Jillian Theil has been the Training and Field Support Coordinator for Pro Bono Net since 2011. She manages the LSNTAP/PBN Community Training series.
Pro Bono Net and LSNTAP kicked off their 2015 LSNTAP Community Training series with the recurring favorite, “50 Tech Tips for Getting You Started on Summer Projects.” The training featured 50 tech tips for project management, collaboration, communication and more, including resources to help legal aid techies get started on that summer project they’ve been putting off. It also included “homegrown” tools and resources developed by and for the legal aid community, and sources of nationally-relevant content and videos that programs have made available for community use.
Tim Ng of the Legal Aid Association of California kicked things off by highlighting some great general tech tips for the legal aid community. Some of these included Ninite, a program to install and update all your programs at once and tinypng, a compression tool for .png files.
Jenny Singleton of Minnesota Legal Services State Support highlighted some great tech productivity tools including Workflowy, a workflow tech tool and Wunderlist, a great to-do list tool.
Jessie Posilkin of the Legal Services Corporation kicked off her presentation with a great reminder – sometimes, the most helpful tech tips don’t involve tech at all, but are rather about getting back to basics. Take a step back and go on a walk to reset your mind, make sure to pick up the phone to talk directly to your colleagues, and be sure to take time to orient your team to any new technology. These small tips will enhance your tech experience.
Not to forget some of the great homegrown tech tools the legal aid tech community has created, Anna Hineline of LawNY talked about WriteClearly and ReadClearly, two great plain language tools. She also discussed other useful products, such as IFTTT, which allows for automated actions between different tech tools.
Rounding out the tech tips was my presentation on tools that have made my life easier working in legal aid technology. A few of my favorites include device mode and mobile emulation in Chrome and the Google Analytics plugin for Chrome.
To view the other tips mentioned on this webinar, be sure to check out materials available on the SWEB Support Site and join us for the next LSNTAP/PBN webinar, “Process Mapping for Civil Legal Services: Small Investments with a Big Impact!”
NTAP helps nonprofit legal aid programs improve client services through effective and innovative use of technology. To do this, we provide technology training, maintain information, create online tools, and host community forums such as the LStech email list. Read about us, or contact us at info@lsntap.org for more information.