National Legal Aid Technology Report

[This analysis is based on Madhu Lakshmanan's presentation in NTAP's Introduction to the LSNTAP Interactive Tech Survey (March 2009).]

Background

NTAP's 2008 Technology Survey was initially conceived of as a techie directory which would facilitate mentoring between community members about aspects of technology work in legal aid. Because that idea did not garner much popularity, NTAP shifted the direction of the project toward gathering a snapshot of the state of the technology field for legal aid, and helping program staffers see how their peer programs across the country are implementing information technology.

To gather this data NTAP asked community members to respond to two lengthy surveys - one aimed at administrators via private email and the other aimed at legal aid techies via listservs such as LStech. Interpreting the data we received was a challenge, partly because none of the questions in either survey was mandatory. The surveys were so long that NTAP did not want to discourage users from giving partial information. Nevertheless, 56 legal aid techies and 42 administrators completed enough of the survey and this document summarizes their responses. (We're extremely grateful!)

Recognizing that gathering this data annually would be a difficult process to sustain, NTAP has transferred the initial results of the survey into its interactive National Legal Aid Technology Report, where programs can submit new or updated data as well as rate products and vendors they are using in their programs to keep the community apprised of their IT initiatives.

What was the content gathered for each of the surveys?

The administrative survey focused on budget; IT priorities, policies and planning; questions about program websites and use of project management software and wikis; technology training, number of technical staff, and use of operations (HR and accounting) software.

The technical survey focused primarily on the hardware and software which formed the backbone of IT in the responding programs. As such, questions asked techies to talk about their servers, backup systems, network, hardware, operating systems, email, and antivirus packages. Additional questions focused on communications software, training priorities and communications technologies.

Who responded?

• The majority of respondents (67% of administrators and 68% of technical staff) worked for LSC-funded programs.

• Tech Survey respondents worked for organizations with full time staff ranging from 8 to 302, with the average staff size being 62.
• Admin survey respondents worked for organizations with full time staff ranging from 1 to 209, with the average staff size being 65.
• Program budgets ranged from $300,000 to $22,793,570.
• What was the geographic distribution of the respondents?

  Here's the distribution by region for the Administrative Survey:

  

  Here's the same information for the Technical Survey:

  

...And on to the survey results themselves.

On Budgets

• Budget Configuration: NTAP found that there was no correlation between the size of a program's budget and whether they had an separate, dedicated IT budget. In fact, fewer than half of administrative respondents worked in an organization that had a separate IT budget. These results seem to point toward a trend of integrating IT expenses into the program services of the organization.

  

• Allocations of Budget for IT Services: Consistently and overwhelmingly, hardware and personnel make up the majority of the IT budget. Programs where the personnel budget was low typically paid for outside consulting or support contracts that made up the difference. Programs consistently allocated the least money for training and communications.

On Technical Planning and Policies:

• Tech Plans: 44% of respondents had tech plans. A recent NTEN survey suggested that 36% of the overall nonprofit industry has tech plans, so legal aid may be 'ahead of the curve.' Most programs had developed specific tech planning components around software maintenance, IT staffing, tech support, training and case handling. Security, disaster planning and software and hardware standards were less likely to be articulated within tech plans.

  

• Tech Policies: Results show that the majority of program technical policies address staff use of email, the Internet, and program equipment. Many have confidentiality polices. Data storage and purchasing policies are less common.

  

On Training

• Program Training Activities: The overwhelming majority of programs offer fewer than three trainings to non-IT staff over the course of the year. This includes orientation for new employees. 63% of programs have established IT materials for the orientation of new users. Overwhelmingly the most common training topics for non-IT staff were related to case management software. Almost 50% of respondents had established case management systems trainings. This was followed by email, calendar software and online legal research (roughly 20% each); and various office suite training - word processing, spreadsheets and presentations - which were offered by between 10% and 15% of respondents. It's important to note that these results don't track the total training effort in respondent's programs, because IT staff offer ad hoc training in response to help desk calls.

• What did administrators identify as top priority training needs? Over 25% identified case management systems and advanced word processing as top priorities.
  

• As for training on the technical side: Techie respondents expressed a need for diverse trainings in various technical topics, including Exchange Server, Cisco Router, SQL, Networking, Project Management, Time Management, Crystal Reports, Security, OSX Server, Linux, SNMP, Web Development, Photoshop, HTML, Sharepoint, Document Assembly programming, Citrix, SQL Network Administration, Database training, Server maintenance, Virtualization.

On adoption of innovative tech by programs.

• Wikis: 31% of respondents reported that their program used a wiki. Most of those programs used a wiki for internal purposes -- to maintain online manuals, for project management, or for intranet functions.

• Hotdocs: 46% of respondents reported that their programs were using hotdocs.
• VoIP: Almost 50% of respondents reported that they were using some form of voiceover IP phone systems in their programs.
• Web conferencing: The community has broadly adopted web conferencing for internal functions. 50% of respondents reported using web conferencing to attend or host remote presentations. Fewer use web conferencing for technical support (20%) or for project management meetings (13%).

Conclusions

The snapshot shows a community that is quickly making use of time and budget saving technologies such as Hotdocs, VoIP and web conferencing. On a program level, the community has made significant steps in tech planning and policy development, but could benefit from more comprehensive training programs. Finally, NTAP's 2008 survey showed that the legal aid community is adopting a broad variety of technologies, but their efforts are so diverse that it's difficult to identify community-wide trends. This report could be a resource for programs doing tech planning or making specific decisions about a technology. The National Legal Services Technology Report could be a significant source of technology information for legal services if programs continue to participate in the future.