The legal system in the United States is daunting to an ordinary Joe. It is even confounding to a newcomer seeking redress, and, according to the Legal Services Corporation, over 80 per cent of the civil legal needs of low-income Americans remain unmet. For organisations offering legal aids, data on the outcome of services provided to clients becomes hard to quantify. FrontlineSMS and The Legal Aid Society of Cleveland (Cleveland Legal Aid) ran a 9-month pilot program to see if the use of SMS technology can help solve this problem.
Basic legal assistance is directed to households earning less than $14,713 for an individual, or $30,313 for a family of four. Their cases are often never followed up, resulting in a lack of data showing the results of the aid offered. The Pilot Outcome Texting Project was initiated in February 2017, seeking to find out the eventuality of the client’s cases. FrontlineSMS developed an automated software with unhindered reach to Cleveland Legal Aid’s clients, 86.4 percent of whom have mobile phones. The majority of them (84.4%), translating to 14,354 applicants, agreed to receive the text messages. The initiative admitted 995 participants and registered an overall response rate of 61.9 per cent.
After identifying cases to be assisted, the Cleveland Legal Aid team used the FrontlineSMS platform to load and send outcome messages, group its clients in different categories according to their legal needs, receive responses and download data. The system allowed Cleveland Legal Aid to upload a list of participants and trigger responses upon prompts. It also kept track of the message interactions, compiled the data in tables later downloaded to a CSV file, and analysed it in Excel by the legal aid team. The results were automatically delivered through email every week.
“We have long recognised the benefits of incorporating outcome data into the organisational decision-making process about brief services. We just have not had good data to use for this purpose. Now that we are starting to collect such data through the Outcome Texting Project, it will become one of many types of data we use on a regular and routine basis at Legal Aid.”
Through FrontlineSMS, legal aid programs find it easy to access outputs such as the number of clients served, the number of cases handled, the kind of services offered, and the consequences, effects, and impacts of the rendered services. Cleveland Legal Aid was able to identify whether the legal result was a win, loss, or dismissal.
FrontlineSMS considered Cleveland Legal Aid’s data architecture and repurposed it to build redundancy, continuity, compliance, and security, enabling an automated, secure, and flexible SMS interaction tool. The key to FrontlineSMS staying power is pegged on its focus to continue developing communication tools from the last mile up, aiming its technology at barriers to replication. This includes engineering its tools to optimise commercial and social contexts, prioritize adoption, and access technical sophistication.
For over 15 years, FrontlineSMS has grown cognisant of the growing complexity of managing data in challenging contexts. Its system development adopts system and commercially accessible approaches to exert control over its digital footprint. For legal organisations offering aids, texting with clients has great potential for community engagement. This project is the first step in learning how to use texting technology in creative and effective ways to deliver legal services to low income clients.
This pilot's success opens the door to legal aids experiencing complex situations, including data-protection-compliant data architecture, security with adverse infrastructural providers, and continuity of core operations even during difficult times such as chaos. FrontlineSMS hopes to continue working with a diversified range of organisations struggling with holistic approaches to those issues.