Measuring Client Satisfaction
The Legal Aid Society of New York has been providing legal counsel and representation to those that can not afford to pay for legal services since 1876. Donations are the primary source of funding to acquire and sustain resources to provide these services to the poor. A major donor to the Legal Aid Society is the Interest on Lawyers Accounts (IOLA) fund. IOLA contributes approximately 2 million dollars annually to the work of the Legal Aid Society. Beginning with the 1999 Annual Grantee Report the Legal Aid Society is required to provide information related to how clients experience service delivery. The clients experience of service delivery is measured in terms of level of satisfaction, how long clients wait before service on their problem begins and the number of applicants rejected. The services of the Capstone team were engaged to develop methods to collect and analyze the data necessary for reporting to IOLA. The Capstone team conducted a client-satisfaction survey, provided tools to record data to measure wait-time and rejection, conducted training for the Legal Aid Societys staff on how to use the data collection tools and provided analysis of the data captured by each tool.