Unifying Legal Aid in the Bay Area
Anyone who has called the customer service department of a large corporation knows the frustration of waiting on hold, being shunted between multiple departments, and repeating the same story to different representatives.
Now imagine going through this experience, not for a misplaced order of garden supplies, but because of a time-sensitive eviction lawsuit that your landlord has filed against you. Or because you need to file a restraining order against your abusive spouse as soon as possible.
For people caught in such crises, the delay and hassle of finding the right legal provider can materially affect their outcomes. Moreover, this delay and hassle can deter them from receiving any legal assistance, either braving the courts as pro se litigants or simply conceding all of their rights. For many people, securing timely legal assistance is indispensable to the full exercise of their rights and is thus a critical component in the “access to justice” movement.
Why is it so hard to get legal help in the Bay Area?
This problem of finding timely legal assistance is especially concerning when it comes to legal aid for indigent populations in the Bay Area. There are more than 100 legal nonprofits that provide direct services to low-income individuals in the Bay Area. Many of them overlap in their practice areas, such as family law, landlord/tenant law, and immigration. Each nonprofit has its own unique set of eligibility criteria, level of attorney resources, and application for receiving services. It does not take much imagination to appreciate the amount of work it would take a prospective client to learn about all these nonprofits and their respective details, let alone to navigate them quickly while undergoing a crisis.
In 2016, eight major legal aid nonprofits* in the Bay Area gathered to discuss how they might coordinate their services in a universal intake system. This solution was envisioned to break down their institutional silos, reduce the duplicative efforts of prospective clients, and quickly connect prospective clients to the best assistance available, regardless of their entry point. Like the Common Application used by Ivy League universities, this universal intake system would eliminate the need for prospective clients to approach multiple organizations and fill out a different application at each one.
When I was invited to join this undertaking as part of my Legal Design fellowship at Stanford, I jumped at the opportunity. As a recent Stanford Law graduate, I had volunteered enough at various legal aid nonprofits in the Bay Area to understand the problem that this group of nonprofits was trying to solve.
In September, I met with the leaders of this vision and discussed their hopes for it in more detail. I listed out the data points that I would need to gather from the eight partner nonprofits, such as which technologies they use, their main practice areas, and how they currently provide referrals. I then interviewed the staff at each nonprofit to gain a deeper sense of where exactly in the intake process they and their clients experience inefficiency and frustration. My goal was to discover where the institutional silos exist and to what extent they prevent applicants from obtaining legal aid in a timely manner.
My interviews revealed that institutional silos exist in two ways: (1) a lack of updated information on the specific eligibility and resource details at other nonprofits and (2) a lack of an agreed-upon system for efficiently giving and accepting referrals between them. Legal aid attorneys at these nonprofits expressed a strong desire to break down these institutional silos and and a willingness to make changes to their operations. The recurring themes of their discontent with the status quo and their openness to change confirmed that the time was right to work on a universal intake system for the Bay Area. Below is a summary of my findings, followed by a longer explanation of each point.
Summary of Findings
At this mid-point of my project, I’ve drafted some of the insights that have emerged about the legal help ecosystem, and where opportunities lie.
- Legal aid attorneys strive to help the whole person but their organizations are siloed. In the face of overwhelming demand, attorneys in these legal aid nonprofits remain deeply client-centered and holistically concerned for people they turn away due to ineligibility or resource constraints. They want to do more for their clients than they currently can within their respective institutions.
- Legal aid attorneys are open to changing their business as usual in order to collaborate. Thus, rather than being narrowly committed to their institutional status quos, these legal aid attorneys recognize the importance of collaboration with other legal aid organizations and are open to modifying their business processes and technologies.
- A universal intake system can generate valuable data about the supply and demand of legal aid. While these legal aid attorneys have a general sense of this “silo problem,” they have no quantitative data to confirm the nature and extent of it. A universal intake system could be a source of relevant data on the extent and nature of the need for legal aid in the Bay Area and how well the existing resources meet that need.
- Begin with an attorney-facing system. The first iteration of the new system will be designed with the attorneys and paralegals as the primary users, with the goal of incorporating legal aid applicants in future iterations.
It’s worth diving into each of these four core insights with more detail.
1. Legal aid attorneys strive to help the whole person
Intake staff at siloed institutions that face overwhelming client demand could easily become indifferent to clients they turn away due to ineligibility or resource constraints. These staff might feel relieved of their responsibility once a client walks out the door, and they might feel content that they have carried out their defined job tasks. This was not the case with the legal aid attorneys I interviewed. Across all my interviews, I was impressed by how strongly the legal aid attorneys wanted to ensure that each client would obtain the best legal service available to that client, whether or not their own organization provided that service.
For example, a chief complaint among the attorneys was that they would like to provide clients with reliable referrals to other legal nonprofits, but that they lack the necessary information and infrastructure to do so. They do not have the bandwidth to keep track of all legal services in the Bay Area or to adopt technologies that would enable secure referrals amongst them. As a consequence, all the attorneys can do is provide clients with a phone number to their “best guess” referral (known as a “cold hand-off”).
In my interviews, legal aid attorneys repeatedly expressed their frustration with their inability to provide a client with no more than an unverified, cold hand-off, especially when a client is in crisis. The attorneys want to know that they have sent someone to a legal aid provider that will help the client quickly and effectively. As it is, clients currently experience institutional run-around, and the subsequent delay in time harms their outcomes.
Legal aid attorneys also expressed that they want the work they have done in conducting intake and collecting client data to not be wasted. They are painfully aware that their duplication of effort only adds to the delay that clients experience in resolving their legal problems. Lastly, the attorneys are sensitive to the fact that clients are often relating traumatic experiences in these intake sessions, and they want to minimize the emotional burden on clients who visit multiple organizations. These are some of the common frustrations that legal aid attorneys experience as they strive to help their clients in a holistic manner.
2. Legal aid attorneys are open to changing their business as usual
As a consequence of their holistic, client-centered perspective, these legal aid attorneys recognize the resource limitations at their own organizations as well as the promise of connecting to resources at other organizations. I found that, rather than resigning themselves to the status quo, these attorneys are eager to combine their efforts and modify their processes in ways that will improve the overall legal aid experience for their clients.
Indeed, since 2016, these eight nonprofits have invested their free time and resources to pursuing this vision, knowing full well that the end result is likely to disrupt their usual operations. Granted the necessary funding and technical expertise, these organizations have great potential to collaborate in powerful new ways for their clients.
3. A universal intake system can generate valuable data about the supply and demand of legal aid
The legal aid organizations I interviewed did not possess the quantitative data to demonstrate how and to what extent their institutional silos might be causing negative experiences and outcomes for their clients. The legal aid attorneys had a vague sense that their institutional silos exacerbated the existing resource gap in the Bay Area, but they had no metrics on how many clients were affected and in what way. Because they did not systematically share cases, they could not easily ascertain the magnitude of client demand for legal aid and their collective ability to meet it.
A universal intake system would fill this information gap by generating data on the extent of demand for legal aid in the Bay Area and the ability of the existing organizations to meet it. For example, such a system might collect data on (1) how many people in a given year sought legal aid and were eligible, (2) how many of those eligible received legal aid in a timely manner, and (3) how many of those eligible were rejected because no organization had the resources to help them in a timely manner. Such data might currently exist for each organization, but it does not exist in an overarching way across the major legal aid organizations within the Bay Area. Such data would be highly valuable to government agencies, funders, and researchers.
4. Begin with an attorney-facing system
Lastly, I asked the attorneys who they envisioned as the primary user of this universal intake system. Would it be a desktop software program accessed only by legal experts, an artificial intelligence chatbot that clients could access on their phones, or both? In other words, how public-facing would this solution be?
The legal aid attorneys generally agreed that a system designed for prospective clients and non-legal providers would be ideal, to maximize its reach. However, they foresaw a host of challenges in a client-facing system, particularly for low-income populations that may not readily identify the actionable legal issues in their lives. For a fully automated intake system to be accurate, efficient, and thorough, it would have to incorporate a sophisticated level of logic jumps and artificial intelligence to substitute for the expertise of a human legal expert.
Another consideration we discussed is that a foundational feature of this system is to enable the organizations to seamlessly refer cases to each other. It would make sense, then, to first develop this core B2B feature and then incorporate ways for prospective clients and non-legal providers to interact directly with it. Thus, we decided to roll out the project in the following three stages: (1) attorneys and paralegals directly use the universal intake system on behalf of their clients, (2) non-legal providers such as social workers also have direct access to the system, and (3) the system is opened up to the general public.
Next: Getting into the Weeds
My interviews revealed that these legal aid attorneys were more than ready to embark on an ambitious redesign of their operations. Together, we had brainstormed the potential for a universal intake system to break down their institutional silos and facilitate the best “user experience” for their clients. We had discussed the potential for such a system to generate valuable data that would serve as a feedback loop on the state of legal aid in the Bay Area. Lastly, we had reached agreement on who the primary users would be, in which phases.
With this preliminary research completed, we were one step closer to realizing the dream of a universal intake system for legal aid in the Bay Area. The next step was to take a deep dive into each nonprofit’s eligibility criteria, discrete legal services, case management systems, confidentiality requirements, and existing referral habits. Based on this information, I would map out their current workflows. Then, altogether, we would map out the logic tree of what a universal system might look like, resolving questions such as which nonprofit would receive which cases and how a nonprofit would communicate its acceptance or rejection of a referral. The resulting level of complexity, the desired functions, and each nonprofit’s technical requirements would determine what kind of business process changes and technologies to adopt.
Thus far, this project has been an amazing legal design opportunity for me to work with a team of highly dedicated and intelligent legal aid attorneys in their effort to seamlessly provide critical legal services to their low-income clients. Click here for my April 2, 2018, update on this project!
(*Project Legal Link, Bay Area Legal Aid, Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, Centro Legal de la Raza, Swords to Plowshares, Justice and Diversity Center of the San Francisco Bar Association, OneJustice, and Legal Aid Association of California.)
