What’s Next in Justice Tech: ITC and LSC’s New Tech Report

Episode Notes

Transcript

Selena Hunn:

The ultimate goal was to not only develop recommendations that would inform how LSC can be more responsive in its grant making and funding of legal aid or legal services technology projects and solutions, but also implore the broader sector to accept this charge, this challenge, and understand the role that they can also play in using technology to promote access to justice.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice and 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. I’m Cat Moon, your host for this episode. Today, we’ll be taking a sneak peek at the upcoming Innovations in Technology Conference, known to many as ITC. And we’ll be talking about a new report that released last month called The Next Frontier: Harnessing Technology to Close the Justice Gap. This is the 26th ITC. And if you’ve never had the pleasure of attending, it is a really incredible gathering of all sorts of people who work in legal technology, legal aid, the courts, and more. The conference is taking place in San Antonio at the end of this month, and even if you aren’t attending, there will be several sessions streaming for free on LSC’s YouTube channel. We’ll dig into that more shortly, as well as the new Tech Summit Report from LSC. Joining us for this discussion, we have an all- star cast today, Katie Strickfaden, Chief Operating Officer at Lakeshore Legal Aid in Michigan.

Luigi Bai managing attorney of Lone Star Legal Aid’s innovation team in Texas, and Selena Hunn, Deputy Director in LSC’s Office of Program Performance. Welcome to Talk Justice, Katie, Luigi, and Selena. It is so good to have you all here today. We have a lot to cover. Are y’all ready?

Katie Strickfaden:

Absolutely. Definitely.

Cat Moon:

Yeah. All right. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Okay. I think the first thing I want to do is to get a sense of what the hot topics in legal tech are that all of you are really interested in at the moment. When you’re looking at the really pretty voluminous list of ITC sessions, is there anything that you’re really keeping an eye out for that you know you want to hear about this year? Because you’re all presenting, but you’re also there to really enjoy and consume this content. So Inni Mini, Mighty Mo, Katie, what are you thinking?

Katie Strickfaden:

First, thank you for having me. Excited to kind of share my excitement about ITC. It is my favorite conference to go to every year. And I’m not just saying that because this is an LSC Podcast. There are a couple of sessions that kind of pique my interest. Some of them are happening during my sessions where I’m presenting, which always makes me a little sad, but it’s going to happen inevitably. So we’ll have Lakeshore staff who come who will make sure we send to those. We kind of divide and conquer the sessions that we want to go to. There is a session about building smarter feedback loops for client services. I think that’s going to be important because as my team thinks through different new technology solutions that we are thinking of introducing to Lakeshore or evaluating, there is technology that we’re really excited about that if we don’t have the buy-in of the staff because it doesn’t have a couple of features that are kind of required, or if it’s a tool that’s really cool and fun and innovative, but no one’s going to adopt and use it because of something we didn’t hear about from impacted staff or client groups or whoever the tool is intended to serve.

I mean, it’s still a fun and cool thing, but maybe not as effective or productive as we would like it to be. So I think that’s going to be really interesting. There is also a session about strategic technology leadership during turbulent times that I’m interested in a lot. I also heard this week that one of the affinity groups is about statewide knowledge base projects and Lakeshore currently has a TIG to do a knowledge base. And so we’re interested to go there and we’re in kind of the middle of that TIG, so we’re interested to hear from other folks, see what features they have in knowledge base projects that they’re thinking about doing or have already done. One of the best things I think about the conference is being able to learn from other legal aids and you don’t have to come up with all the ideas.

Sometimes you can just steal them from other people. And it’s my favorite thing to do. And so I’m hoping that there’s going to be a lot of gems of knowledge that Lakeshore can take from that to bring to our own project.

Cat Moon:

Absolutely. I think the sharing that happens at ITC is just really phenomenal. And also learning from others’ mistakes, right. I bet that’s going to come up in some of the sessions that you were talking about, which all sound fabulous. Luigi, what about you?

Luigi Bai:

Well, thanks, Cat. Thanks for inviting me to this podcast episode. I’m really looking forward to showing up at ITC and connecting with people that I’ve met before, worked with, and also meeting new people who are in the space, learning what they’re doing. It’s always a fun time. There are a couple of sessions in particular that I saw on the list that I’m hoping my schedule is going to let me attend. I noticed that Kevin DeLeban of Tectectonic Justice is going to have a session on the impact of predictive AI on our clients and our communities. It’s definitely an area of interest right now as more and more organizations try to deploy machine learning and AI related tools to either help people who need it or to allocate resources as he’s experienced. There are also a couple of sessions in the self-help tools area. My team builds a lot of self-help tools.

We provide a lot of legal information to the public, and so I’m ex excited about this one session called Power and Partnership. There are a couple of legal aid organizations there who are going to show off some tools and technologies that they’ve deployed to get legal information out into the community. I’m a firm believer that people can help themselves with their legal problems as long as they get some good guidance from especially licensed professionals. I’m also looking at streamlining brief advice for a similar reason. That’s the group out of Maryland who’s going to talk about some software that they’ve put together to help them reach, I think, about 18,000 people a year. That’s definitely impressive. And I think it speaks to the kinds of efficiencies that we can see when we deploy technology to help other people.

Cat Moon:

Absolutely. And you can’t see this, but I’m nodding my head yes vigorously while Louisi is talking because I think the sessions you point out really emphasize how in this moment with technology, I won’t say just AI, but technology in general, there is so much opportunity to empower people to help themselves and we need to be very intentional, thoughtful, and careful about how that happens. So those sessions all sound like they speak exactly to those things. I’m jealous. Okay. Selena, what about you?

Selena Hunn:

Yeah. Well, I might be biased, but there are a lot of sessions I’m really looking forward to. And if I could just offer a shameless plug for the upcoming conference, we are doing something different this year, which makes me particularly excited, and that’s offering four tracks. And our four tracks are based on AI beginner, intake, IT operations, and self-help. And within those, there are several sessions that I’m personally really excited about. I’m always interested in learning how leaders are adopting technology and preparing for readying their programs or their organizations to take on new technology projects or adapt in an ever-changing, rapidly evolving world. So the strategic technology leadership during turbulent time session, I believe that Tuesday is one I’m uniquely interested in. And then I also have a strong interest and fashion, if we can use that sometimes overused word for change management and capacity building.

So we have a lot of great sessions. One of the half day sessions that my fellow panelist Katie is actually leading is the, I believe it’s called the Change Management Game on that final day at ITC. So I’m looking forward to that half day workshop. It’s interesting being in this capacity and understanding that not all of our grantees are ready for technology innovation, let alone … We’ll get into this later as we talk about the technology summit report, but grantees are really all across the spectrum when it comes to tech innovation. And I’m always uniquely interested in any session that addresses how grantees are readying their organizations as well as their staff for technology development, implementation, and of course managing that change along the way. And then of course, anything related to AI. We have one session on AI capacity in Legal Aid that I think will be uniquely interesting.

Cat Moon:

So you hit on this really, I think, compelling combination of technology and people focused sessions, right? And so I think it’s important to identify that talking about change management, talking about the impact on people, talking about how you lead humans through these interesting, maybe turbulent times, like they go hand in hand, right? So I think it’s- Absolutely. Yeah. It’s really important to highlight that. Okay. Well, we’re going to keep digging into conference sessions a little bit because you all are going to be doing some amazing work there and I want to talk about what you’re going to be doing. So Katie and Luigi, you guys are going to be super busy. So you’re both participating in three panels each at the conference. So would you please give us a brief overview of the types of things you’re going to be presenting on and how those panels relate to the work that you’ve been doing lately?

Katie, would you kick us off?

Katie Strickfaden:

Happy to. Okay. So three sessions that I am involved in. The first one is called Practical and Ethical AI for the AI Curious Legal Aid Pro. And this came about because as Lakeshore is trying to build and implement AI projects and experimenting to a certain extent, very safely experimenting with different tools that we might be able to build internally or consider building partners, a lot of staff have come to us with questions like, “Everyone talks about AI, but I don’t know how to use it. Can you help me? ” And so what we have started to do is have some kind of just one-on-one conversations with people who come to us and ask us questions. And what that led us to understand is that this is actually something that it’s not just something … We think a lot more people have that than have questions about how to practically use AI and how it will impact their day-to-day work and how it can help different people.

We have lots of different roles at every lead organization, and I think AI can help support the work of lots of different roles. I think most roles could be augmented in some way by AI assistance. And so we kind of started to compile those conversations and the different roles that we have at Lakeshore, and we partnered with some other legal aid programs who were having similar internal conversations. And our goal is with that session is to tell people the conversations we’ve been having internally and give people some practical guide and exercises that they can hopefully take back with them to their legal aid. And instead of recreating the wheel, we’ll be able to get a headstart on how to have those conversations internally as their organizations navigate the use of AI in their work.

Cat Moon:

Keep going. I think you’ve just hit on one of them.

Katie Strickfaden:

Okay. All right, great. The next one is called One Size Doesn’t Fit All Supporting Disabled Legal Professionals with AI tools that can adapt. And this came up because I will talk about my personal experience. I have ADHD and I will have this beautiful vision of an idea in my head and I will struggle with executive dysfunction and getting it down on paper in a way that is an appropriate professional communication to people who need to hear it. Unfortunately, they don’t get to see the vision in my head quite like I do, and that can be a difficult step for me. But I can describe that vision to AI and it can help me kind of take the first step in getting a draft that of my vision that I might be able to obviously then take and tweak and change and maybe change the prompts or do whatever I got to do in order to get something that gives me the head start I need and really helps move some of my work forward in a way that is meaningful and really, really saves me a lot of time and angst that I can’t get it out of my head and on paper.

And I’m not the only person who has that kind of experience or other folks I think at Lakeshore Legal Aid and across the nation who have that kind of experience and might not realize that AI can help support things like that. So we wanted to have kind of an open and conversation about where we’re at. And you got to be a little bit vulnerable because you got to throw out there. I have ADHD and this is something I struggle with and we have some staff who are willing to engage in that conversation and we think that that might help some other folks who have similar struggles, realize some ways that they can use AI to augment their work as well. And then finally, as Selena stated earlier, I, along with a handful of other folks, are going to do one of the half day sessions about change management.

We have had a lot of success at Lakeshore kind of gamifying change management to a certain extent. And this started in, I’ll tell you, it was 2022. We implemented a new case management system and that was a huge change for Lakeshore Legal Aid and the others in the state who adopted the same program. And what that did is that exposed the kind of where different people were at in our leadership group about where they were at with change. And we have a wonderful project manager named Sara Cross who led a meeting. And in that meeting, she had like a, what’s icebreaker. It was an icebreaker exercise that was about like really answering questions and figuring out where you are on the change management comfort spectrum. Are you over here and you actually not only don’t want to change, you want to go back in time or are you over here where you think all change is good?

And it gave us a visual of where we were all at. And even though I’m involved in a lot of the change management, it was yet surprising to me. And so that started a lot of internal conversations and really has, from a change management perspective, shaped my work a lot at Lakeshore. And we, at last year’s ITC, we had a session that had some of these games where we showed them to other legal aids and it was well attended and folks liked it. And so we got asked to bring it on back. I will say we picked a new game theme this year. I’m not going to say it here. You got to go, but I’m very excited. We’re very committed to a theme. And so we’re excited about it and I’m excited to be able to bring some of the lessons we learned to the other folks at ITC.

Cat Moon:

I think that is a fabulous teaser. Do not give away the theme, make people show up. So all right, all of that sounds amazing, brilliant. Luigi, you’ve got your triple hitter too. What are you going to be talking about?

Luigi Bai:

I’m involved in three different sessions. The first one I was invited to by Cecilia Barber of Neighborhood Legal Services Program in DC. It’s called Turning Mountains into Milestones, and it’s about project management. We will hopefully have some interesting discussions and tips for people who are experienced project managers, but the real focus is to give some guidance and hopefully some confidence building to people who haven’t led a project before or maybe haven’t led a project this big before. And we can talk about how we break projects down, how you involve the stakeholders, how do you determine when you’re making progress and how you celebrate that at the end. So that should be pretty fun. The next one is on a topic that’s near and dear to me. It’s called Open Source Legal Aid Tools, Pros and Cons and Procurement. So we’ll be talking about when you should think about using open source tools, what are the benefits, what are some of the things you need to look out for?

What is an open source community? How do you become involved in it? And if you’re lucky enough to produce something that’s shareable or replicable in a project or a TIG in particular, you should consider using an open source license to share that with other people and build a community, which then dovetails into my third presentation, which is about Project Lacy. Project Lacy is a project that we’ve built here at Lone Star Legal Aid over the course of two different TIGs, and we’ve released this to the public under a free software license called the AGPL. This is a license that allows anyone to pick up the software, use it right away, adapt it for their state, to also propose adding changes to the code so that other people can use it. We’re really excited about where we’ve come with the software. And so in this second TIG round, we’ve included two partners, Texas Legal Services Center and Idaho Legal Aid Services who are adapting LACI in their own environments in two different ways.

And we’ll be talking about the practices that we each had prior to using Lacey and then how Lacey has improved our practices afterwards. The fourth participant is Atlanta Legal Aid who just got a TIG award to adapt Lacey in their state in Georgia and also look into ways of using machine learning and maybe some generative AI techniques to help people use Lacey in their own environments, in particular to look at ways of figuring out which authorities are important to the documents that they’re monitoring. What Lacey does is it goes out and looks at these authorities online in Texas, as in a number of different states, our statutes, our regulations, our rules are available online, same with the federal rules and regulations and statutes. And so if you’re in a state where your stuff is online, you too can adapt Lacey. The hard part is if you haven’t already annotated your documents, if you don’t have citations in your documents that say what are the relevant authorities, you have to go back kind of forensically and do that legal research and we may be able to use the data that we’ve collected at Lone Star and maybe with TLSC and iLIS to train up a model that maybe can help other organizations then put their documents in and say, “Here are a suggested set of authorities for you to monitor.” So that’s pretty exciting.

We’ll also be talking about that in an affinity group meeting that’s right after that session. So during the session, we’re going to talk about the maintenance procedures for keeping legal information up to date and how Lacey works, but in the affinity group, we’ll talk more about the future of Lacey, hopefully give a demo, technology permitting, and answer any questions people have. So really looking forward to all of that.

Cat Moon:

So Louisi, really quickly, would you tell us what Lacy is and does? Because I think that is an important point. It was referenced in the report we’re going to talk about in a minute. It was an example given, but tell us really quickly what Lacey does and why this is so exciting that it is spreading beyond your jurisdiction.

Luigi Bai:

I appreciate the opportunity. I realize I’m so used to saying Lacey. I don’t even say what it is. So Lacey is spelled L-A-C-I, and it stands for Legal Aid Content Intelligence, and it’s software that allows you to keep your legal information documents up to date. So usually if you have a bunch of legal information documents, and these could be a self-help website, these could be template memos that you give out to clients. These could be handouts that you give out at outreaches. All of these need to be reviewed periodically. Often what organizations do is they have a big pile of these, and then once every year or two years, or periodically, they go through and they look to see what has changed in those. There are two issues with that, right? Which is sometimes when you do all of this work to review, a lot of the stuff hasn’t changed, but you’ve spent that work anyway.

The other thing is that things may have changed right after you created the documents, and then there probably could be out of date for that period of time between checks. What Lacey does is it’s constantly on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on how you configure it, checking to see if any of these things change and alerting you to which documents need to be reviewed. So you’re not reviewing all the documents all the time, but you also aren’t letting things get stale for too long. Thanks, Cat.

Cat Moon:

So yeah, well, no, I think Lacy is brilliant and as you’re describing what it does, I can think of so many contexts in which that would be just incredibly efficient and helpful. So thank you for explaining that to us. We’re going to now turn to Selena because there are some streaming sessions happening. And so I feel like our audience would really like to know about those because any of us can hop online and watch. What have we got streaming?

Selena Hunn:

LSC has 16 sessions at ITC that we’ll be streaming across two days. That would be day one of ITC, which is January 28th, and then Thursday, January 29th. We’ll essentially have eight sessions that are live streamed on each day, several in the morning, several in the afternoon. And rather than listing all of them specifically, because there’s quite a few, there are just some that I think I could highlight that cover a broad spectrum of topics. I know we’ve talked about it a great deal earlier in the conversation, but the session on strategic leadership is titled Strategic Technology Leadership During Turbulent Times. That’ll be on Wednesday morning, and I think that’ll be a very dynamic session comprising several of our LSE grantee executive directors who will be talking about practical strategies for navigating technology decisions. I mean, you consider where we are currently in the world and what we’ve all adapted to in 2025.

This’ll be really a very ripe discussion. So they’ll focus on navigating change and navigating technology decisions in this unprecedented era and an era that’s comprised of a lot of digital risks. So I think that’ll be a session great for EDs and other members of leadership teams. Another session I can highlight is one that’s focused on building AI capacity. I might have mentioned this earlier when I was just talking about what I was personally looking forward to. This is a session that will be on Wednesday afternoon. It’s titled from Strategy to Action: Building AI Capacity and Legal Aid. And it’ll be a session that’s focused on moving from being curious about AI, conceptualizing AI use and tools to actually implementing them. So hopefully folks will walk away with some very practical tips and ideas for how legal aid organizations can respond to the immense pressure of meeting client needs with very limited resources in a very tangible and practical way.

Another session, if I could just highlight maybe one or two more, we have a session that’s focused on modernizing intake and this session titled Modernizing Legal Aid Intake: Lessons from North Carolina and New York will feature some of our grantees from New York and North Carolina, obviously, and they’ll be demonstrating how they transform their intake systems with accessible client-centered technologies and AI. Over the years, just based on a lot of surveys and attendee feedback, we’ve learned that AI … I’m sorry, not AI, but intake rather is a really hot topic and one of great interest among our ITC attendees. And so I think this is one that’ll be very responsive to not only a persistent interest among conference attendees, but also one that addresses where we currently are. And then lastly, one that’s focused on maybe things a bit more practical and that’s cybersecurity. There’ll be a session on Thursday morning titled Practical Cybersecurity Roadmap for Uncertain Times.

You’ll see a common theme here that all of these sessions have some sort of through line with helping organizations navigate change and uncertainty. So this session will provide a practical roadmap and it’s more of a workshop focus. So participants will walk out with a framework that they can start implementing for improving their cybersecurity.

Cat Moon:

So I think another through line really is the richness and diversity of these sessions, right? So focusing on very important people skills, but also going right to the heart of some technology challenges we’re facing in security. Cybersecurity is top of mind, really. So all of this also is foreshadowing a lot of the recommendations that appear in the report that I mentioned in the intro. So Selina, let’s dig into the report a little bit. So it’s titled The Next Frontier: Harnessing Technology to Close the Justice Gap. So what does the Report cover and why did LSC decide to put this together now?

Selena Hunn:

So this report is a long awaited labor of love, I would say, and a lot of coordination and collaboration across the entire access to justice sector that we’ve led over the last couple of years. And we launched this project in late 2023, really throughout 2024 and into 2025 with the goal of updating our 2012, 2013 technology summit report. Many might recall this report, which proposed a national vision for expanding access to justice through technology. And given how much has evolved and how rapidly technology is evolving, particularly with AI, we thought it was most responsive for us to explore how to leverage these developments and improve the delivery of legal services and advance access to justice. So what we employed was a multi-phased approach over about two years. We had a lot of stakeholder involvement from folks outside of LSC across our grantee community, folks in academia, the courts, and technologists, and I’m sure I’m leaving out other groups, but just want to emphasize that it was a broad spectrum of participants who had input into the recommendations that this report produced.

So we had a consultant or team of consultants rather who conducted stakeholder interviews, focus groups, and we held a workshop at ITC in 2024. And the purpose of that was to convene more than 50 experts from various sectors. I believe some of you were participants in that day long affair. And that was, I think, a really great opportunity to hear from multiple stakeholders about the most significant barriers to advancing access to justice and significant roadmaps or roadblocks rather, and barriers to successful sustain global technology implementation. And from that, we then convened several working groups and invited stakeholders across the community to be involved in these facilitated discussions around, I would say, four topical issues. Those topics aren’t as important, but just to give you some sense, they focused on grantee capacity building, ways to ready organizations for operational and technology changes, data and measuring impact, and then technology innovation.

And the ultimate goal was to not only develop recommendations that would inform how LSC can be more responsive in its grant making and funding of legal aid or legal services technology projects and solutions, but also implore the broader sector to accept this charge, this challenge, and understand the role that they can also play in using technology to promote access to justice. So essentially what evolved was our very comprehensive white paper or report that is inclusive of seven recommendations for how LSC can improve the way we are using our technology initiative grant funds to fund technology projects, also improve the way that we’re supporting grantees through our oversight and just being a though leader in this space. And then also ways that other audiences, whether they’re the courts, our grantees, other funders, you name it, can also play a role in helping us leverage technology to improve the delivery of legal services.

Cat Moon:

Yeah. So through all of that work over a period of two years, and I was fortunate enough to participate in some of those activities, and you all did tap a really rich and diverse group of folks. And I think that’s critical to fashioning the seven recommendations that came out of it. So I wonder if we could cover the seven recommendations by having Luigi and Katie both speak to the ones that they’re most excited about or they think are priorities right now. And then maybe Selina, you could bring us home by highlighting any that they don’t mention. Katie, what about those recommendations? Are you like, “Yeah, let’s go. ” Or, “Oh my

Selena Hunn:

Gosh.” Or do they all intimidate you? I’m

Katie Strickfaden:

Going to give you somewhere in the middle is what I’m going to give you. So first, I want to give a nod to LSC. As a grantee, I felt like my voice was heard and I was given an opportunity to provide input in a way that was meaningful. And that is hard to do. And I think it’s hard to do because you have grantees all over obviously the country and some territories. And I think that the process you guys went through was very methodical and thoughtful. And from my perspective, I felt heard. And so I think that’s an important thing to say out loud. This wasn’t just like a, “I’m going to dictate that these are the seven things.” These really does come from a lot of conversations and time spent talking to people about their fears and their successes and kind of what we needed as grantees.

And so I think that needs to be said out loud. I am very fortunate at Lakeshore. One of the recommendations is about seeing technology as an important part of the core work that Legal Aids do. And I am very lucky at Lakeshore Legal Aid that my leader and the CEO of Lakeshore is very supportive of technology work, but I can understand how not having that would make some of the things that … If I didn’t have that kind of leadership, it would make the things that I’m trying to do and the improvements I try to make in the projects that we do much more difficult. So I think saying that out loud is very important and I think will help a lot of legal aid folks kind of shake off the fear of spending resources, time resources, fiscal resources on technology projects. So I think that one’s really, really important to moving legal aid and technology forward.

So I don’t know that that’s an excitement or scared, but I think it’s an important one. I nerd out a little bit on the AI stuff, so the AI recommendation is fun for me. So I nerd out just enough to get in trouble with people who are IT professionals, just to be clear. And so I personally think that one’s super fun. I will say the one that’s a little scary to me is data because I’m an attorney and how to use data in meaningful and powerful ways. I can see why that is so important to what we do, and yet numbers, numbers, numbers, math. And that is a little intimidating to me truthfully. And so that’s the one certainly that is the biggest reach for me and the one that … I think I agree that it’s important, but is difficult for me as an attorney who loves their words.

Cat Moon:

And that is fair. And I’m going to just identify really quickly the three recommendations that you referenced. So the one, the very first one is reframe tech is core to legal aid mission, right? Then four is promote and support data driven decision making. That’s the math scary one. Maybe we can sort of move that into reframing to make it less scary. And then six is lead and coordinate responsible AI innovation and broader tech adoption. So yay, yay, yay. All right, Luigi, Tag, you’re it. What about you?

Luigi Bai:

Thank you. Yeah. Well, first I do want to echo Katie. Reading the report does feel like LSC really paid attention to what we were talking about during the process. And so it feels good to have these themes that we saw discussed come out in the report and be taken seriously. I think the two I wanted to highlight were number three, explore new funding approaches for technology projects. I think we definitely appreciate and have taken advantage of the new SEA funding, which is sustainability, extension and adoption. That’s helped us take an initial TIG project and do a second round of funding to bring this to other partners, other legal aids, and test out how this can be replicable across the whole legal aid ecosystem. And so I think that that money is well invested. And I like the other ideas from the section as well. The other one I wanted to go ahead and highlight was number seven, strength and support for the development and modernization of high quality self-help tools.

There are some-

Cat Moon:

I knew you were going to cite that one. I knew it.

Luigi Bai:

Well, that’s our wheelhouse here. That’s for my team at Lone Star. Awesome. For sure. I mean, I like the ideas. There are sub recommendations in there about more collaboration, encouraging more integration. That’s definitely something we try to do at Lone Star in the innovation team. And then I see a role for Project Lacey in here as well. Lacey can help keep things like knowledge bases or self-help websites up to date. And so I think this is part of strengthening that support base for these self-help tools, keeping them relevant for people, keeping them up to date.

Cat Moon:

Excellent. So Selena, can you bring us home by highlighting, I think, a couple remain of the seven recommendations and just give us a little preview about what LSC is going to do to really activate these recommendations. How are these going to show up and happen?

Selena Hunn:

Yeah, absolutely. There were two recommendations that haven’t been mentioned yet. And the first of those is that LSE should streamline access to resources to help grantees meet and exceed the technology baselines. That’s one that I think is uniquely important to our grantees. As I mentioned before, we have grantees that are all across the spectrum as far as their technology infrastructure and their readiness for tech innovation. And the second recommendation that has yet to be mentioned is the one focused on modernizing the TIG evaluation. And that one’s related to developing a flexible evaluation framework to support our grantees, to support their innovation, their ability to measure impact, and document that so that we can use comprehensive evaluations and share those across the community so that grantees can use those to innovate and replicate.

Cat Moon:

And the theme that I saw reading through the report that I hear as you all talk about the meaning of these recommendations is sharing. It really is sharing across organizations with LSC. And I think that’s incredibly powerful and so important where we are right now in these turbulent times. I think that’s a word that’s been used in this conversation. Okay. This conversation’s been amazing and I wish we could keep going and I’m super excited to share all of this with folks, with our listeners. Thank you all, Selena, Katie, and Luigi for joining me today. I want to let folks know that you can find the TechSummit Report at lsc.gov/techreport. And you can also find information about ITC at lsc.gov/iTC26. So thank you to everyone for listening to this episode of Talk Justice. Be sure and subscribe so that you do not miss an episode.

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