LSC's 2019 Innovations in Technology Conference

People seeking help often need assistance that legal aid providers can't provide. Information about the accessibility of other legal aid providers is often hard to find and even harder to trust. Legal aid resource directories are typically maintained in duplicative, incompatible silos, and it's often a struggle to keep them up-to-date. This status quo not only fails legal service providers and their clients, but it also hinders analysis of community needs and program effectiveness. It doesn’t have to be this way. Open Referral is helping organizations take a new approach to this old problem. By using a common data standard and interoperable tools, we can develop a resource directory infrastructure — enabling information about legal aid resources to be updated and verified once, then made simultaneously available to all the different tools and contexts in which people might want to use it. This session will look at several implementations of Open Referral in legal aid — including the Florida Legal Aid Resource Federation, Minnesota’s Legal Organization Online Network, and the Northwest Justice Project.