice on telephone systems or? Sure. Well I was in a similar situation both in Alabama and in Oklahoma. The same situation that you found yourself in I found myself in here where the PBX has been hanging in the D mark for 10 or 12 or 15 years and literally pieces of them were failing. You'd lose the voicemail card on the PBX and you wouldn't have the ability to leave a voicemail anymore. At the time I got to Oklahoma that was pretty much the situation in every office. It was the same PBX, it was the same handset. They were about the same age. They weren't under contract, they weren't being maintained and so there wasn't really a good on-prem solution that we wanted to go with which again really pushed us to the cloud as a solution and then it became which cloud VoIP provider do you want to use and we spent a good six months testing about a half dozen VoIP providers and initially went with Dialpad which we still have some offices on Dialpad and it's a great product and a great service and it's competitively priced and it's been reliable but it doesn't have quite as tight a level of integration with Office 365 that Skype does. So we evaluated Dialpad versus Skype and decided that we really liked the tight integration of Skype for Business with Office 365. So we've begun to deploy Skype for Business instead of Dialpad but right now we're a little bifurcated but we will take the offices that we move to Dialpad and convert them to Skype offices in 2019. Excellent and with regards to telephone systems this is something that if you have any questions I would really encourage asking on the LSN TAP email list. There is a lot of programs have went through very intense RFP processes, redesigning and redoing and there's a lot of knowledge there. That is definitely if you are looking at two or three different systems you can find people who use pretty much any of those systems on the email list and they'll tell you what went well and what didn't, they'll also give you feedback over vendors because putting these systems together is very expensive and there are vendors with very good reputations and there are vendors that people have lost a lot of money and abandoned systems on. So definitely get a hold of that. Yeah and one of the big changes is that both Dialpad and Skype and I would imagine most of the other Voigt vendors will let you go month to month. You don't have to commit to a long-term contract like you used to have to do. So you have the capacity now that you didn't just a few years ago actually spin up an office or a few volunteers on Skype for business with both a headset and a physical phone if that's the route you want to go. We've spun up instances of 8x8 and Ring Central and Jive and Dialpad and a bunch of other vendors and actually I mean until you put an ear to the quality of the call and look at the feature set and develop what you're willing to spend or what you can spend from a budget perspective and what features you have to have and what features are just nice to have you can narrow down that vendor choice. In that same vein we decided to go with Amazon Connect as our call center software because neither Skype for business nor Dialpad really gave us the control we ultimately thought we wanted with our call routing as it related to online intake. So it's going to be difficult to find a one size fits all solution but with only a 30 day commitment on a per user basis you don't have to make that one size fits all decision anymore. You can mix and match different services based on your needs and your budget. We lost your audio sorry. Two questions, thank you so much. Is there a resource on how to implement Skype for an on-premises system that you would recommend? There's a laundry list of resources that we use for both VoIP and 365. I can in fact I just provided the list of a lot of the blogs and video resources that we use at Lasso about 365 in Azure and Skype specifically. There's a tremendous amount of documentation on on-premise Skype from Microsoft. Microsoft is the documentation is pretty good it may be outdated so you can use the documentation generally as a baseline and then go find some authoritative resources primarily in third party bloggers that will give you the correct recipe for a specific implementation case. So it's really a mix of a bunch of different type of resources. Microsoft is pretty good on the planning side and the big picture side and where their documentation seems to break down is I mean their documentation doesn't seem to keep up with the pace of their development so invariably you're trying to solve a specific problem that they haven't that they don't have good documentation on but invariably the blog postings of their development groups are very informative. They all have communities focused around specific products and services that you can become a member of and there's a lot of additional resources like Microsoft Academy, Developers Academy, what is it Channel 9 but I'll I'll I'll send SART the email of resources I sent to the Midwest IT Directors Group just recently on some of this stuff and we're discovering stuff every day as you Google a specific use case you'll find somebody else in the Netherlands that has this elegant solution for something you've been knocking your head against the wall for a month. But yeah there's there's a lot of resources and that's good and bad there's a lot of bad resources but but hopefully we've figured out the ones we trust the most. Excellent now we'll we'll put together a separate blog post for those resources and just make them publicly available. Yeah cool. So I'm jumping to our resource slide which will also be available in the blog post. It covers a lot of the different things that are out there and we will make this whole list available. Additionally I definitely want people to know that our YouTube channel has videos on pretty much every topic that is covered in the baselines and if there is not a video there please feel free to email me we will create a video or we'll put together a training and we'll find some experts out there in the field to help share whatever is going on there. It looks like we have covered all of the questions. Thank you so much William for co-hosting this with me. I like what you're doing in having kind of that director's call and sharing knowledge on a regular basis. We'll look at our schedule with webinars next year and see about putting together like some type of a national like quarterly thing probably on a different piece of software so that everybody could talk so that it's a little more interactive but I really like that because just having those discussions with other professionals is one of the best ways to share knowledge. Yeah absolutely it's a great asset. No this is the last webinar of the year there's going to be a survey going out within the next day or two because we just released our RFP for what webinars you want to see next year. As that survey comes out to everyone please fill that out mention the topics that you want we're going to be looking at different vendors also if there's anyone that you think we should reach out to with regards to doing a presentation there'll be an option there in that survey or if there's something that you would like to present on send your will-collect contact information through that survey and we would love to have other experts from the community present. Thank you all so much greatly appreciate it.