Articles

Recently, Columbia Law School’s Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic and Glenn Rawdon, Program Counsel for Technology at LSC, produced the Optimizing Online Outreach for Legal Services Organizations report.

The report gives a rundown of how various groups people use the internet, both in general and specifically sites providing legal assistance. The report also pays special attention to the three groups that LSC has identified to be at risk of being unable to find or access online resources: non-native english speakers, low-literacy native english speakers, and the “tech-averse”.

After laying out the current situation, the report makes a series of recommendations for best practices that can be implemented. This list is particularly well put together, and the items are all concrete and actionable. Some of the suggestions include collecting and sharing analytics on your website, configuring your website to get the most value from search engines,  and making clear who the website's targetedusers are to reduce the the number of ineligible users.

In summary, time spent going over this report may result in concrete suggestions tht will allow your organization to improve your online reach.