Starting on LegalServer

Sometimes starting a new project can be daunting.  While you are just beginning the process, here are a few first steps for your team. 

Join the Admin Listserve

Our Admin Listserve allows administrators from different agencies to connect with one another to share ideas, use cases and implementations of LegalServer.  If you need help understanding what a module does and how to use it, please email support@legalserver.org or contact your onboarding specialist. If you would like to know how other sites implemented a certain function, that's a great question for the admin listserve!  At least one admin should join this listserve.  

Send an email to siteadmins+subscribe@legalserver.org to for membership. You will be approved. We require applying to foil bots and spammers. You do not need a Google account to subscribe or receive posts via email, only to use the optional web interface to the group (search previous posts, etc.). Feel free to subscribe via a work address and a personal Gmail address if you want access to the web interface and don't have a G Suite work address.

Identify your data collection instruments

Do you have intake forms, questionnaires, or existing reports ready to share? Start gathering those now, review them and revise them as needed. We'll use these as guidance for the reports and forms we build in LegalServer. 

Gather your team

It's never too early to start thinking about a LegalServer Implementation Team. This should be a representative sample of the users in your organization, and will help you think through various changes and configurations in your system. While they don't need to be on every call,  they should plan on coming to the classroom trainings and your internal weekly calls. 

Plan your schedule 

Start thinking about how you are going to make onboarding part of your own weekly schedule.   Determine days and times your team will be available to meet with your LegalServer Onboarding Specialist.  We encourage your team to also meet internally at least once a week during the onboarding process.  We suggest setting aside 5-10 hour per week for the duration of your onboarding for meetings, trainings and just getting into the site and playing with it. 

View our New User Training (and show it to staff!)

Our new user training goes over some basic taxonomy of LegalServer, some essential features of the platform, and serves as a great introduction for anyone who is new to LegalServer.  Check out the full playlist on our YouTube Channel! 

Check out our trainings and plan which ones to attend

During our kickoff call we talk about the various trainings you'll be asked to attend.  It may seem like a lot now, but time will fly.  Take a look at our Training Page and make a schedule for yourself.  Please remember that you are expected to attend the Onboarding Kickoff Call, Life Cycle of a Case, the Essential Features Tour and the New Admin Training before you start your one-on-one calls with your LegalServer Onboarding Specialist.  Tuesday Trainings and Monday/Wednesday/Thursday office hours are encouraged, but not mandatory. 

Our Training Page also has ideas on how to start training your staff during the onboarding process.  It's never too early to start!

Familiarize Yourself with this site

We will go over everything in this site during your onboarding, but get ahead of the game by just reviewing what is there. What will you find here? I'm glad you asked! The Process section of the site goes through the various stages of the onboarding process from Initiation through Refinement with a whole dedicated page to Data Migration.  The Features section will walk through the major component modules of LegalServer with short descriptions of each module, a training video on most modules, links we hope are useful to the help site, and homework for your team to really get into the site.  Finally, our More section has a FAQ page with answers to some common questions,  contact information for our onboarding and support team and our trainings page. 

If you take a look at the videos and start thinking about the homework questions you'll be in great shape once we get to configurations.  

Migrating data? Check out our dedicated data page!

Data can be a major part of migrations.  Familiarize yourself with what is involved, what your expectations of us can be, and what we will be expecting you to be familiar with and to do as part of the process (hint: it's data testing!).  If you have a sense of what fields or what data points you are planning to migrate, now's a great time to get that list together!