Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC) was the first LSC-funded program to purchase Legal Files, in 2001. In the past 9 years there have been a number of significant changes, including a statewide merger, increased staff, major technology changes and upgrades, the development of statewide practice groups, new specialized statewide projects such as the Mortgage Foreclosure Defense Project, new sources of funding with their own reporting requirements, and majorchanges in LSC rules and requirements. Legal Files' flexibility has allowed LANC to adapt successfully to each significant change.
The legal services programs in Connecticut have been using the SQL enterprise version of Legal Files since 2002. We did extensive research at the time, asking vendors questions much like those in this survey, and then having a variety of our users test the top programs for features and usability. We selected Legal Files because it not only provided the features that we wanted, but because of its ease of use and excellent customer support.
Pine Tree Legal, along with the other members of the LegalServices Network (Volunteer Lawyers Project, Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic, Legal Services for the Elderly, & Maine Equal Justice), is in the process of implementing Legal Files as of this writing (November, 2009), so we don’t have a lot of experience with it.
I have been impressed, however, with its features, ability to customize, the prompt & helpful support, and the strong project management we’ve received. I’m still exploring the underlying database and have so far found that it is well designed.
