Website Content Managers

of our work of legal content articles. Um, so we're going to do um a little something we haven't done a little while. We're going to do some actual online brainstorming um and um uh talking about best practices there. So, I'm going to just chat everybody a link. It's a really long link. Sorry. Um, this is a link to a Google Slide deck. Um, where I'm hoping that we I've never actually done this before uh in Google Slides. Um, my Miro account that I've been using for this uh expired and I have to pay money a fair amount of money for it. So, we'll try it in Google Slides and if it doesn't work, we'll do something else. Um, >> so we're gonna brainstorm people or types of people that you might include and then we're going to talk think about um kind of the advantages of that type of people, some of the challenges and some tips. >> Let us get underway with just some introductions. Um, so let's keep the introductions a little short and sweet this time. if you could just say um your name, your organization, and maybe in a sentence or two, one thing that you're working on now at your organization in terms of legal content. >> I'm going to just go in order of what I see on the screen and I'll say I'll call on somebody and then I'll I'll say who's on deck just so you it's not like a complete surprise. Um, Emily, could you start us off if you don't mind with Chris on deck? >> Sure. Thank you, Laura. Uh, so my name is Emily. I'm the website content manager for Wisconsin Law Help. I've only been there a couple months uh so far, so still kind of learning the ropes. Um, but enjoying it very much. And we are currently working on a lot of website upgrades, but we are we've just installed Lacy, so we're um attempting to kind of monitor our articles for legal accuracy using Lacy. That's a big project. Yes. Uh, thank you, Emily. Chris with Shelly on Deck. >> I am Chris Serat at Legal Services Vermont. Um, very recently, we've just been working on our general AI policy for the agency, and that has got me wondering what people are thinking about um tagging or uh disclosing AI use in their Whoops. content. That would be an interesting um topic for our conversation. Um Shellyley with Millie on deck. >> I'm Shelley Reid. I'm the manager of LSNTP and we are working on AI um material, but we're also going back and looking at some of our past um information. So seeing if it needs updating and um our top one of our top pages was our hackathon. Um so looking at seeing the interest there. Fantastic. Great. Um Millie with Gerson on deck. >> Hi, I'm Millie and I'm with Community Legal Aid SoCal. Um we haven't done much in the in the realm of AI as far as the website. And so that's something that we've kind of discussed a little bit. Our executive director brought it up. Um so but we haven't really moved forward much with that. So, I'm just kind of like listening in. My colleague Marilyn, who sometimes is able to join us here, um she works on the website as well along with the web master. So, we're just kind of feeling things out right now. >> Fantastic. Um for those of you joining us, our we're just doing a quick go round. Um and the topic is simply your name, your organization, and one thing you're working on as uh on your legal content. Um, so Gerson, uh, let me know if I'm saying that correctly with Angel on deck. >> Yes. Hi everybody. It's Gerson Gerson Sorto with Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County. I'm the director of legal services here. Um, I'd say transition is the theme for us. We've uh been able to retain a communications manager for the first time, um, social media manager type person for the first time. All these things happening within the last 6 months or so. And then we're also going through an ED transition. Um, so there's a lot that uh is kind of happening on that end and just trying to focus on keeping momentum for website improvements is I think what I'm trying to do. >> Fantastic. Great to have you with us. Um, great. Angel with Erin on deck. >> Hi, I'm Angela Wedell with Pescal Legal Services in Asheville, North Carolina. Um, and right now we are trying to pull together content on all the changes to Medicaid and figure out how to uh explain that in a timely manner. >> Absolutely. >> Um, fantastic. Um, I don't know if I said who is on deck. Uh, [singing] Erin. Um, >> I think it was me. Yeah. >> With Marina. I'm done. >> Hi, I'm Erin Larkin. I'm um the director of the access to justice unit at the DC courts. Um, so I'm not with legal services, but I was for 12 years. So my heart is in legal services. Um, and we just finished a website redesign and realized that we need some web governance. So we are working on trying to establish web governance and get our hands around the monster that is our website. >> Yes, governance and updating is close to most of our hearts, I think. Um, and we may come around uh to that in a something coming up soon. Um, welcome Erin. Um, Merina with um, we've got another Chris on the line. Chris with uh, a C on deck. >> Oh, Marina, you're muted. >> Okay. >> Oh, there you go. >> Sorry. Okay. Let me know if you can hear me. Um, I'm Marina Drobo. I'm the project manager for Mass Eagle Health, which is the self-help website in Massachusetts. Um and yeah, this is my first meeting in this working group. So happy to be here. We um yeah, just continue to improve our and evolve our um content management systems and we rely on a lot of volunteers from different legal aids around the state. So um it's always a challenge getting people to get involved and update their things. So I definitely want to hear from you what works and what doesn't. >> Fantastic. Great. Um, and uh, I have forgotten who is on deck. >> It's me. >> Anybody know they're on deck? >> With a C. >> Ah, Chris with a C with Jay on deck. [laughter] >> Hi, I'm Chris. I apologize for being off camera. I'm not feeling well today, but I'm This is my first meeting and I'm glad to be here. Um, I work for the Arizona Bar Foundation and the Bar Foundation hosts um Arizona's law help website as well as uh several other um legal help uh type websites. We have court help. We have uh that we host on behalf of the courts and then we have law for seniors and law for veterans. And so I'm very excited. I'm one of two people um that do um any like any of the public facing stuff on the sites. And so I'm really excited to hear about how everybody makes this work. >> Fantastic. Great. And Jay and anybody else who's out there, uh, get ready. >> Hi. Um, I'm traveling today, so I'll be mostly listening. Um, my name is Jay Collier. I'm working with New Hampshire 603 Legal Aid um, in anticipation of a major um, relaunch of our website within the next month. So exciting. Fantastic. And anybody who didn't introduce themselves other than me, I realized that I haven't introduced myself and there's there's a fair amount of new people here, which I'm super excited about. Welcome to all of our new people. Um, I am Laura Quinn. I am a consultant specializing in access to justice websites um and I do coaching to uh access to justice websites um around things like content governance, technology, RFPs, uh things like that. Um so yes, that is me. Um, and something that's kind of top of mind for me right now, I don't have anything top of mind right now because I'm I'm I top of mind right now is whether my Google Google Slides are going to work or not for this exercise. So, um, fantastic. So, let's actually dive in there and see in fact whether um my warm-up uh works at all. Um, so if you haven't, let me um put in the link to the spreadsheet again because I think if you've just um uh just joined us um you may not have seen that yet. Um if you can take yourself to those slides if you can. Um Jay, I know you're on the road and not able to participate in slides. Are there other folks who either can't see that or aren't able to participate via document? All right. So, Jay, maybe we can Jay, are you able to type at all? Um, type in the chat or anything? Not Jay's I think Jay may be driving. So, um, fantastic. Let's do a warm-up. Um into this first slide. Um so there's just a how are you feeling today? And the idea is here you're going to select one of these sticky notes on the left. You're going to drag it into the right and type something in it. Um so the idea of dragging it is just so we don't all try to type into the same note at the same time [laughter] which I don't know might not go so well. So perfect. Oo, people feeling very efficient, encouraged. Um, super fantastic. Um, great. I like this. It feels like it's working. Anybody having any trouble with actually typing something in? All right. Let's Oh, no. Not overwhelmed. Not one more thing. So, hopefully we can keep you clear and focused for this hour and uh and you'll get some good stuff coming out of it. Um terrific. Let's move on to slide two. Um you can over all the way over on your left hand side. Um you have the ability to toggle to the next. Um and let us do a little brainstorming. So our topic for today is thinking about um who are the type of stakeholders who might be able to help with articles. So one that's definitely come up in the past is um law students. So I'll just go ahead and brainstorm law students. Um but who are other types of people or you can do variations on law students if you want if you want to add subtleties there. Um let's just brainstorm um for a minute or two. Um we'll wait till we're slowing down. Um and think about kind of the constituencies who might be helpful. All right. And if you're feeling like you're done, we can start to cluster these a little bit potentially. Um so to look at what um may be like other things. [snorts] um to see whether there's any duplicates or whether things are um there's actually a lot here and there are not a lot of duplicates. Yes. All right. So board members are probably kind of like our own staff this cluster here. Sorry I'm clustering myself. uh kind of have this cluster of private attorney. Am I right that proono volunteers implies private attorneys? Is that correct? Cool. Great. Yeah. Um so kind of the idea of people who are in private law. We've got um I'm going to put service center staff potentially with actually with intake workers um with the idea of people who are on the front lines. Is that sensible to folks as people who are fairly like each other? Um, legal services, board membered, retired or members, in-house attorneys. Uh, I'm going to put in-house attorneys with board members. Uh, I don't know. Sorry. I'm trying to cluster these so we can do some finite amount of um pros and cons or um uh deep dives. Let's um um so I've got some dots along the right hand side. There's teal dots. Um oh, sorry. I was just looking at your uh comment, Shelly. Um let's um do a little bit of a dot poll. So, if you can take two dots um and put them on, try to get a dot two dots out of the kind of the middle here because if everybody tries to grab from the top, it's going to be a mess. Um vote for what you'd most like to talk about in terms of the pros and challenges and tips. So, presumably the challenges and tips are going to be the most interesting there. Um, so two dots on to things that are interesting for you. Um, with with the idea that things that are within a cluster you don't have to vote twice for. Oh, let's sorry, I didn't see it. Um, let's not talk about AI in the same vein here. Um, we can come back to AI in another session. Um, we took on AI a couple ones back, but we might make make sense to um, uh, do it another. So, whoever voted for AI can take that vote for another thing. Just two different, I think. All right. Lots of interest in uh private attorneys, so we'll definitely take on that one. Lots of interest in interns. um couple two dots on um freelance writers without legal background. That's actually something that's a kind of a passion of mine. Um I don't know if we have other people here who work with them, but there definitely are people who come to this call who do. Um and then a couple bits and pieces. Um if you haven't put both your dots on, please do so. um know that your dot is going to be more powerful um uh on something that >> Well, I'm having trouble putting a moving a dot for some reason. >> Okay. Oh, where would you like a dot? >> I'd like a dot over to proono. >> Proono. Fantastic. Uh and one more dot. >> Hold on a second. I got to go back to the screen. Sorry. >> No problem. Um, if you have interest in um any so the the uh frontline staff staff at community organizations. Oh, I'm actually going to make I'm going to use a judgment call dot um to do staff at community orgs because Emily asked me specifically if we could talk about that at today's meeting. [laughter] So >> can you move one there for me too? >> Fantastic. All right. Now we have a uh uh definitely a um uh a mess. All right, let us start then with pro bono volunteers. Um I'm going to change where I have law students to uh so no sorry uh so this is private practice whether or not they are lawyers. Um, so what I'd like to do now is kind of continue down this vein of typing out things and then we'll have a little bit of a discussion. Um, so to what are the advantages of of working with private practice lawyers? Um, so things that are kind of Oh, sorry. If you can um uh move to the next slide, please. I forgot that you are not um seeing me. Um, so what are the advantages of working with private practice lawyers? Um, what are the challenges that are potentially specific to them? So I don't know if it's necessary to talk about like, oh, they're busy. Um, so things that are kind of true of everybody, uh, but things that are true of private practice lawyers and then tips. Um, or even, oh, I have lots of experience here. happy to talk in your name. Um I think might be a um uh useful thing here. All right. And people are already starting in. Let's take let's see how this goes because we've got such so much experience here. Uh let's take five minutes and see what happens if we just do this in 30 minutes and end up at 130. And I'm just going to put all the font down one years ago. And we justed to means I just record and people just later. to agencies. We didn't know who wanted like something like that. >> All right. Um, if you feel like you're slowing down, take a look at the challenges and see if you have any tips. um that could provide them or if you feel like you've got lots of experience here, uh would love you to type your name in. Um I guess put that under tips. Tips is talk to me. These are I turn away from All right. Let us So take 30 seconds to finish off anything you're currently writing. Good. All right. So, I'm going to ask some questions of the group based on some of the So, I've had the advantage of being I've only been reading while you've been typing. Um, so there's clearly some themes. Um, so kind of in general, these are people who may well um have specialized knowledge and uh be able to really contribute um more or different stuff. Um, but they may not be as familiar with low-income users that it's hard to get them to do what you ask them to do, include right in plain language. They're busy. Um, a couple of questions simply about um getting them um kind of getting their help, getting their attention. Um, so and in fact I see no specific tips about Oh, I do see a tip of getting referrals from people, you know. Um, but I'm wondering if um one or two people who are working with this this type of of folks or private attorneys are willing to talk just a little bit about where the private attorneys come from. Would do they are they compensated? um things like that for those who aren't really familiar with it at all. >> Yeah, Marina. >> Yeah. Um for us, we work sometimes with attorneys who get kind of referred to us by some people that we work with and we do compensate them or offer to um sorry if it's Um yeah, >> I think you compensate at market rates or at more of an honorarium. >> More like an honorarium, I think. Um I think we paid them like I'm going to say like $65 an hour or something. So it is per hour, but um yeah, it's usually only for a few articles or Yeah. But um yeah, and we aren't, I guess, allowed to compensate legal aid attorneys who work with us. It's just kind of like part of their work that they already have and it's just more on their plates, which also makes it hard. Um so it's kind of weird in that way. But um yeah, I'm wondering because we haven't gotten a lot of I guess like referrals from other legal aid attorneys and I don't know if it's because they don't know people or they don't know people that they trust with this type of content. So yeah, it's usually like people who are former legal service attorneys who've now gone into private practice and like family law would say. >> Yeah. Fantastic. some other kind of and we will provide these um these slides. Um so other um kind of clusters of tips um so kind of providing guidelines, examples, plain language tips. I've been on projects where the plain language training is provided. I'd say it's still hard to get. I mean you can provide tips and training and guidelines and all of that stuff. It's still hard to get uh to work with these folks. Um and in fact, I don't know if I've ever worked on a project where there wasn't somebody who was responsible after the um the attorneys um to actually um do further cleaning up. Um uh ask for things they already have is an interesting tip. Um who who put that in there, Emily? Is that yours? That was mine. >> Yeah. Are you willing to say a little bit more? So the implication they already have articles or things. >> I mean, if they're in private practice, they probably are posting things on their website or should be, you know, to keep the the public up to date on things. So if they already have something in hand and, you know, maybe takes some light editing, it's much easier ask than another ask. or suggest, hey, if you write it for us, you can also use it for your, you know, your site or your LinkedIn or whatever, you know, um, but help them see that it can be beneficial personally in their own work as well as helping the organization. >> Absolutely. >> Are you providing attribution then in that case, Shel, if if someone has something on a blog for instance, and you're republishing it? Um well so we would um if we post something here on LSNAP um I don't yeah that would have to be an organizational decision. Um but I can't think of anything right off the top of my head about why you would not except for you don't want to be seen as advertising for an attorney. Um, so that could be a a reason not to. >> Um, but if it's a regular feature, you know, where you have multiple attorneys putting in, I mean, you can cover yourself that way. >> Yeah. Interesting. Thank you. >> Yeah. And somebody has put in here on the idea of so kind of on the opposite of that um that if you're having trouble um if they're pushing back on plain language or other changes, putting your own organization's name as an author or co-author might um uh help that issue. Who put that comment in? >> I put that comment in. Yeah. Um our organization just has a policy. It's only putting or names as the author on the articles and not any individual lawyers. And so that sort of helps. Um, and it really depends on the person, I think, with how much they care about like wording changes or edits that we make after they write things. Um, but with some people there's a lot of back and forth. And I wouldn't say this is a case with private appeals especially, but I think it could help if um you're worried about like push back on like using jargon or um you know not explaining every single exception to a rule um and just kind of simplifying things. Maybe the attorney will feel better about it if their name isn't on it and it's considered like your work or your org's work, but they've just helped you kind of write it. >> Absolutely. >> Great. Um let us see if we can wind up our conversation on this particular group so we can move on to another uh questions or thoughts, comments before we move onward. All right. And I'm thinking that this we may have enough fodder. Uh I'm going to go back and look at what we've got. We may have enough fodder for our next session as well. Uh let's see how it's go. Let's I know that Emily is under um some time pressure to see what she can figure out in regard to um thinking about staff at other community works. So let's think about that for a moment. Um so I'm thinking here so I'll define it and then definitely I want to hear you define it as well. um community lead organizations. Um, so I'm thinking like for instance there may be um housing advocates um that works a ton with your target audience and may in a practical sense know a ton of the legal stuff um and be in fact great at um writing it for your audience and it just needs a light uh uh look over for the law and it might be good to go. Um this uh is that the same definition you have Emily of uh community organizations? >> Yeah, I I think so. So I Wisconsin Law Health is is kind of looking to partner with um some community organizations to create content. Um and I think you know I'm just curious to hear what people think and happy to touch base with people offline too if anyone's interested. But we're kind of just looking for um concerns people have about that. Some of the things we've run into is, you know, my question about attribution kind of relates to that is sometimes, you know, even these community organizations are hosting things on their website and they don't necessarily want um to drive traffic away from their website. Um you know, so content ownership, tracking metrics, um reporting and also managing the content workflows like if we have one workflow for creating content and they have a different one, you know, what do we follow? Um so those those kind of concerns. So just looking for any experiences people have. Um, and also if anyone has any kind of sample agreements or memorandums of understanding they've actually set up with partner organizations, I'd be really curious to hear about that. Um, >> so let's actually do this exercise for this particular group. Um, so if you make your way down to slide four, I've now got uh staff at community organizations. Um I um uh was doing uh some but obviously uh bad uh notetaking while you were talking Emily. So I got just one of the challenges there. Um so yeah we have um let's just go ahead and do the same exercise five minutes. Um and I will go to town on this one myself because I have some fair experience here. Um, All right. Take 30 seconds to finish writing or if not to if you're done writing to read. Um, if you are currently doing a fair amount of work with organizations, um, can you, um, and and if you're willing to talk to Emily, can you, um, write your name in a tip box? Um, Emily, all of the current tips are currently written by me. Sorry, I uh, I [laughter] went to town on tips. >> This is amazing. Um, I'll take a screenshot of this as well, just my own uh, my my future perusal. Yeah, absolutely. And and around so just in quick summary of this, this is a really interesting, it's almost kind of the flip side if we think about it from the practice um uh private practice attorneys. Um so they work directly with the audience. They likely know how to talk to the clients. They know the questions people have. Um they may have existing uh materials though again it may not be exactly the right stuff that we might want. Um I like the top uh center advantage that they're going to really care um about kind of more crisis changes and policy stuff. Um builds community gets people uh kind of connected to your what you're doing in your site. Um but there's always challenges of course when you've got multiple different organizations working together. Um hard to attribute. um might I've definitely seen situations in which the viewpoints don't align like so one is all about like what actions can you take in this situation and a legal aid organization is more likely to be like what I I actually think this is not necessarily a good thing but like what does the law say you know so what you should do is different than what the law says um in many cases sorry Not that you should do illegal things, but that that is in the same perspective. Um they uh yes uh there may be the may be issues of duplicative content. Um I've seen that happen a lot. Um and I think a big issue here is updating the content. Um and I have a something that is a lot easier said than done. um is uh making sure it's defined who owns the article, who's allowed to update it, and um is responsible for updating both of it. Um so, and that should be a single organization. And that in my in my experience has kind of made or break broken um the partnership where basically they are like what you can just update this without getting our buy in. But on the other hand, saying that it can't be updated unless everybody agrees is just is not likely to be practical. Um, I'm not going to go through all the tips that I just put in. Um, I think it's important that, um, it's only put up in one place for a couple of reasons. There's both technical and non-technical reasons for that. If you have it only in one place, then you can track the metrics on the single place and report it. whoever has it reports it back. Um maybe if we say they're the expert in on what the audience needs, maybe they define the questions and um uh we define the answers. Um yeah, so that was a whole bunch by me. >> That's that's great. Very helpful. Thank you. other people. So, it's sounding like not a lot of other people working with organizations have you found that partner organizations are too much hassle to be worth the effort just not tried much? Angela, what do you think? I mean honestly we have not really just in the past year have actually started producing actual content. Um so we haven't even begun to make that leap into outside of the organization. >> Um so we're we're still internal right now >> just getting started. >> Yeah. And if there is internal capacity to write stuff then that always kind of feels like optimal my >> yeah for us we do work quite a bit with community orgs in certain topics. Um, I feel like especially immigration right now, um, I think sometimes the challenge can be, we do have things in multiple places and a lot of the challenges you were saying about sustainability really ring true for us and getting people to update their content and if they're existing in different formats. Um, also just people either clients or like existing or sorry like advocates know of specific organizations to go to that may or may not be our website. So there's just so many different places that people can look for information. But for example, one partner organization that makes a lot of content doesn't really have it in a format that's meant for clients. It's more like PDFs of different languages for advocates to download, but if people like speak those other languages, their website is only in English, so they wouldn't find them there. >> Um, and then we aren't able to put just PDFs up on our site. We have to tie it to like an HTML page. So that's why we usually put things in HTML like article format and then if there is a PDF flyer, we do still link to it or embed it, but it's kind of separate or like in addition to the article. So that's something we're trying to deal with because sometimes it seems like a lot of hassle for us just to take their existing like PDF content and put it on their site. put it. I think it is valuable and they're usually okay with us having their content site more than one place because it will just help more people. >> Definitely. That sounds like a good use case. Absolutely. >> Fantastic. Any other thoughts, questions, tips on this before we move on to one last area? Let's see who we might have. Let's do interns as somebody who is a little bit different. Um does not seem like they're going to support their whole own well I don't know maybe they'd support well okay so let actually let's look at slide two together. Um so things where we have um the interest around a uh something else is interns, freelance writers and staff. [snorts] Oh we I just did staff. Sorry. Um so just these two. Um unfortunately that I just did. Um, okay. Interns and freelance writers. Um, of these two, which would you more ra which would you rather have potentially a standalone session around into the chat or say something? You can give someone a thumbs up on what they've just said or do it yourself. And it's it's a little bit split. Uh all right. So why don't we do interns? Um because I think um we can get um uh I know that Ohio um works with freelance writers um so that's Rachel who often joins us um and in fact Karen um with New York in fact was a freelance writer um herself um so would be interested um to get them to uh attend or to invite them to attend. So let us talk about interns. Um if you will take yourself to slide sorry not slide 11 slide five. I don't know what I'm thinking now. Um four minutes to think about advantages challenges and tips for working with interns. I'm wondering if by interns we mean undergrads or law student interns or both. >> Um, good question. Um, let's do both together. Um, and maybe if you have thoughts or question thoughts that are specific um to um specify Yeah, maybe to I think this is likely to be a place where unless you have a nonobvious advantage or disadvantage or challenge um maybe to move to tips. All right, put your last 30 seconds worth of thought in and read over what's there. Great. Um, this is a really good summary here. Boy, we uh can create summaries of things in like no time flat. It's really exciting. Um, I'm not going to summarize this one for the interest of time. Um, as you are looking at this, so kind of in general, I think we've got the expected advantages and challenges with just a couple that are standing out to me. um fresh perspectives um maybe potentially uh particularly on tech because a lot of schools are teaching on tech and younger people may have more experience with it. Um so just the challenges there don't have much as much workplace experience yet might reinvent the wheel. uh prioritizing schools and then yeah lots of tips around um checking in, teaming them up, giving them support. Thoughts on anybody feel like they have a fair amount of experience? Certainly like other things, please put your name in if you feel like you could be a resource to others on this. Closing thoughts on interns. Anybody? Uh, somebody give me some comment so we don't go out on no on no thought. Somebody find something interesting on this page. >> So much pressure now. Um, let's see. >> Thank you, Emily. [laughter] >> I just I think maybe just my big takeaway is just be realistic. Like don't don't try to don't don't assign a ton of content writing perhaps to an intern. Make keep it small, manageable. >> Keep it small. Yeah. Try it out before going that too far down. Yep. All right, thank you so much for this. These are always really fun to do in this brainstorming format. Yeah, I need to get back to doing them more often because we generate so much great information so quickly. Um so, um yes, I will put on the list a followup on um hiring writers um and what especially um so there it sounds like there's both interest in both like where do you find people with legal backgrounds but then also journalists. journalists are cheap, so there's real advantages there. Um, also on AI, um, AI writing, uh, but sorry, not just literally, let let's have AI spit out things, but what can AI do potentially? Um, we will be sending out the slides as well as the recording. Uh, thank you, Shelley. Um and yes, um this is a monthly for those of you who are just joining us for the first time. We would love to see you um whenever you're able to make it next time, next month or whenever you're able to make it. We have probably about 20 25 people who are in rotation for this group. It's a great group of really collaborative folks. Um it's the third Thursday of each month. Um, if you're registered for this, then you've got it on the calendar. Terrific. Thank you so much for your time, thoughts, and we'll see you again soon.