LSC's Innovations in Technology Conference

Technology improvements have enabled the automation of more and more tasks in the legal services office, such as preparing reports for funders and conducting factual research in cases. But has efficiency reduced transparency? How can everyone in an organization be on the same page when the details of important processes are encoded in computer code or exist only in the brains of irreplaceable technical staff? Can managers assure quality without learning to code? This presentation will describe methods and tools that bridge the gap between non-techie managers and the computer systems that automate important tasks. For example, Behavior Driven Development (BDD) software allows managers and techies to collaboratively design and validate computerized processes such as Legal Server customizations. Another example is Reproducible Research (RR), a method of preparing reports in which the transformation of data from the original database into final results is fully specified in a single document. This allows the report to be re-run for a different time period at the touch of a button, in a transparent way.