The Florida Legal Aid Resource Federation: Pilot Report

After two years of development, we’re pleased to share details of our successful Florida Legal Aid Resource Federation pilot!

Initiated in 2016 (see our original post here) and completed in 2018, with support from the Legal Services Corporation and the Florida Bar Foundation, the Florida Legal Aid Resource Federation (FLARF) was a complex project with a simple goal:

We aimed to ensure that accurate information about Florida’s legal aid providers can be reliably updated by those providers in one place – one official record! – and subsequently shared as standardized, canonical open data. (This pilot goal was directly in the service of our ultimate goal: to ensure that this information can be found and used in any given channel through which someone might look for it.)

The pilot phase of this project has concluded successfully! 

The FLARF pilot yielded a functioning ‘beta’ system through which resource data can be shared among every organization that receives grants from the project’s primary funders. (This includes about 90% of the legal aid resources in the state!) This information is now accessible to each legal aid provider in Florida within their own case management system – improving their ability to refer clients from one legal aid provider to another.

We’re now beginning work on additional implementations that will make this data accessible through more and more channels (such as through integration with resource referral call centers, medical-legal partnership programs, even just better search results in Google, etc).

Read our complete final report on this project here. Continue reading

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Open Referral for legal services in Illinois: the new IllinoisLegalAid.org

This is a guest post from Teri Ross, Program Director for Illinois Legal Aid Online.

 

Illinois Legal Aid Online develops technology and information to increase access to justice for people in Illinois who may otherwise be foreclosed from it, especially for those who cannot find or afford a lawyer.

Illinois Legal Aid Online, or ILAO, just completed a major overhaul of our online platform — consolidating four separate websites — including IllinoisLegalAdvocate.org, IllinoisProBono.org, and IllinoisLegalAidOnline.org — into one mobile-friendly site: IllinoisLegalAid.org.

I’m pleased to share our launch on the Open Referral blog, as the data model produced by this community has enabled us to increase the complexity of our information while simplifying the experience for our users. Continue reading

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LegalServer’s First Take at an Open Referral Implementation

Jeff Hogue is the Director of Operations and Community Relations for LegalServer.

legalserverlogoLegalServer is a configurable web-based platform that dynamically responds to the complex, rapidly changing challenges faced by legal service providers who strive to provide effective advocacy to the most vulnerable among us.

In this field of legal services, some of our major challenges involve triage and referral. Every day, many people approach our providers with problems that fall outside of the scope of their work — so our providers are constantly seeking ways to redirect these inquiries with effective referrals to other services. …

For online intake and triage, we can avoid duplicating the effort of compiling resource directory data in multiple silos. Write it once, and let it be read anywhere and everywhere. This is how the World Wide Web itself came to be. Continue reading

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