As part Pro Bono Net News’ focus on our 10th anniversary, we asked Iowa Legal Aid, one of the earliest adopters of LawHelp, to reflect on the impact that LawHelp has had on service delivery in Iowa.  Iowa Legal Aid Deputy Director Patrick McClintock agreed to share his thoughts with the Pro Bono Net community.

By Patrick McClintock, Deputy Director, Iowa Legal Aid

Iowa Legal Aid provides critical legal assistance to low-income Iowans in all of the state’s 99 counties.  Since 2003, our LawHelp site, www.iowalegalaid.org, has been a key component of our commitment to provide service across the entire state.

Iowa Legal Aid has always had a strong emphasis on community legal education and self-advocacy.  That’s been a part of the fiber of our organization since the very beginning.  LawHelp has allowed Iowa Legal Aid to collect, organize and index educational material and make it available to everyone instantly and at no cost.  It’s made a world of difference in how information is provided.

The impetus for our LawHelp site was a combination of the Legal Service Corporation’s (LSC) efforts to encourage statewide websites, as well as a merger of legal aid programs in Iowa in 2003 that led to the emergence of Iowa Legal Aid as the single statewide legal services provider.  Iowa Legal Aid staff felt a website could play a critical role in helping to project this new organization and serve as a vehicle for continuing what had previously been done in the area of community legal education.  In pursuing this idea I ran across Pro Bono Net co-founder Michael Hertz, who caught my interest by talking about this thing called Pro Bono Net. 

The concept of LawHelp and probono.net was one that really resonated, particularly as it related to the notion of our focus being content development rather than maintaining the technological infrastructure.  Iowa Legal Aid is not in the business of technology; we’re in the business of providing services and information to low-income people in the state of Iowa.

LawHelp allows Iowa Legal Aid to quickly respond to emerging needs.  In response to last summer’s massive floods in Iowa we added a new Disaster Relief topic area.  We have also added foreclosure content under our housing area and a new topic area called “Resources for New Iowans,” to provide information to those serving immigrant populations. 

As Iowa’s population has grown more diverse, Iowa Legal Aid has also added translated versions of key resources in other languages, primarily Spanish and Bosnian.  That’s easy to do with the LawHelp template. 

LawHelp has been continuous and relentless in terms of integrating website resources, such as LiveHelp, the real-time, chat-based support service.  (See previous article.)  In 2004, Iowa Legal Aid joined Montana Legal Services Association and Pro Bono Net in developing the LiveHelp pilot project, with funding from LSC’s Technology Initiative Grant (TIG) program.

 The service was launched in Iowa and Montana in 2006, and has made it easier to find a particular resource for people who need assistance in a given area.  Learning what people are searching for also gives Iowa Legal Aid a window into emerging areas of need, which is helpful in determining new content areas.

Iowa Legal Aid staff continue to explore ways that technology can help us better serve clients.  Iowa Legal Aid obtained funding from LSC’s TIG program for an online intake project that allows people to apply for legal aid via an online interview.  The online intake tool was successfully deployed in 2006 in a pilot, using the LawHelp program site template, combined with A2J Author as the gateway to the intake process.  We’re now in reformulation, collaborating with Ohio and a couple of other states to try to take it the next step.  It will ideally become a feature of LawHelp.

Going forward for the next ten years, I’d like to see LawHelp and Pro Bono Net continue to play a role in encouraging more content sharing and joint content development between states.  For example, Iowa Legal Aid collaborated with several other LawHelp states, Pro Bono Net and the National Health Law Program (NHeLP) in 2004 to pool resources to design and organize health law content for our statewide advocate and client sites.  There’s a lot more that can be done in terms of bringing the community together and making a wider array of resources available.  LawHelp and Pro Bono Net are in a natural place to continue to enable that collaboration.