Like most nonprofits, we are faced with the challenge of showing our value to current and potential funders.  The people that use our services know about the great work that we do, but often we are so busy actually doing the work that we don't think about telling our story to others.  It is no longer enough to say we helped so many people or that we spent so many hours on client work.  We now have to show what the impact of our work really is. 

This webinar will address some of the challenging issues that legal hotlines and other programs face when trying to tell the story of the great work that they do.  This webinar focuses on how to identify information that is worth telling and how to effectively use it.  The objectives of this webinar are for the participant to learn to:  (1) collect data to effectively convey the breadth and depth of your work and the populations that you serve; (2) differentiate between outputs, outcomes, and impacts; (3)draft compelling "good stories"; and (4) effectively use quotes, pictures, and other story-telling tools.  The content of this webinar is designed to be a thorough overview of this topic of growing importance for not only funding, but also outreach to clients.

The webinar will be Thursday, May 30, 2013 from 1:00pm to 2:00pm Eastern.  This webinar is hosted by the Center for Elder Rights Advocacy, a partner in the National Legal Resource Center.  Presenters for this webinar include Kari Deming, Managing Attorney at the Counsel and Advocacy Law Line, and Keith Morris, Project Director for the Center for Elder Rights Advocacy and Manager of the Legal Hotline for Michigan Seniors.

Debt issues are one of the most prevalent questions that hotline advocates are receiving today.  We hear things like "I need to file bankruptcy" or "I need a bankruptcy attorney to help me."  As a hotline advocate, you need to understand the legal concepts and practical considerations before you try to help a client in this situation.  This webinar is designed to help.

After completing this 90 minute webinar, you will understand

• the different types of personal bankruptcy,
• the basics of the general exemptions,
• the bankruptcy process,
• the alternatives to bankruptcy,
• the "get out of debt" scams,
• how to make sure you have all of the information necessary to advise on this issue,
• the practical advice and instructions that hotline advocates can give clients regarding bankruptcy, and
• when to refer the client for more extensive service.
  

Our presenters for this webinar are

• John Rao is an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.  John focuses on consumer credit and bankruptcy issues and has served as a panelist and instructor at numerous bankruptcy and consumer law trainings and conferences.
• Kari Deming is the managing attorney at the Counsel and Advocacy Law Line.  Kari and her staff have helped thousands of clients with bankruptcy questions, and she brings a very practical approach to dealing with these complex issues.
  

Legal helpline advocates are faced with unique ethical situations every day.  The rules of professional responsibility are established to help you deal with these situations while protecting your organization's and your client's interests.  However, there are some situations where we struggle to determine what is the right thing to do.  Join us October 11, 2012 from 2:00pm to 3:30pm Eastern for Dealing with  Ethical Issues on Legal Helplines.

This webinar addresses several situations that present potential problems for legal hotline advocates.  These include confidentiality, who is the client, conflicts, etc.  The webinar will include recorded video scenarios and the model rules of professional responsibility relevant to the situations where these potential problems may arise and then discuss how to handle them.

The presenters for this webinar are David Godfrey, Senior Attorney, ABA Commission on Law and Aging, and Paula Pierce, Director of Hotlines, Texas Senior Law Center. Both have years of experience managing senior legal hotlines and presented on this topic at the recent Equal Justice Conference. Make plans for all of your hotline advocates to view this webinar.  It is a good training for new staff and volunteers, as well as a good refresher.

Download Powerpoint

Selected Model Rules of Professional Responsibility

One in ten older adults reported experiencing elder abuse in the past year.  Further, it is estimated that only 5% of cases are reported by older victims.  Hotline advocates have a unique opportunity to listen for, identify and assist callers who are experiencing abuse. 

This webinar on August 31, 2012 from 2:00pm to 3:30pm Eastern will provide a foundational understanding of the range and prevalence of abuses suffered by older adults, including physical and sexual violence, as well as emotional abuse, neglect and financial exploitation.  Hotline advocates will then be offered tools and tips to help you: 

·        recognize the signs of abuse, 

·        elicit pertinent information from a caller about the abuse, 

·        holistically assess a survivor’s situation, and 

·        respond appropriately to help enhance a survivor’s safety and security. 

Speakers include: 

·        Lore Rogers, JD, of the Michigan Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Prevention and Treatment Board.  Lore was a civil trial lawyer for 13 years before working as an advocate and program director for several domestic violence and sexual assault service providers. 

·        Rebecca Henry, MA/JD is the Deputy Chief Counsel of the Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence at the American Bar Association. Prior to joining the ABA, Rebecca was first a family law attorney for domestic violence survivors at Pine Tree Legal Assistance, and then director of the OVW-funded Elder Justice Project at Maine’s Legal Services for the Elderly. 

·        Kari Deming, JD, Director of the Counsel & Advocacy Law Line (CALL).  Kari’s professional history includes a long history of litigation and hotline-based services in the arena of domestic violence and other abuses.  Of the over 3500 people aged 60+ served by CALL in the last 18 months, 270 (8%) were identified as victims of abuse and holistically helped.

Providing services by telephone is harder than it sounds!  This webinar will help you learn how to overcome the challenges of providing legal advice to a client when you cannot read visual cues or use your nonverbal cues to put the client at ease, etc.  We will discuss  how to conduct an effective interview t, how to provide the information  to the client in a manageable way, how to assess the client’s capacity, and how to determine if the client is capable of following through on your advice.  We will include not only great suggestions but also some role playing to help you see the concepts in action.
David Godfrey, Senior Attorney at the ABA Commission on Law and Aging, and Shoshanna Ehrlich, Program Specialist at the Center for Elder Rights Advocacy, will be our presenters for this informative webinar.  Both have many years experience in working with clients by telephone, as well as providing training on this topic.

Join us July 12th, 2012 from 2pm to 3:30pm Eastern for this webinar.  If you are new to hotlines or a seasoned veteran, you will find this webinar a great resource for improving your skills in this challenging area.

Many legal hotlines rely on grants as a major source for their financial support.  In this increasingly competitive environment, a hotline needs someone (manager, staff, volunteer) who can be an effective grant writer.  This webinar will discuss both government grants and foundation grants.  It will discuss tips and strategies for effective grant writing, as well as evaluating whether a grant opportunity is a good fit for your organization.  The presenters for this webinar are Kate White and Ellie Crosby Lanier.

Kate White is the Executive Director of Elder Law of Michigan and has been writing grants for 22 years.  She has written many successful federal grant applications, as well as many large and small foundation grant applications.  The Legal Hotline for Michigan Seniors and the Center for Elder Rights Advocacy are two programs of Elder Law of Michigan.

Ellie Crosby Lanier is a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law. Previously she worked with the Legal Hotlines Technical Assistance Project. She launched the the Georgia Senior Legal Hotline and served as its managing attorney.  Additionally, she has served as a grant reviewer to evaluate grant proposals for funders. 

[powerpoint presentation]

Do you need ideas 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.

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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.