Company Overview
Illinois Legal Aid Online was created in March 2001 as a unique and unprecedented statewide collaboration of legal services providers, funding entities, law schools and the private bar.
Their mission is to increase access to justice for lower-income and vulnerable Illinois residents through the innovative use of technology to assist and educate the public and to train and support legal aid providers and pro bono attorneys.
As the statewide technology center, Illinois Legal Aid Online sits at the center of the legal services and pro bono communities. They developed the statewide technology infrastructure that helps streamline the delivery of free and pro bono legal services, and provides easy to understand legal information and assistance to the public and self-represented persons. The use of technology allows them to deliver their services widely, giving Illinois Legal Aid Online the capacity to reach and help millions of low-income, elderly, and disabled Illinois residents who otherwise would not be able to adequately resolve their legal problems.
Business Challenge
In redesigning their two attorney websites, IllinoisLegalAdvocate.org and IllinoisProBono.org, they needed a way to provide a password-protected section of the websites to allow the separate user groups for each site to communicate with each other.
Problem Summary
They redesigned their two attorney websites in April 2007. Prior to that time, one of their sites, llinoisLegalAdvocate, had one forum with multiple categories. Meanwhile, the other site, IllinoisProBono, had no forums. Their version of FuseTalk at that time was significantly outdated and would not support more than one forum. The users of IllinoisLegalAdvocate are employees of civil legal aid organizations in Illinois and wanted a space to communicate that was password-protected so that only approved users of IllinoisLegalAdvocate could access the space. Illinois Legal Aid Online also wanted to create a separate open space for attorneys that provide legal services on a pro bono basis.
Desired Features in a Discussion Forum
Illinois Legal Aid Online wanted a discussion forum application that would:
- support at least two separate forums;
- support password protection at the forum level, preferably with integration into their site's existing security system; and
- had a customizable interface that could be somewhat branded to look like their own site.
Solution
Illinois Legal Aid Online chose FuseTalk to provide the forums that they needed. In their perspective, FuseTalk had the nicest layout and they were able to change the colors to match their own website design. It integrated directly into their session-based security with the ability to have separate permissions based on forums. It also included some advanced features (blogs and knowledge base) that Illinois Legal Aid Online were interested in possibly using in the future. They were also upgrading from an earlier version, so being able to easily bring in their existing data was an important consideration.
Results
Illinois Legal Aid Online has had the new discussion forums available for over three years now.
They have expanded their community content, adding many new categories on both sites since the upgrade. The discussion forums work well for their small community members, and it integrated easily into their existing framework.
Company Website and Community
URL: www.illinoislegalaidonline.org