Does Your Reach Exceed Your Grasp? Part II

Pro Bono Law Meets Document Server

Legal Services Corporation ( LSC), a private nonprofit corporation established by an act of Congress, finances 143 legal aid programs around the United States to help poor Americans gain equal access to the judicial system. The group works to provide a place where victims of domestic violence, eviction, and fraud can turn during times of crisis.

In the early days, LSC cobbled together its own technology solutions: Lawyers who had learned how to use Word Perfect to automate the process of cre ating pleadings in private practice began to create document assembly tools for themselves. At that time, there wasn't a way to manage the documents in a standard shared way. Instead, "a designated geeky person figured out how to write a macro and then everyone in the office started using it," said Joyce Raby, Program Analyst for LSC.

This is how the organization first made the leap from an individual system to a shared one. The infrastructure began to take shape as lawyers figured out ways to adopt technologies they used in private practice for the nonprofit arena.

"Clearly the first thing people started saying was, 'Let's put [the documents] on the Web to make them available to everyone,'" said Raby. "So no matter what time of day, if someone is threatened by eviction, he or she can find the information right away."

Getting the system up and running took more than a desire to help those in need. Lexis Nexis donated a license for its HotDocs document automation software and two licenses for its HotDocs authoring tool per state. From there, the organization took a huge "early-adopter" leap in using those tools to create a document assembly system. LSC funded the creation of a national server to host all of the legal documents in one central place, and cities and communities interested in serving documents to residents created their own sites using the HotDocs authoring tool to connect people with regional information and the documents from LSC's central server.

Though it may have been more difficult to set up a centralized system, using the same software for document assembly on all of the legal Web sites has many advantages. "Sometimes it can mean you save $1,000 in Web hosting fees over the course of a year," said Raby. "And [this system] fosters partnerships and community."

Though providing civil legal services to low-income people is LSC's primary mission, its document assembly system supplies the resources to assist people in diagnosing the nature and severity of their legal problems. Using software on the site, visitors can put together a document to file to the court, get directions to a courthouse, or, if there's a domestic violence issue, the person can organize paperwork to file a restraining order.

"Through our site, users can determine if they have enough information to solve a problem, or find a lawyer that we can provide, or a referral,” explained Raby. "We can help people to understand that they're in a critical situation instead of saying, 'I got a letter from the court, now what do I do?' We're here to educate and empower people so they can understand the severity of what they're facing."

A Big State with Bigger Technological Solutions

Montana Legal Services Association ( MLSA) uses LSC's document server and is currently the only legal aid program in Montana to receive LSC funding. As one of the first programs to receive a grant to develop templates for the national document assembly server, MLSA is currently in the late stages of testing with the Helena and Eastern Montana Self-Help Law Project clients.

"It's amazing what bugs show up when real client data is used and when that data is entered by the clients," noted Katherine A. Bladow, MLSA's Technology Project Coordinator. When the new system is live, Bladow knows it will save time and headaches.

"A paralegal is testing the templates for us and actually completed an entire packet of divorce forms (without kids) in 18.5 minutes,” said Bladow. "This is a job that would have previously taken her several hours. She estimates that when she adds in the time that she spends with clients to review the forms, the entire process takes one-third to one-half less time than before."

Montana's legal system is using tech for other areas as well. While its document server is making things easier on the paperwork side, MLSA's video conferencing project will bring the courthouse to its residents. The fourth largest state in size, there are only six people per square mile in Montana, and 15 percent of the population lives at or below the poverty level.

Montana's video conferencing project started as a way to reduce the number of days before child abuse and neglect hearings could take place. By law, hearings need to happen within 72 hours and it wasn't happening that quickly, due to the size of the judicial districts and the distances that judges have to travel.

Alison Paul, MLSA's Deputy Director of Grants and Administration, saw an opportunity and jumped on it. Montana's Supreme Court Administrator's Office set up several video conferencing sites across the state, mainly in the courthouses, and using a grant from LSC, MLSA set up a site in its Missoula office and paid the connection fees to the Miles City Courthouse, according to Bladow.

"An attorney from the Missoula office began to represent clients in Miles City fairly frequently," said Bladow. "The court loved it because they were on a network that could connect with other courts and low-income persons were getting representation."

In 2003, LSC awarded MLSA a second grant to perform a more in-depth evaluation of the quality of legal representation provided over video conferencing and to expand the project to clients outside of Miles City. Currently, MLSA has at least nine attorneys who use the video conferencing system to rep resent clients across Montana in civil cases.

Judges who were at first apprehensive about using video conferencing for fear of witnesses being coached now accommodate the new system. They are, after all, looking for justice -- and sometimes that means saving someone who is already in distress the hardship of traveling hundreds of miles to appear in court.

TechSoup's Recipe for Technology Triumph

Months of planning, focus groups, all nighters, and dedication were all ingredients for TechSoup's recipe for success. The TechSoup Website, which has been in operation for five years, is a nonprofit that assists other nonprofits that need technology help. On the TechSoup site, you'll find articles, news, a community forum, free downloads, computer recycling resources, a place to buy discounted software, and other tools to help nonprofits with their technology needs.

Rewind five years: Managing Director Sandra Whistler had just come aboard and was on the front lines as TechSoup was being built. It was the dot-com boom in San Francisco andmost people with technology skills weren't looking to work on nonprofit salaries -- they wanted stock options and six-figure paychecks. Nonprofits weren't only hard-pressed to find good help, they didn't have much in the way of technology resources and weren't at the cutting edge of technological innovation.

With those constraints, TechSoup pushed forward, even more determined to build a site. During site construction , everyone at the organization was asked to remember the audience: nonprofits. That was something everyone kept in mind as they went about the grueling process of designing an interface, deciding on licensing, and working with an outside design firm, especially when conflicts arose.

"Back when TechSoup launched, most nonprofits had one person and a dial-up Internet connection," Whistler recalled. "Today, things are much diffe rent as you can build a Web site in a few minutes. We resisted impulses to make [TechSoup] technologically fancy. Bells and whistles may do a better job of representing the organization, but it might not serve the users."

After a grueling schedule of building that lasted nearly eight months, the staff flipped the switch and TechSoup was live. But that wasn't the end of their work; it was only the beginning: The site needed content.

"Some organizations build a site and it goes out of date because the nonprofit doesn't have the staff to update it," said Whistler. "Not everyone can afford a content department like TechSoup has. That's when you get creative and use the resources you have."

While TechSoup has content written by editors and members of the community, its parent organization, CompuMentor, wanted to provide a more open community that everyonecould share and contribute to. So this year it created an open community project Web site called ConsultantCommons . The ConsultantCommons site offers ways for nonprofit technology consultants to contribute, build, and sustain a repository of information and tools. On the site, you'll find an idea generator, a community critique and revision, a repository for consultants to learn from their peers, and the ability to contact one another.

Consultant Commons sprang forth from the need to have a place where collaboration can happen. The site is built on Drupal, a publishing system that is open source -- that is, free to use and distribute, as long as it is not for monetary gain. Through the system, users can administer their accounts, adjust the publishing workflow, add discussions to a site, and publish in XML (eXtensible markup language ), which allows the sharing of content.

"The challenge was largely internal," said Marnie Webb, Consulting Services Director at CompuMentor. "It takes a lot for an organization to decide to make public -– let alone to open source -- its intellectual property."

Webb, who oversaw the process and participated in the project from the beginning, said that designing an open site such as Consultant Commons meant making tough decisions every step of the way. The consulting team she manages at CompuMentor agonized over how much structure and organization to provide for the site. So the group skipped over long discussions about taxonomy, and, rather than try to rigidly define the site's hierarchical structure, it c reated just enough taxonomy to allow people to have a place to put content. The way the site works now, users can create new words and add to the taxonomy at any level.

"I've recently heard this as a philosophical argument: Does the world make sense or are you making sense of the world?"asked Webb. "If the world makes sense, then it is possible to create a hierarchical structure that will capture all of the knowledge we wish to share. We, though, are trying to make sense of the world. We will find new things, new things will be invented, and, as a part of that, old worlds, representing old technologies, will fall away to be replaced by others that represent newer technologies."

With an ever-changing structure in mind, Webb and her team are offering up the Consultant Commons site to the nonprofit masses in the hopes that it will be an open place to discuss and test ideas, share successes and failures, and make contacts in the field. And the site will evolve to serve its visitors.

"This will be a success if other people can use this as a platform," said Webb. "A platform for reaching out to their own local constituency; a platform to which they can contribute and upon which they can continue to build; a platform for individuals and organizations to develop and share their own knowledge."

When it comes to technology and nonprofits, there isn't one right way to do things. Above all, nonprofits are about helping people, and the people are the ones being served by the technology -– not the other way around.

"Trust that your value lies not in your intellectual property, but in your people," said Webb.

Reprinted from the California Association of Nonprofits' (CAN) bimonthly newsletter. CAN is a membership organization for nonprofit organizations and foundations in California. See the California Association of Nonprofits Web sitefor more information.