Orbit — the next step in the Victoria Legal Aid Journey

Since teaming up with Victoria Legal Aid (VLA) as a Code for Victoria Fellow last year, my team and I have been busy creating better ways to match people with the right legal aid service across Victoria.

Christian Arevalo
Code For Australia

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Check out here and here to see what we’ve done so far.

This is a story about where we’re heading now, which centres around a new tool called Orbit. Orbit, in essence, is an online referral, booking and information tool seeking to:

  • provide accessible information about the services on offer
  • enable good referrals and facilitating entry into services

Orbit was born out of CLCs and VLA’s need to access real-time service information and availability, and VLA in particular needs an organisation-wide booking tool.

So, how do we even begin?

As part of our research for Orbit, we visited a range of VLA offices, Generalist Community Legal Centres (CLCs), Specialist CLCs, Federation of CLCs and Justice Connect. During these visits interviews with managers, lawyers, admin staff and volunteers were conducted as well as shadowing of front line staff.

We did this with the aim to identify their goals and priorities in their work. To learn about the barriers they meet and what motivates them. Also getting an idea of what tasks they are doing, their context of work, tools used and habits help identify who the Orbit user is.

We know already that Orbit is going to be used across the sector of both CLCs and VLA offices so it was important for us to learn about the relationships across offices and organisations too.

How do we process that all?

After conducting our research, we decided to consolidate it in an affinity diagram to help us identify and understand patterns and themes.

We did this by writing insights, observations, quotes and users’ key ideas on post it notes and attempted to sort these post it notes into logical groupings. By grouping this unorganised information into meaningful themes, we were able to identify patterns, identify and analyse challenges and it helped pointing us in the direction of potential solutions.

After multiple initial sorts, our affinity diagram evolved into two main hierarchies;

  1. An ecosystem including topics around collaboration, trust, referrals and community
  2. Services including topics around knowledge gaps, eligibility and provision

Aside from our Ecosystem and Services hierarchical groupings, many other useful groupings emerged during the creation of the affinity diagram that helped us better understand single-issue themes and patterns. For example…

  • Good vs. bad referrals
  • Issue spotting
Rikke, Toby and Christian

Where to from here?

Offices across the legal sector work together on an ad hoc basis. For Orbit to succeed it is critical that these organisations work together to achieve a balanced ecosystem.

There’s a lot needed to make this happen. These are just some of the things we’re thinking about at the moment:

  • How can we support relationships and communication in a consistent way across offices in the legal sector?
  • How can we provide a holistic response/experience to clients?
  • How can we assist staff to provide this?
  • How can we support CLCs desire to work both independently and collaboratively at the same time?
  • How can we capture data in a time and flow-efficient way for front-line staff across the sector?
  • How can we create a supportive environment where offices see benefits in working closely together and trust work done in other offices?
  • How can we capture changes in local community needs and trends real time?
  • How can we address the entire client journey when it starts and/or ends outside a CLC or VLA office?

We’ll be tackling these challenges as we continue our work over the next few months. We’d love to hear your thoughts and insights, either via the comments below, by joining us on Slack, or at one of the Code for Australia events in the near future (you can catch us at most Open Houses).

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