Access Pro Bono: Streamlining Access to Legal Help
- Social Justice
Access Pro Bono is a small independent organization doing great things: they promote access to justice by delivering quality legal services for free to those of limited means. Their diverse and community-minded team relies on thousands of legal service volunteers who are equally committed to fostering equity and justice through equal access and representation.
We have worked with Access Pro Bono on several projects including re-envisioning their main website and creating a new Everyone Legal Clinic website. You can read more about our work on those projects in the Access Pro Bono: Balancing the Scales case study here.
the challenge
When technology is holding you back
To offer clients and potential clients access to the legal help they need, it's essential for Access Pro Bono to deliver a low-friction process for people to request a session with a lawyer. The legacy scheduling system was originally built in-house, and their workflow was very much coupled with it. Over time, this led to operational inefficiencies, where the process still relied heavily upon manual effort, and the technical limitations of the system were hindering the organization’s ability to evolve the way they worked.
Client
- Access Pro Bono Society of British Columbia
Sector
- Social Justice
Service
- Strategy
- User Experience
- Design
- Development
Technology
- Drupal
the solution
Turning pain points into feature requirements
Access Pro Bono needed an online booking system that could scale with them and support the organization’s development and growth. To thoroughly understand our client’s needs and create a roadmap for a new online booking platform, we needed to walk through their current workflow and surface the pain points. Through interest holder consultation and extensive user research, we established requirements for a feature-rich platform that would deliver a streamlined client onboarding process as well as a scheduling system complete with email automation and a calendar for booking lawyer sessions, combined with robust security and user management.
Drupal was our technology of choice for this solution for several key reasons:
- It is open-source software, so very much in keeping with Access Pro Bono’s commitment to freedom of access.
- It is scalable and would support their organization as they evolved and needs expanded over time.
- It is flexible enough to deliver complex solutions securely.
With their primary audiences in mind, we collaborated to design and build a powerful platform that met the needs of clinic coordinators who scheduled lawyers into shifts, client call volunteers who scheduled clients into sessions, and lawyers who logged into a dashboard to review and manage their shifts and client sessions, as well as log session notes and submit reports.
Complexity simplified
Looking at the specific and complex needs of this lawyer-clinic scheduling platform, it was important to work with a toolset that could reliably meet the system’s functional requirements. We worked with an established Booking and Availability Management Tool (BAT) that provided the foundation from which we could address availability management, reservations and booking use cases. We also chose to integrate Envoke as the platform’s powerful engine for transactional emails and detailed reporting as it comes with non-negotiable basics including Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) compliance, Canadian data storage, and excellent support.
The end result was an online booking system that streamlined Access Pro Bono’s process, centralized the scheduling of lawyer clinics, and improved reporting functionality, dramatically enhancing operational efficiency. The new system included a triage form through which clients requested sessions, and a calendar that provided visibility into scheduled lawyer shifts, client session availability and automated booking confirmation via email for clients and lawyers. The introduction of a centralized scheduling system with seamless email automation for booking confirmations and cancellations created a user-friendly and intuitive workflow for Access Pro Bono’s network of volunteers and lawyers, reducing cognitive load and dependency on manual tasks. This new booking system allows Access Pro Bono to focus on doing the work that’s most important to them: providing pro bono legal services and access to justice across BC.
