Bay Area Legal Services' use of document assembly and case management software will produce user-friendly client and court documents. Processing more than 58,000 applications every year, the organization will also economize its resources across its five-county service area and two statewide legal helplines.

Ohio State Legal Services will support LawHelp Interactive (LHI), a national document assembly platform used in more than 40 states. LHI enables self-represented litigants, legal aid and pro bono lawyers, and self-help programs to create high-quality online forms for free. Through its partnership with Pro Bono Net, improvements to LHI include enhanced remote workflows, such as e-signature and e-submission. These developments are particularly important now, as states grapple with the realities of post-COVID legal service delivery.

Indiana Legal Services will enhance Indiana Legal Help, a website that helps people navigate legal issues on their own. The project team will create automated documents and guided interviews to help residents in expungement, driving privileges, gender marker, and name change cases.

Northwest Justice Project will redesign WashingtonLawHelp.org (WLH) to be mobile-first and more accessible to people with all levels of ability, literacy, and English language proficiency. WLH is a key training space for new attorneys and pro bono lawyers. The project will incorporate community and stakeholder feedback to develop a self-help library, advocate resource library, provider directory, and a guided navigation and triage system.

Pine Tree Legal Assistance will receive a TIG award to continue support of Stateside Legal, a website focused exclusively on veterans’ federal legal rights and resources. TIG funding will allow Stateside Legal to maintain a large collection of legal resources relevant to veterans and other individuals with a military connection. The project will also explore innovations to enhance the delivery of information and conduct substantial outreach to other legal and veterans groups.

This TIG will allow Michigan Advocacy Program (MAP) to update and migrate the Michigan Legal Help Program to Drupal 9 while improving usability and updating design, migrating a user guide to legal help, ensuring full functionality and compliance, modifying the existing library of 50+ DIY tools to be easily e-filed, rebuilding online intake or working to integrate the existing online intake module, and translating the guide to legal help into Spanish.

Legal Services Alabama received TIG funding to create a comprehensive document assembly program to automate family law forms. The project will first focus on uncontested divorces before expanding to custody, child support, modification of custody and child support, and contested divorces. Eventually, the program may also automate forms for consumer and housing cases, such as debt collection (small claims, district, and circuit court) and evictions.

Legal Aid of West Virginia received TIG funding to respond to the needs of families impacted by the opioid drug epidemic through development of the innovative Kinship Information Navigator (KIN) Project. This effort includes development of a legal portal for family members trying to determine how to obtain legal custody of a child who has informally come into their care.

TIG funding of $259,500 will add three new features to the popular A2J Author document assembly program in order to increase resources available for self-represented litigants. Enhancements include the ability for users to complete a previously saved interview without repeating questions they have already seen.

TIG funding to Kansas Legal Services will support the upgrade of the content management system Drupal for Legal Aid Websites (DLAW) from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9. DLAW is a Drupal distribution for building public legal information websites used by many legal services organizations. Prior development of DLAW has also been supported by TIG funding.

Montana Legal Services Association will TIG funding to develop, test, and implement a series of self-help consumer law tools on MontanaLawHelp.org to provide targeted information to users with debt-related legal problems. These include a garnishment calculator; a tool to help identify possible claims, defenses, and exempt income, and disseminate resources on common consumer questions; and an automated interactive answer form to make it easier for self-represented litigants to respond to lawsuits.

Michigan Advocacy Program (MAP) received TIG support to create an SMS text messaging system to learn more about clients’ outcomes in advice and brief service cases. The system will facilitate simple, automated text conversations between clients and legal services providers in Michigan. This project will replicate and build upon the work done by both the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland and MAP on previous TIGs.

Lakeshore Legal Aid received a $100,400 Technology Initiative Grant (TIG) to produce user-friendly animated instructional videos to help self-represented and retained clients. These videos will be published online and will be usable by other Michigan legal aid organizations.

California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc., will conduct an assessment with a consulting team to identify potential improvements in applicant-intake workflows and related technologies, enabling people to easily access their services.

Funding will support an effort to expand the online intake system currently used by five Florida legal aid organizations, including Bay Area Legal Services, to include the Florida Senior Legal Helpline and the Florida Veterans Legal Helpline. The grant will also help Legal Services of Greater Miami add analytics to gather data about time spent on applications and eligibility determinations. 

Legal Aid Chicago received TIG funding to integrate its version of the case management system LegalServer with Paladin’s pro bono referral system to better match pro bono attorneys with cases. The Pro Bono Placement Integration Project will use API-based integration to auto-populate information into databases used by law firms, corporations and individual attorneys. 

Memphis Area Legal Services received a TIG to assess their overall technology environment and identify a series of improvements to help them operate more effectively and reach more clients.

TIG funding supports the development of Utah Legal Services' debt collection chatbot. The chatbot will allow the organization to increase the quality and efficiency of providing personalized legal information to low-income Utahns.

Virginia Legal Aid Society will conduct a business assessment to analyze the effectiveness and efficiency of the Office365 application in delivering legal services. With the help of a consultant experienced in training and customizing Microsoft Office products, the organization will develop customized special programs, including ribbons, toolbars, and document assembly templates in Microsoft Word to improve legal services delivery standards and increase program efficiency.

Funding supports the development of an online triage system to provide applicants with targeted legal results at any time of day. It will use Guided Navigation and the Knowledge Resource Library in LegalServer to make resources available via the web and by text in multiple languages.

Atlanta Legal Aid Society received TIG funding to support a project to increase website accessibility. The organization will create short videos to guide users to more robust content on GeorgiaLegalAid.org, make the homepage mobile-friendly, and ensure that A2J Author DAT documents (regularly used in the legal aid community) are accessible to the visually impaired.

Philadelphia Legal Assistance Center will use this TIG to expand the Upsolve self-help bankruptcy platform to empower users to send letters to debt collectors, file complaints with the Consumer Bankruptcy Protection Bureau and assess eligibility for student loan discharge. Upsolve will also build a new Learn Center to educate visitors about consumer law issues.

Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut received a TIG to add new features to its case management and online intake systems and Connecticut’s statewide website, CTLawHelp.org. The program will use text messaging to share information and for the online intake process, and the project team will use machine learning to bolster different components of the project.

Legal Assistance of Western New York received a Technology Initiative Grant to implement new, more intuitive, mobile-first web designs on the LawHelp New York statewide website. This will include functionality to allow subject matter experts to update content, advanced search features that help people understand the nature of their legal problem, integration-driven referral tools that facilitate collaboration and support the accuracy of referral information across platforms and flexibility to support scaling and modifications as community needs and service delivery methods evolve. 

Legal Services of Northern Virginia received a TIG grant to create a messaging platform that will allow program staff attorneys to communicate with limited English proficiency clients in multiple languages.

Neighborhood Legal Services Program of the District of Columbia received TIG funding to work with Clio to adapt a system used by private law firms to meet the needs of legal aid organizations. Additions will include new features such as eligibility screening, grants management, and the custom reports required by LSC and other funders.