One System for Every Client, Grant and Case at Legal Aid WA

Legal Aid WA provides criminal, family and civil law services to disadvantaged people across the state, drawing on over 470 private lawyers as well as its own practitioners.

Its client and case data was spread across ageing systems, LAW Office and Grants Online. Work was routed by email chains and phone calls, and managers had no live view of workloads or bottlenecks, which made it hard to plan resources for peak demand.

Silver Lining ran a four-week Implementation Planning Study before contract award. It covered client intake, the call centre, duty lawyers, grants, in-house and panel practitioners, finance and data migration.

The study produced a conceptual data model, a licence and user mix across 14 roles and 10 licence types, and a fixed-price implementation plan, with recommendations on email integration, document generation and CI/CD. Delivery then ran in three-week sprints across seven streams:

• Client management on Salesforce CRM
• Legal practice management with Unity
• Grants management on Salesforce
• Scheduling with Salesforce Scheduler
• Panel Practitioner Portal (Legal Aid WA Connect) on Digital Experience Cloud
• Finance and records integration with Technology One and OpenText
• Data migration of 10 million records and 20 years of data, fully reconciled for audit sign-off

• Live in December 2024, on time and on budget
• One source of truth for client and case data across every office and outreach location
• A one-stop practitioner portal for grant applications, claims and client information
• Transitioned to Silver Lining Managed Services on an initial five-year contract
• Silver Lining is now delivering the next phase: an Omni-Channel contact centre for 70 staff

“A new user friendly, one stop-shop practitioner portal, Legal Aid WA Connect, will provide smoother pathways for practitioners to communicate with us, improved grant application and claim submission processes, and access to up-to-date client and grant information.”