Scaling and Improving Legal Tech Projects

Episode Notes

Transcript

David Gray:

So we are looking to come up with a blueprint, a way to shorten that runway for everyone so that they can do it faster, learn from our mistakes, and sort of set them up for success right away.

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Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice an An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the General Public Talk. Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Cat Moon:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice, the podcast where we explore innovative ways to expand access to legal services. I’m your host for this episode, Cat Moon, and today we’re going to explore the evolution of legal tech solutions that empower communities. I’m joined by Taylor Sartor and David Gray, both of Bay Area Legal Services and the creators of Foster Power and Luigi Bai of Lone Star Legal Aid, the Mind behind Lacey Legal Aid Content Intelligence. Both of these groundbreaking projects started with technology initiative grants and have now received sustainability enhancement and adoption grants to expand, enhance and sustain their impact. Foster Power helps youth in foster care understand their rights and access crucial legal protections. Lacey keeps legal information websites up to date ensuring accuracy for those who rely on them. In this episode, we’re going to dig into what it takes to improve an existing tech platform, what works, what needs to evolve, and how to scale it successfully. We’re going to start first with Foster Power. Taylor, could you give us the 92nd overview of the awesome foster power?

Taylor Sartor:

Definitely. Thanks so much. Kat. Foster Power is a movement to improve the lives and futures for youth in foster care by creating access to information on their benefits, protections, and legal rights. Foster power started off as a project while I was still a law student working with teenagers and foster care who were trying to understand what sort of benefits and rights they had. Did they have a right to an allowance in a group home? Did they have a right to see siblings they hadn’t seen in years? How could they get into extended foster care? I quickly realized that Florida had no comprehensive resource to provide this information to youth or the adults trying to help them. So it was really then in there that I said, I’m just going to create something. I worked with a team of about 15 law students and spent over 300 hours of legal pro bono research creating what was then a Know Your Rights Guide, informational Guide for teenagers and Foster Care.

This guide proved to be really successful. Youth liked it, adults liked it, but as you can imagine, kids lose things, especially in foster care. So they would lose these guides pretty quickly if they were having a lot of placement and stability, and they would also become obsolete. When we wanted to update the law or add new sections, we got feedback time and time again if kids could have this on their phones and be able to access this on a computer or a tablet, be life changing. So fast forward to me becoming an attorney, using it in my practice, the Know Your Rights information. David actually found the Technology Initiative grant through LSC and we applied, we were selected, and that is how foster power really became a reality. We worked with youth, we worked with a number of vendors to create the information on the website and the app to design it, and that’s how Foster Power became the first app and website in the country to explain the benefits and protections of legal rights that children have in foster care.

Cat Moon:

I’ve seen the app, I actually got to see it when you all shared it, LSCs Innovations and Technology Conference I think a couple of years ago. Not only is the app really impressive, the story, the origin story is incredible. Thank you for sharing that with us. I really look forward to digging into how you are evolving foster power with his additional funding from LSC. But before we go there, Luigi, the virtual mic is being passed to you. Can you talk with us about the original work that was part of the Legal Aid Content Intelligence program and are you referring to that as Lacey by any chance?

Luigi Bai:

Yes, we are. Thanks, Kat. Yeah, we call it Project Lacey, and it actually grew out of our experience as a small team building self-help tools and information resources for people who are representing themselves in court, and we built out a number of these tools and resources and then over time what a typical review cycle would be is every 12 to 24 months you’d go through and do what Taylor was talking about. You’d look for updates in the law, you’d want to update your materials. What we were finding is that 80 to 90% of the materials on each review didn’t need to be changed, right? Not a lot had changed over that period of time, and in fact, the ones that had changed, they could have been out of date for a while since the last review. So this was not really serving us or our public really well.

So what we decided to do is look around. We noticed that the federal statutes and legal information, as well as Texas statutes and legal information were all available online. So that gave us an idea. What if we had a piece of software that knew about all of our documents and legal resources and also knew for each document what of those authorities were important to the document. We pitched the idea to LSC for the TIG program and got funding to build Project Lacey. Now it knows about approximately 800 of our documents and which authorities apply to each of the documents and it checks those relevant authorities on a weekly basis. When one of those changes, it alerts us to just which documents need to be reviewed. So every week we keep up to date on a small number of documents instead of trying to review them on a periodic basis. And that saves us time and it makes sure that our visitors have really up-to-date information.

Cat Moon:

So that is equally impressive as you talk about really how important both projects are really focused on how important it is to provide accurate information that people need to deal with the situations they’re in and they need it to be accessible, accurate, usable, findable, and both of your tools are working towards that, although in different ways. So I love that through line and both projects are evolving. So you received initial funding a few years ago, you’ve built some amazing things and LLC thought, this is so cool, we’re going to fund you some more. So you’ve gotten more funding. So I’d like to start off by talking about what have you found is working really well because I know our listeners are going to be really interested in what they can learn and takeaways from the projects that you’re working on. So Taylor, David, either one of you want to chime in on what you feel is working really well with Foster Power and what you’ve learned over the past few years as you launch into this next phase.

Taylor Sartor:

So I can start off and then David, if I leave anything out or there’s more you want to add. Foster power has been a really great success in Florida, I think even greater than we could have imagined. We know that foster power is being utilized because we can see our number of downloads, our number of website views and how much time people are spending on each device. We have over 4,500 downloads of the app and we have over 22,000 website views. We tend to get hundreds of views per week and a couple of downloads every day to the app. And depending on if we do a training or outreach, we usually get much more. So we know that people are utilizing foster power. We have seen some systemic change locally such as bringing attention to different areas of the law that maybe aren’t happening. One of the examples is I do the foster power trainings and when the app first came out, people responded to one of the sections that I trained on about youth having their credit reports pulled every year starting at age 14, and they’re actually supposed to get a copy of their credit report from all three agencies and have it explained to them.

And everyone from judges to case managers to youth themselves said this isn’t happening. And after a couple of training sessions, there was someone who had attended one and spoke up at one of the trainings that they were from the lead foster care agency and had been assigned to pull the credit reports. So that had started something that wasn’t previously happening for not exactly sure how long but was now happening because attention was brought forth because of foster power. We have had a lot of good feedback just from different stakeholders and youth themselves. Judges really love the app. One said that they have it open while they’re on the bench and there were certain acronyms that even he sort of wondered what does this stand for? And never really knew from being a judge for decades and spoke about this on a panel that he going through the All about court section was able to see what some of the complicated acronyms of child welfare actually mean youth are using.

We have some document automation. We have a feature where youth can request funds be used for something to their benefit from their master trust accounts. So if a youth that is in licensed care, so they’re in the foster care system has any kind of benefit, whether that’s SSI survivor benefits or two commonly used benefits that kids may have in the system. The lead foster care agency becomes a representative payee and they will deduct for cost of care of foster care every month and take money out. Kids however, have the right to request a fee waiver, which means that their money can be used for something that they want. They can ask that cost of care to be waived, but there was no direct way for kids to actually ask for that themselves before we created this form. So we created a form that it helps them fill it out and understand how to request what money and what they’re using it for, what they’d like to use that money for, and that can be sent to their case manager directly and to start that process off of requesting that money. And we have seen that that form has been used over 50 times, so we know that people are filling it out, people are able to ask for money that is theirs and that they may want to use for something else. So those are just a couple of examples of ways that we’ve seen foster power being utilized and with the continuation funding, we’re continuing to find new ways to get data feedback surveys on usage and continue to improve foster power.

Cat Moon:

That all is incredibly impressive. It sounds like some things are going very well and I’m particularly intrigued by the fact that not only are you educating and empowering youth and other people in the system, but the judges also are relying on this information. And I think that’s a testament to both the quality of what you’re providing, but also the usability and ease of access, right? We would all like information to be more usable and accessible regardless of where we sit in the system. So thank you for sharing that. And I would like to pass the virtual mic again to Luigi. If you can share with us as a baseline what’s going really well with the project Lacey so far?

Luigi Bai:

Yeah, thanks Kat. So for our small team, now that we’re not scheduling these big periodic reviews, we’ve got some more time to build some more tools and information materials for the public. So we’re currently building one that’s going to help people with Texas’s consumer protection laws, and we’ve got one in the pipeline that we’re busy researching. In the meantime, we’re noticing that there are changes that we need to respond to and we’re keeping our existing materials up to date. So we’ve seen some updates to some federal regulations in housing that have caused us to update some of our housing materials. And of course recently we’ve noticed a lot of changes to federal websites that our tools point to for additional information. And so we’ve had to adapt our tools so that they find either different links for what we’re looking for or different sources and what we’re using the SEA funding for in this second round.

What we noticed was that the first round funding was really helpful for us to prove out the idea of Lacey as a proof of concept. It’s sort of like seed funding. And I think what’s really important about the new SEA funding that LSC is making available in this space is that it gives us the opportunity in a second round to look at how can we respond to some of the issues that we found in the first round of funding. And it also helps us to make it more replicable, which is one of the goals of the TIG project in the first place. LSE wants to use this money to fund technology improvements that other organizations can use, but sometimes when you build something for the first time, it’s really specific to your organization. And what I like about the second round of funding is now we get to work with two other organizations to see how they’re going to be using it, what do we need to change in Lacey so that other people past that can use it. I think that’s a great opportunity and I think it’s a smart additional thing that LSC added to the TIG program.

Cat Moon:

Yeah, it sounds like an incredible investment on LSCs part to support these projects that have shown validity, proof of concept and success. And you actually answered another question that I had, so I’m going to take the virtual mic. No, that’s perfect. I’m going to pass the virtual mic back over to the foster power folks. And this question is, so some things are going well, but you’ve got to figure out how you want to evolve. How do you identify what you’re going to add, change, evolve to make the program even better, to expand its applicability so that other jurisdictions can take what you’ve built and build something themselves? What does that process look like for you all?

Taylor Sartor:

So I can answer as to Florida and I think David can probably answer more of our national reach. So for Florida, we had a lot of success. Like I mentioned with our launch with getting a lot of downloads, we can tell when downloads are coming from a specific source if they are under the age of 24 and living in Florida. So the likelihood that they were in foster care is high. We know we’re definitely getting people, young people in Florida downloading the app. We have trained, for me personally in the first TIG round, it was really just me going out and doing all of the trainings and conferences myself. So I trained over 400 people from different agencies. But what we really wanted to do was to really expand the reach so that every youth in Florida knows about foster power. Florida in particular is very, very challenging state to get the word out regarding anything child welfare related because our child welfare system is completely privatized, which means that the Department of Children and Families contracts out to dozens of community-based care agencies across Florida who then contract out to case management organizations anywhere from three to five case management organizations per CBC, community-based care agency.

And then those can change. So there’s a lot of different players and getting the word out is a challenge. So one of the visions that I had for our expansion was to hire a training and outreach specialist and for this training and outreach specialist to have lived experience in the foster care system, we at Foster Power believe that it’s vital to bring on someone who not only can spread this information to youth and to adults, but to also be able to have that lived experience, bringing that to the table to add to the trainings what information they would’ve wanted to focus on when they were in foster care themselves and building trust with the youth to receive this information and see that this is a resource they can rely on. So what we’re doing is kind of dividing the work where this training and outreach specialist is going to do all of the non-attorney training, so really focusing on case managers, child welfare professionals and youth.

And then I am focusing more on the judiciary and attorneys. We did a really good job of getting foster power out to several circuits, but we want to try to get out to all of the judges as many circuits as we can that they know about this resource. So really kind of expanding on the ground effort. We’re also going to be creating a foster power advisory board that’s a mix of people with lived experience in the foster care system and also what we like to call just our foster power champions, people who have reached out to us and have been really, really passionate about helping get the word out about foster power. So those are kind of the main things regarding how we’re wanting to expand in Florida. We are also adding a section on human trafficking with our Equal Justice Works fellow, who’s our human trafficking project manager. We’re doing updates to content as well continuously. And I would like to pass that to David so he can kind of explain what we hope to do nationally as well, which is another part of our continuation plan.

David Gray:

I’ll build off what Taylor said. And up to this point, foster Power has really been a pilot program, a proven pilot program, and we’ve seen a lot of success. So from that, we’ve had a lot of organizations in other states reach out to us. We’ve had strong discussions with organizations in Texas and Washington State. We’ve had some conversations with organizations in other states as well, and it varies too. We’ve had LSC grantees, we’ve had other just nonprofit youth advocacy organizations to non LSC legal aids and just pretty much every state has had a different organization. So there’s definitely the need in other states. So we recognize that and that’s where with this new tig, we are looking to see what does expansion look like. So we’re working with hopefully some consultants soon to figure out what is a sort of business model and replication strategy look like because every state’s different.

There’s a lot of different things for each state, so you can’t just do the same thing every single time. So we’re looking to come up with a blueprint, a way to shorten that runway for everyone so that they can do it faster, learn from our mistakes and sort of set them up for success right away. We’re also putting together an advisory board as well, sort of a business or growth advisory board, similar to what we’re doing with the state, just again, to have those people who have kind of done something similar or they have a better idea of how each state’s child welfare systems work. So this will be a mix of people in the child welfare system to legal tech leaders to other access to justice advocates around the country is what we’re looking to put together. But from a technological standpoint too, we’ve kind of done all the hard work.

So again, what we’ve built so far is kind of a pilot. The next two years we’re looking to build out a new platform so that we can go into each state and it’s a lot easier that no one’s having to build from scratch and everyone can just kind of build off one brand. So Foster Power at least is seen nationally as one brand instead of every single state having their own sort of version of foster power. So a mix of economies of scale, but also collaboration efforts as we do all start working in this space across the country.

Cat Moon:

And you both have touched on another area I would love us to focus on. So I’d like to expand on this and maybe we will pass the mike back to Luigi for this. So with the SEA grants, so that’s sustainability enhancement and adoption grants. So LSC in part wants to use this so that these programs and these technologies can be developed so that more grantees can benefit and take advantage of the work that you are going or you’re doing. So what’s the replicability? And that leads us to how you scale this, right? Because I think everyone’s acknowledges that what you build in Florida is going to look different for what you might build in Georgia or Mississippi or California and Luigi, likewise, there are going to be some jurisdictional and scalability issues and challenges for your work as well. So I think let’s focus on that for a second and think about how you’re approaching scalability so that others can benefit so that you are shortening that runway. I think David, as you pointed out for others, so the scalability piece, how you see that happening and where you think there might be some growing pains as you go in that direction of scalability. Luigi, we’ll start with you.

Luigi Bai:

Thanks. Yeah, so we want to build a community around Lacey, right? Lone Star Legal Aid is a law firm. We’re not a software company, so we’ve released the code for Lacey under a free software license and it’s available in a public repository. Anyone can pick it up and use it if they want to or they can add to it and extend it. And we want to take away lessons from other successful software projects like the Doc Assemble project. We’d also like to build a shared governance model. We’d like to see other stakeholders pick up Lacey and then start involving them in decisions about how to move it forward. On this grant, we’re going to be working with Idaho Legal Services and with the Texas Legal Services Center to adopt Lacey. So those will be two new stakeholders. Each new state is going to need an additional bit of work so that Lacey understands how to access the information from that state.

And so as we go forward, we’ll learn what does it take to support a new state? What does it take for someone to pick up Lacey from scratch and put it into their operations? How does it affect their operations? We want to just make sure that the jurisdictions that have legal information online can pick it up first and most easily. And so we know that some of those are pretty straightforward. Those include Florida and Alabama, Ohio, Kansas, and others. And then other ones are going to be a little more challenging to pick up because although they have their legal information available online to the public, it’s often in a form that makes it difficult to use automation to get access to, and that’s a reasonable approach. They don’t want to have a large amount of load on their systems as people are all trying to get information about their codes. So we want to work with grantees and other adopters in those states to figure out how to get access to these in ways that are compatible with the organizations that are making them available.

Cat Moon:

So really thinking about how a community of practice can help you scale this by bringing folks across jurisdictions together. Well, I’m a huge fan of communities of practice in general, so I think that’s fantastic that you all are using that approach. And now to shift back over to foster power, as you think about, so you have your state specific and then you’re thinking about nationally really how to create a community around foster power as you move towards scaling, where do you see the growing pains?

David Gray:

So funny. I mean, I would say we’re even feeling them a little bit already. Just hiring the new training and outreach specialist and us kind of interviewing that person and talking about all these new Airtable bases we need to add. So we kind of are tracking everything. So just the fact that we’re growing and need to think of it more as a business and less of a project is something we’re going through, but we are looking to pass foster power over to some sort of national organization or foundation who can really scale foster power across the country. Sort of like Luigi said, foster power is part of a law firm. We are not a technology company. Technology is increasing the access to the information, but we’re a law firm, we’re supporting lawyers, so we are looking to kind of do everything we can with, again, the blueprint kind of proving for a second time, Hey, this can be replicated in multiple states. Here’s our proof with our replication partner and here’s how it went for them. And learning from our mistakes now so that the national organization doesn’t have to worry about wasting funds making their own mistakes. We’ve kind of done it for them. So we’ve got a lot we’re going to be figuring out over the next couple of years, but that’s sort of the high level approach we’re taking.

Cat Moon:

Yeah, just as you point out the simple fact of I’m building out your team right now, suddenly you are scaling and adding more people and more things. And so I think there are listeners though who are finding all this very exciting, so they’re glad to hear that you have funding to expand and if a listener wants to know more about your project and how they might be able to engage, how best to find you. I know Luigi, I’ve seen you posting on LinkedIn about this and inviting people to contact you. How would a listener reach out if they were interested in being part of the Lacey community?

Luigi Bai:

We’re pretty easy to reach. We’re Lacey, LAC [email protected], and any email to that address, we’ll reach one of the members of our team and we’ll get back to you. And we also have a public repository, and so if you search for Laci or Project Laci, you should see the repository, all the source code, and you’ll see lists of issues on there that we’ve been posting for ideas in ways that we’d like to see it, that we think it should evolve. And you’re welcome to add stuff there and suggest things so that if we can find other partners or more funding, we can go ahead and do those too.

Cat Moon:

Yeah, that crowdsourcing element is brilliant, by the way. Thank you for sharing. So Taylor, David, I know you can go to foster power.org and check out your amazing platform, so I definitely would send folks there. Any other specific direction you have for anyone who might want to reach out and talk with you about your project specifically?

Taylor Sartor:

Let’s just say similarly, we have an email address, foster [email protected] for Bay Area Legal Services, so that will reach the team. We have a message function on the website as well, so that will also reach us. But yeah, anyone can email us and reach out and we will get back to them. And as David mentioned, we’ve had a lot of interest from other states and are really excited to engage with other states and people and organizations that are wanting to spread foster power and be able to impact more youth in foster care in Florida and beyond.

Cat Moon:

Excellent. Well, thank you all for sharing about your projects, and thanks to all of you for listening to this episode, Talk Justice is brought to you by the Leaders counsel of the Legal Services Corporation and Legal Talk Network. If you like what you heard today, please be sure to rate and review the show and subscribe on your favorite podcast app.

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