For those most concerned with access to justice efforts, conversations about technology revolve less around the latest trends and innovations and far, far more around budgets.

When Bobbin Singh and Erin McKee co-founded the Oregon Justice Resource Center in 2011, hoping to uphold basic civil rights for Oregon's legally underserved communities, they were determined to learn from the technology strategies of their predecessors. When they started putting together the technology infrastructure for the center, they spoke to other legal aid organizations, hoping to pick up some insight about best strategies.

“One of the things I hear consistently is that a lot of organizations are server-based or have programs that are installed on your computer, as opposed to being cloud-based, and they were finding that to be antiquated and cumbersome and clunky,” Singh said.

Many organizations told Singh about the years and funding they'd spent trying to move their legacy servers and technology into cloud systems. Singh took those lessons into the center's original tech strategy. “We were very intentional about trying to stay cloud-based, in part because we wanted to future-proof our system,” he said.

For an organization like the center, cloud-based systems are a key asset because they keep information both secure and accessible. “If we can streamline how we're able to access information or file documents or retrieve or see those documents and see them across the office, those are all important things to being able to provide services more effectively,” he said.

The biggest selling point of the cloud for Singh, however, was its price point. “I think that's the huge attraction to it. Some of the other established software programs that exist are pretty expensive. They charge per user or per account,” he said. For cloud-based options, however, “the costs are much smaller, and the costs are much easier for us to take on.”

Cloud-based systems also helped Singh cut down on technology maintenance, which can reduce overhead costs and keep budgets focused on the center's work supporting low-income people as they navigate the criminal justice system. “We have IT support from someone who is volunteering with us. It's a lot easier to be able to maintain that system through a cloud-based system,” he noted.

But while Singh had plenty of cloud-based services to choose from in designing the center's core technology, he found that very little of it was designed with public interest attorneys in mind. “There is not exactly a cloud-based software out there that fits. Most of the software out there is created for for-profit law firms,” Singh noted.

Singh and McKee initially started by using a few different cloud-based systems and working across them. “It was clunky, but we got used to it,” he said. Recently, however, the center has folded all of these systems into Microsoft's Office 365, which has email, document and matter functionality.

In part, Singh has found that keeping the center's technology strategy simple helps keep their work streamlined and efficient. “It's all pretty simple stuff,” he said. The bigger issue, he noted, is in trying to combine all the small pieces into a fully integrated system. “It's just understanding how to make all those systems talk to each other,” Singh added.

While that simplicity can help the center operate at its best, it can still be difficult to compete with large corporate law firms flush with resources to buy newer, more effective technology. “For a nonprofit, it's a challenge trying to stay up to date with technology and find cost-effective ways to make sure that we don't end up falling behind. It's a consistent challenge,” Singh said.

That work, Singh said, requires a balancing act of “trying to make sure that we can keep up in a way that makes sense with the dynamic world that exists around technology but make it practical for people who really need basic systems, to really not make it overly complicated or too difficult for people to use.”