Innovating Access to Justice
About us
Human Centered, Collaborative, Transformative Services
Mission
The mission of the Lab is to engage in transformative innovation that improves the delivery of legal services, expands access to justice and addresses inequity in the delivery of legal services in rural areas.
Vision
A dedicated hub for identifying and implementing new solutions for bridging the justice gap.
Goal
The Lab will bring together clients, community partners, law schools, staff, and justice tech experts to pursue projects that integrate technology and design best practices into legal service delivery that improves access to justice.
Objectives
- The Lab will be an in-house hub for improving access to justice with better processes, better technologies, and better designs. While our primary focus is on improving North Carolinians’ access to legal services, learning and improving is at the heart of the Lab’s mission.
- The Lab, through innovations, will collect more, higher-quality data on legal needs in North Carolina and use these data-driven insights to improve LANC’s service offerings, particularly in rural areas.
- The Lab will work to ensure that its innovations are governed by equity and the communities they serve and impact.
- The Lab will create a space where other legal services organizations can learn from our work and adapt it to their own communities.
- The Lab will collaborate with people, organizations, and law schools across North Carolina to help us integrate ethical and governance best practices into our technology initiatives and help translate, scale, and share insights from our projects.
Project 1: Modernizing Intake
A better Helpline can have a multiplicative impact on our ability to serve North Carolinians.
Our work to improve the Helpline will focus on four key areas:
- Improving the entry points to our Helpline, so that people can engage with us over text message, on the web, or via community partners;
- Modernizing our call center technology stack to better support a distributed workforce;
- Deepening our ties with other legal services organizations to make higher-quality referrals for people we are unable to help, and
- identifying process improvements to smooth the adoption of new technologies and tools.
Meet the Team
Scheree Gilchrist, Chief Innovation Officer
Lydia Vincent, Innovation Fellow
Jeff Kelly, Advisory Board Chair
Partner at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP
Get Involved
Advisory Board
Legal Aid NC cannot bridge the justice gap alone. We need the support and active participation of our communities to truly be transformative and create scalable solutions that will improve processes and provide greater access to justice.
The Innovation Lab welcomes support and advice from all — clients, community leaders, academia, other legal services providers, legal professionals , legal technology experts, and change management experts. We invite you to volunteer on our Advisory Board, in a non governance capacity, by lending your knowledge, expertise, and guidance to the Lab.
Advisory Board Interest Form
Internship Opportunities
Legal Aid of NC is expanding its MLK program to include an opportunity for an intern to work alongside Legal Aid of NC’s Chief Innovation Officer in LANC’s Innovation Lab (LIL). The law student intern will work work with our Chief Innovation officer and program staff to identify and design new solutions and best practices that improves our delivery of legal services.
Donate
Our unique service model combines innovations with local, accessible offices that are staffed with passionate and talented attorneys, paralegals and support staff who are experts in their practice area.
This approach ensures that every vulnerable North Carolinian has access to the best advocacy possible. But we cannot do this alone!
Contact us
To learn more and get involved email us at LANCInnovates@legalaidnc.org.