Legal Aid Checker - Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

In 2016 three teams of three technologists were paired with three Victorian government agencies and departments to create change through innovation. Victoria Legal Aid (VLA) partnered with Code for Victoria program, created the Legal Aid Checker, which helps individuals assess whether they are in scope to receive assistance from VLA.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

The Victoria Legal Aid (VLA), is responsible for making legal services more accessible for the most disadvantaged people in Victoria. It works to find and introduce new ideas and new ways of working, in order to solve complex challenges in the legal assistance sector. One of the biggest problems the VLA grapples with is a sector-wide disconnect in how individuals are matched to services and how clients are referred to different organisations across Victoria.

“One way of looking at referrals, and the way we assess people, is as a whole lot of unstructured data,” Khoi Cao-Lam, Manager of Client Access explains. Taking that data and translating it into a tool that could match people to services, in a way that was consistent and efficient, was the initial proposal that VLA submitted to the Code for Victoria challenge.

The fellowship team took this proposal as a starting point, and set out to explore the problem by conducting user testing. Over four weeks they shadowed duty lawyers in court matters, sat in on phone calls, pored over surveys and data, and visited regional offices and community legal centres. During the discovery phase, the fellows identified key themes from VLA clients and staff. On the client-side, many people were being referred to places that couldn’t actually help them and as a result, were having to tell their story over and over again. It was also unclear to them what kind of advice or service legal aid offers unless they were already familiar with the organisation. On the internal side, they heard from employees that if they could do anything, it would be to decrease the queries they could not help with. From these findings, the fellowship team identified two projects to begin work on: an SMS tool and an online Legal Aid Checker.

SMS Reminder

The first tool launched by the fellows was an SMS reminder tool. From early research, the team discovered that administrative staff across the organisation were sending appointment reminders to clients manually, which was time consuming and left a lot of room for error. The SMS tool helps to automate the process by allowing staff to send all SMS reminders for a day at once. The fellows estimate that this tool decreases the time spent texting clients by about 80%.

Legal Aid Checker

The second tool developed by the fellowship is an online checker, which helps individuals assess whether they are in scope to receive assistance from VLA. The team estimates that the tool will approximately save 30 hours per week for the Legal Help team.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

The fellows introduced new ways of working to VLA. By focussing on a user-centered design approach and using agile methods, the organisation discovered new practices of working and also developed new capabilities amongst their team. Improved Transparency The fellows adopted open working practices - running open workshops where participants could see the progress they’d made, ask questions and provide feedback, as well as making their code publicly available and documenting their journey through blogging.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

The fellows brought their skills and understanding of leading web development processes from the private sector. Working alongside the VLA staff, who brought insights and knowledge of the department, and clients who gave insights and feedback into ways the justice system, the team built solutions that met the needs of the users, improved process for VLA and saved time for the VLA team and clients.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Clients and other Community Legal Centres were also key actors in the program, alongside Code for Australia Fellows and the VLA team.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Change in approach

The project had an impact on the VLA team at a strategic level, in terms of how they approach problem solving within the organisation. As the fellowship progressed, the Manager of Client Access Khoi was amazed to see “the influence, and the credibility they developed across the organisation”. What he saw by the end of the fellowship, was that the fellows were being asked to provide advice and contribute to other projects within VLA.

Project extension

Over the six months, the VLA team quickly recognised the benefits of having the fellows and their technical backgrounds involved in their work, which has led to VLA funding an extension to the project to continue work on another referral tool called ORBIT. Khoi explains that, “it follows on from the capacity building they’ve done with us, so we feel there’s continued value in having the fellows work with us and our IT area on a big IT project to improve referrals.”

Challenges and Failures

The fellows and the team both identified the biggest challenge as getting up to speed on Victoria Legal Aid; their processes, structure, documentation, as well as the nuances and complexities of the legal assistance sector as a whole. While bringing fellows in who had no previous experience in the sector meant that the challenge was approached with a fresh set of eyes, it also required that the team have a period of getting up to speed. The discovery phase allowed the fellowship team to discover how things worked for themselves, approach every process without assumptions, and objectively assess where improvements could be made.

Conditions for Success

We've found these conditions create a good working environment for the Fellowship Program:

* Endorsement from Senior staff

* An appetite for doing something different

* A project owner within the government agency - one who is passionate about learning something new, prepared to license code under open source and has the authority to make decisions on the project.

* If data may be required, the data should be available immediately or obtainable within 6 weeks.

* The hosting team should be able to provide staff time to support the team, work spaces for the fellows and tools (systems logins / profiles, building access).

* The hosting team are willing to follow an Agile/Lean approach, focusing on delivering working software regularly, and fast feedback loops between team members and between building software and the users using it

* The hosting team has a plan for long-term support, including an internal tech team with the capacity to run another modern web service.

Replication

Both solutions (Legal Aid Checker and SMS Reminder) are open source, meaning different applications can be pursued by any organisation that requires a similar solution. For example, other public services where the identification of priority information that determines an outcome is required (eg: Social care, Centrelink etc.) The tool received a wide amount of press coverage from publications such as Australian Financial Review, Australasian Lawyer, and Lawyers Weekly which has led to Legal Aid agencies outside Victoria reaching out, and enquiring how they can adapt the code for their own use.

Lessons Learned

Collaboration and working as a team has been key—be open to learn new things from your teammates as well as the other way around. Be your government partner’s critical friend by showing (not telling) how things can be done differently.

Start by deeply defining the problem—government partners likely will have lots of ideas that they are super excited about, but often the user is overlooked.

Be prepared to open your mind to new technologies and to break down traditional IT silos. Be prepared to build better relations between IT teams and organisations too.

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