Legal service providers often meet clients who need help that they themselves can’t provide — not only from other legal services, but also social services, healthcare, etc. Yet this directory information — about which organizations provide what services to whom — is hard to keep up-to-date, and typically maintained in duplicative, incompatible silos. This status quo fails both legal service providers and their clients; it also hinders more rigorous analysis of community needs and program effectiveness. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Open Referral is helping organizations take a new approach to this old problem: by using a common data standard, and interoperable tools, we can enable different information systems to share the same resource directory data in real-time. This affinity group will discuss an early adopter for the Open Referral format — the Florida Legal Aid Resource Federation — which is well on its way to establishing a statewide data-sharing system that enables the same up-to-date data to be simultaneously accessed by every case-management system, website, portal, app, etc.
