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How Lowcountry Legal Volunteers is Closing the Access to Justice Gap by Maximizing its Budget with Clio for Legal Aid

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CS Landing Page Header Lowcounty Legal Volunteers

Lowcountry Legal Volunteers

  • 1998

    Year Founded

  • 5

    Number of Staff

  • 2024

    Started Using Clio

  • Okatie, SC, USA

    Location

  • Legal Aid

    Fee Types

  • Estate Planning

    Family

    Housing Protection

    Landlord/Tenant Rights

    Practice Areas

Impact of Using Clio

Using Clio for Legal Aid, the Lowcountry Legal Volunteers team is now able to accurately and conveniently pull up key information and track their results.

  • Icons Customer Story Icon Client

    Increased clients ease of access to the organization

  • How many hours to lawyers work?

    Decreased time spent on gathering information for grant reports

  • Customer Story Icon - People

    Increased visibility to the amount of need for legal services in the community

Biggest Challenge They Were Looking to Solve:

How Clio Solved It:

For nearly 25 years, Lowcountry Legal Volunteers has helped people in need access legal services in South Carolina’s Beaufort, Hampton, and Jasper counties. But, as a small, service-focused nonprofit with budget limitations, it was often difficult for the organization to track results and resources efficiently.

“A lot of our issues were related to tracking our results,” explains Anne Caywood, the Executive Director and Managing Attorney of Lowcountry Legal Volunteers.

“We may have been around for 24 years, but we have run on a shoestring budget for a lot of those years. We’re into the service mode: We want to serve everybody and anybody who comes through our doors. But when it comes to reporting and tracking all the folks we serve, we were falling short on that.”

With this challenge in mind, the organization adopted Clio for Legal Aid in early 2024.

Using Clio for Legal Aid, Lowcountry Legal Volunteers can now quickly, accurately, and conveniently stay on top of the numbers—whether that means easily tracking resources, effectively managing grants and funding, or calculating a client’s intake eligibility.

“We were super excited to become a client of Clio for Legal Aid because we’re all about access here.”

The improved workflows that Clio for Legal Aid empowers means the organization can help more people in need and make a greater impact on the community.

“We do a ton of family law, we help abused women, we help children, and we help parents get child support,” Anne says. “We do simple wills and healthcare powers of attorney, and we also help people facing eviction and unsafe housing issues. So clearly, it’s integral for us, providing convenient access to our clients.”

Biggest Challenge They Were Looking to Solve:

For nearly 25 years, Lowcountry Legal Volunteers has helped people in need access legal services in South Carolina’s Beaufort, Hampton, and Jasper counties. But, as a small, service-focused nonprofit with budget limitations, it was often difficult for the organization to track results and resources efficiently.

“A lot of our issues were related to tracking our results,” explains Anne Caywood, the Executive Director and Managing Attorney of Lowcountry Legal Volunteers.

“We may have been around for 24 years, but we have run on a shoestring budget for a lot of those years. We’re into the service mode: We want to serve everybody and anybody who comes through our doors. But when it comes to reporting and tracking all the folks we serve, we were falling short on that.”

With this challenge in mind, the organization adopted Clio for Legal Aid in early 2024.

How Clio Solved It:

Using Clio for Legal Aid, Lowcountry Legal Volunteers can now quickly, accurately, and conveniently stay on top of the numbers—whether that means easily tracking resources, effectively managing grants and funding, or calculating a client’s intake eligibility.

“We were super excited to become a client of Clio for Legal Aid because we’re all about access here.”

The improved workflows that Clio for Legal Aid empowers means the organization can help more people in need and make a greater impact on the community.

“We do a ton of family law, we help abused women, we help children, and we help parents get child support,” Anne says. “We do simple wills and healthcare powers of attorney, and we also help people facing eviction and unsafe housing issues. So clearly, it’s integral for us, providing convenient access to our clients.”

“Using Clio for Legal Aid has been awesome because we’re able to find out at a moment’s notice who we’re serving, how we’re serving them, and what demographic we’re serving.”

How Clio Helped

Top Ways Clio for Legal Aid Has Positively Impacted their Workflows

Clio for Legal Aid is Clio’s practice management software—but optimized for nonprofit, legal aid, and legal service organizations like Lowcountry Legal Volunteers. 

With the guidance of a Certified Clio Consultant, Anne and the team at Lowcountry Legal Volunteers use Clio for Legal Aid to efficiently manage grant information, enable easier client access, and more. 

“It’s been a game changer already. I knew that Clio for Legal Aid would be a game changer for Lowcountry Legal Volunteers;, I just didn’t know in how many ways it would be a game changer.”

Some of the key ways that Lowcountry Legal Volunteers uses Clio for Legal Aid include:

Managing grants and funding and tracking  resources in one centralized space

Before adopting Clio for Legal Aid, the organization struggled with inconsistent data input processes that made navigating data challenging. Now, the team has a consistent data input process and database, which means they can quickly find exactly what they need. This is particularly useful when managing grants and grantors.

“Clio for Legal Aid is great because we rely heavily on grant support,” Anne explains. “So if our grantor needs to know how many clients we’ve served in a certain zip code in a certain time period, we can pull that information up for them.”

“Before, getting grant reports together for our grantors used to be a nightmare. I would have to rely heavily on our bilingual paralegal to spend hours upon hours gathering that information from a Google spreadsheet. Clio for Legal Aid [has] made a night-and-day difference for us. We can now provide accurate information on how we’re doing and how efficient we’re being for our clients, as well as letting our grantors know, ‘Hey, we appreciate you, and here’s what your funding is doing for us.’”

The ease of having consistent data also goes a long way in time savings for the organization—which, in turn, frees up more time to spend on client service.

“Now, we’re able to pull up information almost instantaneously without taking away from our client time. Our bilingual paralegal could be serving our clients better and more efficiently, and now we’re able to. The burden is removed, thankfully.”

Improving client access to services

The more convenient it is for people to reach Lowcountry Legal Volunteers, the more people the organization can help. Clio for Legal Aid makes it easier for clients to find the organization. 

“So far, what we’ve seen is that it makes it easy for our clients to access us. They can access us night or day. They can apply online at our website, and it’s linked directly to Clio for Legal Aid, so they can do it whenever they have time,” Anne says.

Beyond just making it easier for clients to reach the organization, Clio for Legal Aid also makes it easier for lawyers to assess a potential client’s eligibility. 

“Clio for Legal Aid has been super helpful, with our consultant helping customize our Clio for Legal Aid services so we are able to request specific income information from our clients. So, for me as the attorney and the other two attorneys that work at Lowcountry Legal Volunteers, we are able to easily assess whether that person qualifies on an income basis.”

“If they don’t qualify on an income basis, then we’re easily able to refer them to our referral partners so they can still get the help that they need.”

“Our attorneys can view that information, even if they’re at home on a Saturday and say, ‘Oh, we can approve this client,’ or, ‘This client needs service now,’ using Clio for Legal Aid. So that’s been very beneficial for the people we serve. And really, at the end of the day, that’s what we’re all about.”

Raising the visibility of the level of client need

For Anne, the level of data that Clio for Legal Aid provides has been eye-opening.

“I was actually shocked with the data we were able to capture of all the people that had reached out to us and applied for services that we were never able to capture before Clio for Legal Aid. For example, our consultant, Dawn, pointed out to me that in the first month of using Clio for Legal Aid, we had 196 people reaching out for legal services.”

“We were never, ever, ever able to capture that amount of folks. It’s good for me, as the director of our nonprofit, to be able to see what that need is, and express and share that not only with our staff, but also to let funders know that there’s so much need out there that we’re trying to address, and we need their funding support.”

Helping close the access to justice gap in the community

“Clio for Legal Aid really helps us, pretty much in real-time, to assess our efficiency in providing access to legal justice,” Anne says.

“Essentially, Lowcountry Legal Volunteers has been using Clio for Legal Aid to help people access our services. That’s the hardest part: We’re here to serve people and provide free legal services but it’s hard for some people to get through the front door to us, or even to know about us.

“But now that we’re using Clio for Legal Aid they’re able to apply online and they’re able to communicate easily with us. And we need documentation. We’re able to send, or request that documentation, in a friendly, easy manner for them to be able to respond to. It’s really helped the process run more smoothly for our clients and for us.”

“At the end of the day, we’re going to be able to serve more people.”

Anne provides an example of how using Clio for Legal Aid has helped the team assist a client who may not otherwise have reached them.

“We have a wonderful client who is at risk of being evicted. He was able to, from the comfort of his home, apply online for our services. He was able to upload the lease, and then at one point, we were able to get him in. He is an amputee and he has a horrible time traveling and getting transportation, so we were glad to be able to give him that access to justice that he desperately needed.”

Helping the team make educated decisions for the organization

The Clio for Legal Aid dashboard has also been a valuable tool for Anne, as it provides important data quickly—allowing her to make educated, data-driven decisions.

“The Clio for Legal Aid dashboard is great for me personally. It’s great to be able to look at a moment’s notice and say, ‘Okay, who do we have in the pipeline? Who do I need to review before we schedule the next steps?’

“As a volunteer-based organization, we have volunteers that do our intakes. So it’s been integral to scheduling our volunteer intakes and letting them know the type of case, and gathering all the information for them, so at a moment’s notice they have all that vital information about our potential client to be able to serve them better.”

Other Benefits of Clio

The guidance of a Clio Certified Consultant

When implementing Clio for Legal Aid, Anne and the Lowcountry Legal Volunteers team also partnered with their Clio Certified Consultant, Dawn Douthat at 1=3 Consulting. For Anne, Dawn’s guidance has been key in helping the team learn how to use Clio for Legal Aid to its full potential for the organization.  

“Dawn, our consultant for Clio for Legal Aid, is gold, and she’s gold as a volunteer as well. I can’t give her enough shoutouts on that.”

“As someone who runs a small nonprofit that does a high volume of free legal services, it’s vital to have a Dawn or a great Clio Certified Consultant. Because basically, we don’t have time to do what Dawn does, and what Dawn guides our team with doing is so essential. A great Clio consultant is a must, particularly as a nonprofit.”

What’s next

Looking forward, Anne sees even more ways that her team can use Clio for Legal Aid to help more people in need.

“We can see in the future utilizing Clio’s tracking features for our volunteer hours and the value of those hours,” Anne says. “I think at some point it’s going to be critical to track the value of services we provide.

“Last year we provided the value of $2.75 million back to our local community in free legal services. But I think if we start using Clio for Legal Aid for that, we’ll be able to track even more of the benefits, and that number will most likely go up in value.”

Ultimately, Anne is already proud of how Lowcountry Legal Volunteers help clients access justice today, and excited about the future.

“I’m proud of the work that Lowcountry Legal Volunteers get to do every day, and I’m super excited that we’re able to utilize a tool like Clio for Legal Aid to serve our clients and their families better. We’re going to empower hundreds more people than we would have otherwise.”

Clio Products Used

Clio for Legal Aid

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