Need a low-cost, low-maintenance, highly intuitive and easily replicated solution to your data troubles? The self-dubbed “Legal Ladies” have you covered.  

At least that’s the product the group of five undergrad UW Information School students delivered to Sound Legal Aid as their Capstone project.

Formerly known as Thurston County Volunteer Legal Services, Sound Legal Aid provides free legal advice on civil matters such as tenant rights or domestic violence to low-income residents in Thurston, Mason, Grays Harbor, Lewis and Pacific counties. 

Despite having a team of 15 paid staff members and 30 to 50 volunteers, the non-profit organization couldn’t easily access and sort information that’s essential to explaining their work in the community, noted Vega Jethani, who served as the Legal Ladies’ project manager.

“You can tell the dedication (Sound Legal Aid staff members) have to their work,” Jethani said. But "they lacked the technological tools, whether through visualizations or key metrics, that truly show the bigger picture."

The Informatics students designed a dashboard that provides a snapshot of the different types of cases the organization works on as well as which counties the cases originated in. The data can be sorted by the race or gender of clients. It also shows which attorneys and caseworkers are assigned to each case, how many hours have been dedicated to specific cases, and the average amount of time a type of case is open.

For Sandra Miller, Sound Legal Aid’s executive director, having the organization’s stats at her fingertips is crucial when seeking grants, talking to news media, or seeking community partners.

“This collectively pulled together all our information and allowed us to show our community impact and give partners confidence in investing with us,” Miller said. “What they delivered to us was truly exactly what we had asked for.”

Initially, the students interviewed different groups within Sound Legal Aid, including attorneys, volunteers and Miller to determine what information they wanted to showcase. 

Terra Shrestha, the UX/UI lead on the project, performed market research, including looking at other non-profit and company dashboards, and developed survey and interview questions to understand Sound Legal Aid’s needs. 

“They already had a vision but weren’t sure what would solve their issues,” Shrestha said. 

She noted the importance of working in person with Sound Legal Aid staff to understand their workflow and later to test whether the dashboard worked for them.

“We truly did enjoy the experience,” Shrestha said. 

The three members of the Legal Ladies’ technical team – Kriti Vajjhula, Priya Hariharan, and Saimanasvi “Manu” Charugundla – were challenged with keeping their solution low budget. As a non-profit, Sound Legal Aid not only wanted to keep its costs low but also wanted to be able to share the iSchool team’s work with other non-profit legal aid services.

The team selected several Google solutions, such as Google Looker Studio, which are free but also secure, Vajjhula said.

“We feel like we’ve made a pretty big impact with the way we’ve done things,” Vajjhula said, noting other organizations should be able to replicate their work without much additional cost. 

Tech team member Hariharan emphasized the importance of automating their work on the dashboard because Sound Legal Aid staff members don’t have the background to maintain a highly technical solution. 

“Our role was to take the data and wrangle it,” Hariharan said. “We were able to see a real-world problem and utilize all the skills we learned in our classes to solve it.”

The team didn’t stop at wrangling the data into a dashboard. They wanted to ensure staff members could use the dashboard with ease and were satisfied with how the data was represented. 

This spring, the team conducted user testing, said Charugundla, another member of the technical team. Staff members were given tasks to perform on the dashboard to test its intuitiveness.

“The user testing was a big part of this,” Charugundla said. “If they weren’t able to do a task, then we knew that something was off. Then we would make tweaks until we came to a solution that worked for them.” 

Sound Legal Aid’s Miller describes the dashboard as incredibly user-friendly and believes the nonprofit will ultimately share the students’ blueprint for it with five or six other similar organizations.

“I was so impressed with the caliber and confidence these young women have,” Miller said. “They were always on point, and their work rivaled that of many companies I’ve worked with in the past.”

Pictured at top: (Top row, from left) Terra Shrestha, Kriti Vajjhula and Vega Jethani; (bottom row, from left) Priya Hariharan and Saimanasvi “Manu” Charugundla.