The Whitireia Community Law Centre is a not for profit, charitable trust which provides free legal advice, assistance and representation to the Porirua and Kapiti areas. We provide legal education in the local community in order to empower people with their awareness of their rights, as well as a full range of community legal services including limited legal representation for people facing criminal prosecutions, where legal aid is not available because of the nature of the offence.
The donation of laptops allows this practice to be more digitally savvy as we want to improve the quality of our services to the community. We had become aware of a new database system which would enable us to keep tabs on clients that use our services as well as being able to report to the Ministry of Justice about our KPIs. The rollout of this new software required us to fully upgrade our computer hardware, which would have been extremely expensive for us. The donated laptops are compatible with this new software; they are much faster and enable us to do our jobs more efficiently. Having the laptops set up in each room gives the ability for lawyers to open a file, work on it live and close it without the need to write and collate a physical file and have our administrator physically input it into the old database.
This will maximise efficiency, see a higher rate of data entry and file organisation in the practice, minimise risk of documentation loss as well as being a more environmentally friendly practice.This will also see us save money on stationary, storage and document destruction costs – as the cost of printing is expensive, see us relying more on Cloud based services for document reduction and comply with strict Law Society guidelines on protection of privacy and client confidentiality. We have between 3000-4000 people seeking services from us, with many of them ongoing files, so having the right equipment to be able to do our jobs swiftly and efficiency has made us better at providing our service.
