Talk Justice, an LSC Podcast: Scaling and Improving Legal Tech Projects
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Carl Rauscher
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WASHINGTON—Legal tech innovators discuss how they are working to scale and improve their successful projects on the latest episode of LSC’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 their projects. Then, in 2024 they were both selected for a different TIG, called the Sustainability, Enhancement and Adoption (SEA) grant. This funding supports TIG projects that have demonstrated excellent results as they develop further and increase uptake.
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 the legal information up to date, they would conduct content reviews every 12 to 24 months. It was time-consuming, and they found that very little needed to be updated. But, what did need to be changed could have been out of date for several months.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 that Bai’s team is using to develop more resources and tools.
“I think what's really important about the new SEA funding that LSC is making available in this space is that it gives us the opportunity in a second round to look at how can we respond to some of the issues that we found in the first round of funding, and it also helps us to make it more replicable, which is one of the goals of the TIG [program] in the first place,” says Bai.
“LSC wants to use this money to fund technology improvements that other organizations can use, but sometimes when you build something for the first time, it's really specific to your organization,” Bai continues. “And what I like about this second round of funding is now we get to work with two other organizations to see how they're going to be using [LACI].”
The origins of FosterPower were covered in a 2023 episode of Talk Justice. Sartor explains that FosterPower’s mission is to improve the lives of youth in foster care by creating access to information on their benefits, protections and legal rights. The project started as a pamphlet, and later with TIG funding they developed it into a website and app.
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.”
FosterPower will also add content on human trafficking and Gray and Sartor are working on efforts to support other states in adopting FosterPower’s model, fitting it to each state’s needs, as every child welfare system differs.
“We’re looking to come up with a blueprint—a way to shorten that runway for everyone so that they can do it faster, learn from our mistakes and sort of set them up for success right away,” says Gray.
Talk Justice episodes are available online and on Spotify, YouTube, Apple and other popular podcast apps. The podcast is sponsored by LSC’s Leaders Council.