Funders Delighted by Better Outcome Tracking

Outcomes are among the most important aspects of legal cases. That’s why the LegalServer team pays special attention to the Outcomes module, augmenting it over the years to support a wide variety of uses and satisfy the needs of funders.

LegalServer radically improved the flexibility of outcomes measurement five years ago, in a way that makes it a cinch for programs to report case outcomes in great detail. It works well for reporting to funders who employ the Virginia model or virtually any other reporting scheme. Admins can optionally show users only specific outcome sets to pick from, and can arbitrarily group outcomes for a major funder with a different idea of how outcomes should be aggregated.

Agencies can leverage Outcomes to create categories (such as primary, secondary, and tertiary), track financial outcomes (like amounts and frequency of monetary recovery), and group multiple outcomes for the same case. The City Bar Justice Center in New York City uses these tools to help meet the ever-changing requirements of its funders.

One of the most valuable features with LegalServer Outcomes is being able to keep track of multiple financial outcomes for a single case, and then have everything available for funders in one quick and easy report.

Schwartz also notes that LegalServer’s versatility has been integral when it comes to grant funding. “We’re never quite sure what new funding sources are going to become available, and grant reporting always presents us with a moving target,” he says. “We can easily customize and adapt our forms to prioritize whatever new information we’ll need without adding additional layers of complexity where they aren’t needed.”

Accurate data collection leads to better reports, which can be grouped by Outcome categories and in summation - by counting the number of outcomes recorded in a specific period of time, for example. Outcomes may also be grouped by financial benefit type, with subtotals and grand totals, and filtered down by legal problem code.

The LegalServer community deserves a lot of credit for helping steer the development of the Outcomes module over the years. Legal aid agencies like City Bar Justice Center have provided invaluable feedback and insight to make Outcomes more useful - which all agencies can benefit from in a dynamic legal aid landscape.

We find LegalServer so powerful from its ability to grow and change with us.

Special thanks to Legal Services Corporation (LSC) for featuring the Outcomes module in a recent write-up.