Do you need ideas on on how to effectively train your legal hotline intake staff? Are you looking for a training  new intake workers can view? The Center for Elder Rights Advocacy, in conjunction with the Missouri Senior Legal Helpline/Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services and the Utah Senior Legal Helpline  at Utah Legal Services, is pleased to announce a webinar entitled Training Your Legal Hotline Intake Staff,  on Thursday, January 19, 2011, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 pm Eastern Time.   Training intake staff properly is crucial to a high quality and efficient program.. This webinar is for managers and intake workers alike.  It will focus on what a legal hotline intake worker needs to know in order to do the job effectively.  This webinar will build and reinforce knowledge in  screening clients and will prepare intake workers for those difficult situations that they are likely to encounter when taking  calls. The webinar will deal with intake procedures such as: issue spotting, handling senior callers,  conflicts of interest, confidentiality, case management systems, phone etiquette, dealing with difficult clients, third-party callers, managing sensitive information, and  avoiding the unauthorized practice of law. The webinar will provide some great tips and strategies that you can start using immediately. You will not want to miss it!

The Center for Elder Rights Advocacy is pleased to offer this webinar on Targeting and Serving Minority and Rural Communities on Thursday, December 8, 2011, from 2:00pm to 3:30pm Eastern Time.  Knowing how to connect with minority populations and rural communities is critical to providing legal assistance to these often under-served groups.  The webinar will discuss how to reach these populations, how to recognize and overcome cultural barriers, and how to effectively serve these populations.  This webinar will also discuss how to prioritize targeting, what the needs of the different groups are, and the lessons learned from past experiences.  You will not want to miss this.

Darrick Lam, M.S.W., U.S. Administration on Aging-Region IX, will discuss diverse populations and how to effectively reach them and serve them.  Rich LeMay, Legal Services of North Dakota, will discuss their efforts to reach the Native American Communities.  Cat McConnell, J.D., West Virginia Senior Legal Aid, will discuss her efforts to reach out and serve the rural community in her state.

Senior Legal Hotlines do great work everyday.  However, they struggle with capturing information that shows  the outcomes of this work.  Knowing how to capture this critical information and present it to current and potential funders is critical in establishing and continuing resources for sustaining a hotline.  

This webinar will explain the differences between outcomes and outputs and what they mean in relation to capturing outcomes for a hotline.  We will also discuss quantitative and qualitative data.  Three different senior legal hotlines will then showcase the great work that they are doing to capture outcomes for their programs.

Our presenters will be
David Godfrey, ABA Commission on Law and Aging
Ellen Yahuda, AARP Legal Counsel for the Elderly
Dina Franch, Georgia Senior Legal Hotline
Mike Walters and Tom Bedall , Pro Seniors Legal Hotline

Calls about debt and debt collection are the fastest growing types of calls that senior legal hotlines are receiving .  Knowing how to address a debt-related call is essential to being an effective advocate on a legal hotline.  This webinar will cover many of the debt related issues that an advocate is likely to experience on a legal hotline, and give tips and strategies that can be utilized to address those situations.  This webinar will address how debt collectors work, how a hotline can address debt collection cases, and how to identify violations of debt collection law.

Strong communication skills are the key to being effective advocates on a legal hotline. Knowing how to communicate with a client on a legal hotline will better prepare an advocate for those difficult situations that one is likely to encounter.

This webinar covers many of the problems that an advocate is likely to experience on a legal hotline and some of the tips and strategies that can be utilized to address those difficult situations. This webinar also offers skill building in the areas of setting the tone, listening effectively, how to take charge of the call, weeding out important information, offering solutions, and how to close the call.

Download Powerpoint

This webinar discusses the new AoA Reporting Guidelines for Senior Legal Hotlines/Helplines.  It covers the new standard definitions that every senior legal helpline/hotline that is funded by AoA must use when reporting information on number of clients, cases, etc.  We also hope that senior legal hotlines/helplines not currently funded by AoA will continue to report their annual numbers and expenses to CERA and will attend the webinar.

The Center for Elder Rights Advocacy, in conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission and the National Consumer Law Center, is pleased to offer and announce a webinar on identity theft, coming up on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011, at 2:00 p.m. Identity theft has become a nationwide problem in recent years, especially among our most vulnerable seniors. This webinar will cover many of the problems that we are seeing crop up across the country, and some of the tips and strategies that your programs can use to identify, prevent, and address some of the major problem areas. This webinar will have a panel of national experts who work daily in the area of identity theft, who will offer current information on the latest trends and hot button topics in the world of identity theft. You will not want to miss it!

Powerpoint

Taking calls from Third Parties is a delicate balance of Rules of Professional Conduct vs. providing the most help possible to seniors. New helplines need an ethically sound and workable procedure to handle third party callers before the first call comes in. Experienced helplines may want to revisit their procedures from time to time. David Godfrey of the ABA Commission on Law and Aging will discuss relevant ABA Model Rules and experienced helpline managers will share their solutions to handling this balance.

Powerpoint

Screening Questions, Scripts and Case Management Systems: Tools for telephone intake screening and providing legal information. Linking screening questions and substantive FAQs to your case management system can be a rich resource for your legal hotline, particularly for volunteers and new advocates. Here is your chance to have a first hand look at how these tools are integrated into the workflow at several legal hotlines.

South Carolina Intake Playbook
Nebraska Pika Index and Scripts
Kansas Elder Law Hotline Handbook

A webinar on methods of handling call flow from the inital call into the hotline through connection to the attorney/advocate. Experienced hotline managers who have tried and studied various methods of handling incoming calls with discuss pros and cons of various systems. If you need guidance adjusting your processes or have experiences to share, please join us on June 3rd.

Powerpoints: [From Intake to Advocate] [Legal Hotline for Michigan Seniors Intake]

The use of interactive online legal forms in combination with advice from a legal helpline attorney can greatly augment the effectiveness of legal assistance. Idaho Legal Aid Services (ILAS), as part of the AoA Model Approaches to Statewide Legal Assistance Project, constructed a set of forms for the nation's first web-based senior legal form library linked to document assembly software. (Read Idaho's Lessons Learned from its AoA Model Approaches Grant, LHC Dec '09)

The webinar will showcase how ILAS' Automated Forms and Senior Legal Hotline attorneys impact client service delivery. The webinar will include (1) the Technology Project Developer’s Perspective on Automation of Documents. (2) the Senior Legal Hotline Attorney’s perspective on how to utilize the forms in the legal hotline work and (3) the Project Director’s perspective on creating and selecting forms, finding funding for document automation, obstacles and lessons learned in creating and integrating an automated documents library into the legal services delivery system.

Presentation: [.ppt] [.pdf]

With the new round of AoA Model Approaches Awards just announced, this is an opportunity for the new awardees to get together and discuss their plans for senior legal helplines and to bounce ideas off each other. New senior legal helplines managers, as well as experienced ones, will benefit from this discussion.
Additional Materials:

• Casenote Considerations by Alan Herman and Shoshanna Ehrlich, LHQ Spring 98.
• Legal Hotline Evaluation Criteria
• Powerpoint Presentation

Presented by NLRC partner, The Center for Social Gerontology.

All Model Approaches Award Recipients are tasked with conducting an assessment of the legal needs of older persons in their state and also assessing the capacity of their state's current legal delivery system to meet those needs. This webinar will look at how to complete both of these essential tasks. For needs assessments, we will look at different approaches/methodologies (formal and informal), the importance of first deciding “whose needs” you want to assess; approaches for focusing on needs of target populations; costs of different approaches and tips for saving on costs, and valid ways of reporting the results. For assessing capacity of your current legal delivery system, we will look at various components of delivery systems, focus on the core components of the system, and explore the kinds of questions that need to be answered regarding those core components. Legal Service Developers, Senior Legal Helpline Managers, and other partners in the Model Approaches Grants should attend.

Presentation: [ppt] [pdf]
Natalie Thomas Presentation: [.pdf

Legal Hotlines rely heavily on new technologies to deliver their services in the most effective and efficient way possible. Online intake is one of the latest topics of interest to hotline managers as a way to possibly cut costs and handle more clients. This webinar looks at what technologies are available and how they are currently being used to provide legal services. [ppt presentation]

Many senior legal hotline managers struggle with how to tell others about the good work that their hotlines are doing each year. Many funders and community leaders are looking for more than just a report on the number of clients and cases. This workshop discusses telling the story of the hotlines through various outcome measures. It discusses the challenges and limitations for hotlines in reporting outcome measures because of the limited levels of service that many offer. The webinar was recorded on March 26, 2009.

With limited resources, senior legal helplines must work to use their efforts efficiently. One way to do that is by targeting populations most needy populations. This webinar looks at the reasons for targeting, targeting using outreach techniques, targeting by setting priorities, how senior legal helplines can help the IIIB programs with their targets efforts, and how to use GIS mapping to better target and to evaluate effectiveness. The webinar was recorded on Thursday, June 18, 2009.