Legal tech innovators discuss how they are working to scale and improve successful projects on an episode of Legal Services Corporation’s “Talk Justice” podcast. Host Cat Moon is joined by Taylor Sartor, senior attorney at Bay Area Legal Services (BALS) and legal director of FosterPower; David Gray, business project manager at BALS and business director of FosterPower; and Luigi Bai, managing attorney of Lone Star Legal Aid’s (LSLA) Innovation Team.
FosterPower and Bai’s software project, Legal Aid Content Intelligence (LACI), leverage technology to make high-quality legal information available to people for free online. Both also received Technology Initiative Grants (TIG) from the Legal Services Corporation to launch projects. In 2024 they were both selected for a different TIG, called the Sustainability, Enhancement and Adoption (SEA) grant.
The idea for LACI came from challenges Bai and his colleagues encountered in maintaining and updating LSLA’s online resources for self-represented litigants. To keep legal information up to date, they conducted content reviews every 12 to 24 months. What needed to be changed could have been out of date several months.
“So, this was not really serving us or our public really well,” says Bai. “We noticed that the federal statutes and legal information, as well as Texas statutes and legal information, were all available online, so that gave us an idea: what if we had a piece of software that knew about all of our documents and legal resources and also knew for each document what of those authorities were important to the document?”
LACI monitors these web sources, notifies LSLA of any changes and flags which documents need to be reviewed. The software has freed up significant time.
During their first round of TIG funding, Sartor was running all FosterPower trainings and conferences on her own, training over 400 people from different agencies and organizations across Florida. She explains that because the child welfare system in Florida is privatized, educating those involved in the foster system is very challenging. The Department of Children and Families contracts out to dozens of community-based care agencies, who then contract out to other case management organizations.
“One of the visions that I had for our expansion was to hire a training and outreach specialist and for this training and outreach specialist to have lived experience in the foster care system,” Sartor explains. “What we're doing is dividing the work where this training and outreach specialist is going to do all of the non-attorney training, so really focusing on case managers, child welfare professionals and youth, and then I am focusing more on the judiciary and attorneys.”
Talk Justice episodes are available online and on Spotify, YouTube, Apple and other popular podcast apps.
FosterPower and Bai’s software project, Legal Aid Content Intelligence (LACI), leverage technology to make high-quality legal information available to people for free online. Both also received Technology Initiative Grants (TIG) from the Legal Services Corporation to launch projects. In 2024 they were both selected for a different TIG, called the Sustainability, Enhancement and Adoption (SEA) grant.
The idea for LACI came from challenges Bai and his colleagues encountered in maintaining and updating LSLA’s online resources for self-represented litigants. To keep legal information up to date, they conducted content reviews every 12 to 24 months. What needed to be changed could have been out of date several months.
“So, this was not really serving us or our public really well,” says Bai. “We noticed that the federal statutes and legal information, as well as Texas statutes and legal information, were all available online, so that gave us an idea: what if we had a piece of software that knew about all of our documents and legal resources and also knew for each document what of those authorities were important to the document?”
LACI monitors these web sources, notifies LSLA of any changes and flags which documents need to be reviewed. The software has freed up significant time.
During their first round of TIG funding, Sartor was running all FosterPower trainings and conferences on her own, training over 400 people from different agencies and organizations across Florida. She explains that because the child welfare system in Florida is privatized, educating those involved in the foster system is very challenging. The Department of Children and Families contracts out to dozens of community-based care agencies, who then contract out to other case management organizations.
“One of the visions that I had for our expansion was to hire a training and outreach specialist and for this training and outreach specialist to have lived experience in the foster care system,” Sartor explains. “What we're doing is dividing the work where this training and outreach specialist is going to do all of the non-attorney training, so really focusing on case managers, child welfare professionals and youth, and then I am focusing more on the judiciary and attorneys.”
Talk Justice episodes are available online and on Spotify, YouTube, Apple and other popular podcast apps.
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