Bringing Automation to the Legal Aid Sector
Legal Aid Content Intelligence (LACI) web application: Saving 1,000+ hours per year for lawyers and legal proffesionals
- What We Did
Strategy & Planning
Custom Web Application
Data Parsing
API’s
Automation & Workflows
Email Alerts
Database Development
Lone Star Legal Aid, based in Houston TX, protects and advances the civil legal rights of low-income Texans by providing advocacy, legal representation, and community education that ensures equal access to justice. This mission means it is essential for the organizations professionals to stay up to date on the latest changes to statues and regulations — and quickly edit resources in LSLA’s extensive resources library to reflect any changes.
Keeping track of critical legal resources & content
What Lone Star Legal Aid’s staff found was that this was an exceptionally labor-intensive process. Hundreds of authorities needed to be tracked, and hundreds of public-facing resource documents updated with the latest information. All of this was done manually — until we found a better solution.
The Legal Aid Content Intelligence system (LACI) gives LSLA the much needed ability to automate the tracking of changes to relevant legal authorities, and notifies the assigned staff members when changes are made. This application was custom-built by our team for Lone Star Legal Aid in 2024, and was developed using Drupal CMS.
Since launching, this new application has saved Lone Star Legal Aid staff hundreds of hours in manual searching, sorting, and indexing, and is expected to save thousands of hours in the coming years.
Our Solution
The web app we built for Lone Star Legal Aid:
1) Monitors the statutes and regulations LSLA needs to keep up-to-date information on. The application runs a periodic scan of 600+ legal authorities that have implications for LSLA’s online resources. The scan job runs on a weekly basis by default, and can be customized. Users can also run manual scan jobs when needed.
2) Notifies the relevant LSLA staff when changes to these authorities are made. When a change to an authority is detected by the system, any users monitoring an associated document are notified via email. For example, if your were monitoring the document ‘OP04316 Contact the District Attorney’, and a legal authority pertaining to this document was changed, you would receive an automated email, informing you of the change and prompting you to investigate!
3) Allows LSLA staff to track the documents that may require changes. The application marks documents with a recently-edited authority as ‘Pending’. LSLA staff can then go into the system, marking and sorting them appropriately depending on where they are in the process. Once a document has been updated to reflect the changes to the authority, they can mark it as ‘Complete’ and remove it from the queue.
4) Allows LSLA staff to add new documents and authorities with ease. Users can add new documents, new authorities, and associate documents with authorities with ease, in a clean, user-friendly web-based interface.
