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Riding the Circuit
by Christie Constantine
For the past two years as a Circuit Rider with Pro Bono Net, I have traveled around the country working with organizations to build statewide legal information web sites for their clients. When we began the LawHelp statewide web sites project, funded by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), it was new territory for many of the organizations we were working with in each state. One of my major goals as a Circuit Rider has been to encourage and facilitate the sharing of experiences, ideas, and materials among states as we’ve mapped this territory together.
In contrast to the column’s title, this article is actually set right here in the District of Columbia, my home base, where work has begun on a LawHelp client site. I recently sat down with Margaret Duval, staff attorney at the DC Bar Pro Bono Program, to discuss how DC’s LawHelp project is shaping up. Although the project is in its early stages, the positive impact of wisdom sharing by the more established LawHelp projects is already apparent.
CC: Thanks, Margaret, for agreeing to talk with us for this article. After spending two years building the probono.net/dc site (see Pro Bono Net News July 2003), the DC Bar is now a co-host of the DC LawHelp web site for the public. The planning is off to an impressive start. Tell us about the coordination between the LSC grantee organization, Neighborhood Legal Services Program (NLSP), and the DC Bar Pro Bono Program. We are seeing cooperation between legal services and Bar programs on LawHelp projects more and more around the country. It seems to be a great match.
MD: I think it’s an ideal partnership. We each have an important role to play. NLSP is a great link to the client community. They are on the front lines, so to speak, and really know the needs of the people in this city. Here at the Bar, we have staff and other resources to contribute, including prior experience with a project of this nature. As hosts of probono.net/dc, we had already developed a process for stakeholder cultivation and content management, so it was a natural fit for us to work on the LawHelp project. The planning and coordination involved in developing our probono.net practice areas was a learning experience, so we feel we have a unique perspective to offer the LawHelp project.
CC: What kind of initial project planning did you do?
MD: It was really helpful to have the experience of the other states that have been working on this project. Reading all of the materials in the LawHelp library (www.probono.net/statewebsites) helped us to get us up to speed quickly. We also had the benefit of developing probono.net/dc. Early on, we developed a written project plan based on models from other states.
CC: What other type of organizations are partnering with you on this project?
MD: The project’s “stakeholder committee” is pretty diverse. We have a broad range of legal services providers in the city, who bring a lot of legal expertise to the table. We’ve also included a representative from the court and from one from the local law school clinics. We felt it was important to have various non-legal perspectives that would remind us to orient the material we publish toward a non-legal audience. So our committee also includes representatives from social service organizations, a librarian from the local public library, and a legal services client who is currently serving on Neighborhood Legal Services Program’s client advisory board.
Many of our legal service providers are the same as those that collaborated with us to develop probono.net/dc. So they already knew that we would be developing DCLawHelp.org and were looking forward to it. We sent a summary of the LawHelp project along with our invitations to the stakeholder meeting to a very broad range of organizations, beyond the core group who had initially worked on probono.net/dc. We stressed the fact that this site will help them do their jobs by providing critical information that currently isn’t available in any one central place. I think it’s key to sell it that way. We got a pretty good response.
CC: What areas of law are you focusing on for the public site, and how did you decide?
MD: We’re starting out with Housing, Family, Public Benefits, Consumer/Bankruptcy, Employment, and hope to add Probate soon. At our first meeting, we agreed to start small, and that the best way to prioritize what we’d cover was to take a poll of our stakeholders. We felt that the topics should be prioritized according to the needs of community, and not only where content was already developed.
CC: How have you approached authoring material for the public in those legal areas?
MD: We decided, based on what we’ve learned from other states, to put together teams of content developers we call “topic owners.” We outlined their responsibilities in writing. At the moment, all of our topics owners are attorneys at legal services organizations. The groups will meet for the first time later this month. In terms of gathering content, the topic owners’ first stop will be their own files and other legal services organizations. We will also recommend that the topic owners seek out Skadden Fellows and Equal Justice Works Fellows placed at agencies around DC. The Fellows have a writing component to their grant, so hopefully we can get them to work on content for our site. We are also planning to recruit pro bono volunteers from the various Bar sections to write new content. The Pro Bono Program will act as the liaison between the sections and our topic owners.
CC: Have you addressed literacy, usability and related issues as you begin to develop the web site?
MD: That has been daunting. Writing content for the public, and in an online context, is an area where we didn’t have a lot of experience. I really relied on samples other states had provided. It was also very helpful to have you here to help us. We organized a stakeholder sub-committee to focus on these issues and to come up with guidelines. We wanted input from our stakeholders and wanted to make the process open, rather than just making these decisions unilaterally. Our sub-committee includes the web manager at the DC Bar, who has expertise in font, layout, and usability, and also a legal services lawyer and our client and social worker stakeholders. It was important to have them there as we developed our literacy and usability guidelines, to ensure that we were on the right track. We used models from other states to develop our content guidelines. Everyone will have the chance to comment before we adopt the guidelines at our next stakeholder meeting.
CC: It sounds like you’ve gone the extra mile to create a very democratic process. Is there anything special you’ve done to stay organized?
MD: Well, all of the stakeholders know and like each other. It would be easy for us to spend our lunchtime meetings socializing! To avoid that, we have an agenda for each meeting, and I try to keep us moving along, and to avoid going over the time allotted. At the end of each meeting, we jointly set the next meeting’s date and agenda. This way, people know what their assignments are, what information they’ll need to bring with them for the next meeting, and they can be better prepared for a productive meeting. People also appreciate deadlines and reminders. I send out reminders, keep people aware of upcoming deadlines, and I try to offer help whenever possible. I also do handouts for people. For example, when we voted for topics, I prepared the results in a handout. It’s a great way to capture information, so that each organization knows what the other’s suggestions are. We also prepare meeting summaries and circulate them to everyone via email following the meeting.
CC: Any other advice you have for other LawHelp projects just starting out?
MD: The key is to establish good communications and create an organized, transparent process, so that everyone has a voice in decisions. Our goal has been to make things as democratic, yet organized, as possible.
CC: Thanks again. Congratulations on a great start! I’d like to mention to folks that all of the materials you mentioned are available in the LawHelp library at http://www.probono.net/statewebsites.
[PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION]
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Christie and Margaret Duval at the DC Bar (photo: Sean Groom)
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