Technology in a "Typical" Legal Aid Program
Legal Aid programs are a combination of law office and nonprofit organization and their technology generally reflects that. The software is more akin to a typical small multi-office law firm and the hardware more inline with a nonprofit budget.

Typical software in a legal aid office includes:

-- Office Suite. Usually Word or WordPerfect. (This is because historically WordPerfect catered to the legal community.)

-- Email and Internet Browser Client. Many legal aid advocates belong to substantive legal email lists related to a legal practice area of their interest.

-- Case Management System (CMS). This is the bread and butter of a law office and the poverty law office is no exception. A CMS is a glorified database of current and past cases (clients) that allows a program to track client data and all reporting needs associated with cases. Ideally, the CMS should also be a software that facilitates the work of advocates by managing all data and communication related to the case, performing necessary conflict checks, tracking necessary court or case-related deadlines, and assisting with mandatory timekeeping procedures. Many options exist in the private section for robust case management systems. These options can be expensive. Additionally, legal aid advocates typically underuse the full functionality of the case management software because training budgets are generally thin in legal aid programs. Also, because legal aid programs have some unique case management needs such as client income eligibility screening and case statistical reporting for funders, a niche market has developed for CMS designed for the poverty law community. Check out the Case Management section of the LStech Resource Center on LSNTAP.org for more info.

-- Online Legal Research. For decades there have been a few legal publishing houses that have captured legal precedent in the form of published case decisions from state and federal courts and state and federal statutes and regulations. They had published these precedents in volume upon volume of books called case reporters and statute books. Over the past few years most if not all of these precedents and statutes have been digitized and are now made available online (via the web) by these same publishers to subscribers. The major competitors in this area are Westlaw and LexisNexis. Most case handlers have access to one of these services on their desktop. There are also a number of free resources available on the web but most programs subscribe to one of the services because they have it all in one place.

Please see: Summary of 2002 LSC K-Form Data for more info on software and hardware in use in poverty law programs.