Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) has posted its 2010 Technology Plan as a publicly viewable Google Doc, in solidarity with NTAP’s efforts at its technology planning portal to support legal services programs as they develop the technology plans now required by LSC.

There are a lot of different ways one can approach this task. We tried to avoid the all-too-prevalent, easily scanned, less likely read, and arguably not so well comprehended bullet-style of reporting and planning. Yes, there is select use of bullets (three sets, to be exact). In the opening paragraph we recognize that “the LSC instructions require, at a minimum, identification of any capacities the organization lacks, but encourage submission of a plan that describes current and planned uses of technology.” That is what we think we did.

We wanted to create something readable, something that helps us, the Legal Services Corporation and others interested to read and understand how we view and take advantage of technology. Conforming to the LSC baselines is pretty good place to build out from, and despite their predictably sterile descriptions of basic technology needs, the twelve basic categorizations in the LSC baselines are a reasonable way to break it all down. So we did it that way.

Like everyone else out there, we are feeling the crush of these times on our clients, the loss of any number of alternate funding sources, the unparalleled collapse of IOLTA,… oh, we all know too well the story at hand. And if that is not bad enough, our institutional resources have been further strained by the calamity of a major fire that recently took out our Ukiah Office. We are pleased to report that our existing technology infrastructure and practices helped us weather that setback, but undoubtedly would have been magnified many times over without our having essential technologies in place.