The $4,000 grant from the MBAF allowed us to meet some initial technology goals and we are now benefiting from additional financial support to fulfil the rest of the project goals. To give you provide some additional context:

When the pandemic hit, we integrated some new technologies into our clinic systems:

• Zoom

  • Clinics are hosted on Zoom

  • The Law School provides an account

• Air Table:

  • Clients can contact us through an online Air Table form. All client calls to the civil legal helpline are catalogued and managed in Air Table. All law student volunteers working on the helpline use Air Table.

  • We use a free version.

• Appointment Core:

  • Volunteers on the helpline schedule appointments for clients into various MVLC services using Appointment Core.

  • We currently use a free version but would benefit from upgrading to the $40/month version.

• Salesforce:

  • This is our central client database developed initially by students in the Business School.

  • We pay an annual nonprofit rate of $300 (since 2017).

• Wufoo:

  • Client notes are currently captured in Wufoo and later entered into Salesforce. This is not ideal, but it became necessary when the pandemic hit and our volunteers no longer used clinic (University-owned) computers and started using their personal computers.

  • The law school provides the Wufoo account

• Google Spreadsheets: free

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The systems we have built are very cost-effective, but they are very "clunky." None of the systems we have been using were technologically integrated until we were able to hire. For example:

• When a client makes an appointment for services through Appointment Core, a staff person must take that information and manually enter it into a Google Spreadsheet for lawyer and law student volunteers to see.

• When a law student and lawyer write notes about a client's visit into Wufoo, those notes are later manually entered into the Salesforce database.

• We are currently operating the remote clinics at the same volume as pre-pandemic in-person clinics (~400 clients per month). Pre-pandemic, the use of University-owned computers at all clinic locations meant client visit notes were entered into the Salesforce database in real time. Once we shifted to remote services, law students and lawyers started using their own laptops during the clinic because we do not share the password to get into the

 

Salesforce database and this meant data stopped being entered directly into the Salesforce database. We currently have three months of client data (-1,200 client visits) to enter into our client database.

 

Thanks to the MBAF grant, we were able to hire Oplidrome, LLC to integrate these systems which will allow for a more user-friendly experience for our volunteer law students and lawyers and a more streamlined system for our clients. The developer is:

• Integrating Appointment Core with Air Table so that law student volunteers working on the helpline will only have to enter information about callers into one place to perform the functions of recording notes about the caller and to schedule an appointment when needed. It will also mean that when a client cancels or reschedules their appointment, that information will be auto-updated across all systems (I can't even begin to explain how challenging that currently is).

• Creating an online intake system for clients, allowing each client to provide us with basic information before their appointment and having that information tied to an existing Salesforce record if the client is someone who has seen us before.

• Creating various views from Air Table that will pull data only relevant to each volunteer scheduled for the day. For example, if a lawyer and law student are going to see three clients, they will have the ability to view information about those three clients prior to their shift without clinic staff manually pulling that information together and emailing it to all volunteers (as we do now).

• Allowing volunteer law students and lawyers to take notes about client visits that go directly into Salesforce without having to log in to the client database.

 

Again, the MBAF grant allowed us to get started with Oplidrome, LLC and propelled us into identifying how to take our current systems into a more sophisticated and user-friendly realm. Thank you and thanks to the whole foundation for allowing us to get on this path.