Opinion: Julie Bishop—‘It’s never about the tech. It’s about what you can do with it: it’s about people.’
How surging demand plus a ‘catastrophic’ drop in funding forced the director of Law Centres Network to deploy digital to stretch the network’s most valuable resource: lawyers.
The Law Centres Network is an infrastructure body supporting 40 law centres around the UK. We provide legal assistance to 125,000 people on average a year.
Law Centres arose out of the student and protest movements of the 1960s. The 60s were a time of hope: we thought that everything was possible. The founders understood that people who live in poverty are constantly bumping into sharp legal things, much more than those who live settled lives.
But today, we’re losing that hope: after nine years of austerity, the hostile environment, and the shame that is 1.5 million people living in destitution.
Cuts force rethink
Law Centres are needed more than ever, but like all charities we’ve experienced a huge surge in demand at the same time as a catastrophic drop in funding. That has forced us to re-examine how we are going to best use our resources and specifically we have begun to look at how to better manage demand.
We knew that whatever we were going to do, it must be simple and it must be affordable. We took part in one of those fast-paced interactive user-centred design processes that will be familiar to others working with CAST—an organisation that has certainly reinvigorated the sticky note business!
Nevertheless, the crucial phase for us was user research with staff, with volunteers and with clients. This has transformed our approach. I felt absolutely certain at the outset that we needed machine learning, but in fact the main thing we learned was that what needed to change was us: we had to think differently.
Listen and learn
We had to listen to people and we had to do it creatively, so we developed an SMS reminder tool that makes sure each lawyer’s appointment is used as well as possible and that we don’t waste our most expensive resource.
The surprising thing was that the most popular part of it was a blank template that the staff are using to update clients on their cases. This user behaviour transformed the reminder tool into a communication tool. We built it with Twilio, which is affordable, but also has excellent CSR.
Twilio gave us a small grant to get going and now a much bigger grant to keep going, but the process has made us think about how we are going to do digital going forward.
We realised that actually we need to think more about client communications. We have to think about what happens to the client at each stage of the journey, from first contact up until six to 12 months after the service.
We’re also examining how we can use digital to free up lawyer time and importantly how to extend our other really limited resource, which is administrators.
Service design is key
But we’ve also learned out of the process that this is essentially a service design piece that harnesses digital technology. Good design is the key to people adopting new technologies.
We now want money to fund the hardware and also want somebody to fund a cataloguing tool so we can find out who’s doing what. Then I will only use our money to do what we alone have the expertise to do.
Years ago I had lunch with a guy I worked with for a solid hour. He told me about the beauty of that 32-bit chip, and it was at that moment that I realised it’s never about the technology. It is always about what you can do with it. It’s about people — and in doing digital in this way I’ve realised it’s fun again.
This is an edited version of a talk given by Julie at the inaugural gathering of the Catalyst programme in London on 11 July 2019
