New York providers pilot coordinated eviction referral portal to route tenants to the right providers
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Summary
A coalition of Legal Aid organizations demonstrated a New York eviction referral portal that embeds Legal Server interviews to route tenants to appropriate regional providers; presenters highlighted governance choices, OTDA support, English-first launch and plans for multilingual support and expanded referrals.
A coalition of Legal Aid providers in New York presented a coordinated eviction referral portal designed to help tenants outside New York City find the appropriate legal services provider and to pass completed intake interviews directly into partner case management systems.
Christina Riley, interim executive director at the Legal Aid Society of Mid New York, described the statewide problem: more than 80 legal services providers serve 62 New York counties and clients often reach the wrong program online. The portal was developed with a governance structure intended to incorporate regional partners’ preferences and to avoid forcing adoption of a single system.
How it works: a prerecorded demonstration showed an embedded online interview that asks a prescreen sequence and routes the application into a receiving organization’s Legal Server instance. The demo included a rule that flags users with a court date within three days and prompts them to call the referred provider immediately. The system returns confirmation by email or SMS with a PDF or link containing the submitted application data so users retain a copy.
Funding and partners: panelists said work was supported by a Technology Initiative Grant (TIG) and contributions from state funders including OTDA in New York; design choices leaned on LawHelp New York for content hosting and the project team emphasized low-impact, ‘insert’ deployment so the portal can be embedded on partner sites and OTDA channels. Steering committees and subcommittees were used to ensure partner representation in the project.
Operational issues and constraints: presenters emphasized that Legal Server integrations were necessary and that conflict checks remain a manual, human-reviewed step that complicates immediate appointment scheduling in some partner workflows. English is the version-1 language (with Spanish and other languages planned), and the panel said additional functionality — appointment scheduling, multilingual support, and more robust referral routing — is slated for later phases.
Sustainability and evaluation: developers said TIG funding underwrote initial development and that additional support (including IOLTA/IOLA sources and private funders) is being sought to sustain and expand the service. They also reported baseline metrics used to define success (pre-launch response times and intake-processing capacity) and said they are monitoring intake volume, response times, and conversion to accepted cases.
The presenters invited partners and funders to follow up for more detailed pilot data and promised continuing evaluation as the portal expands beyond the initial participating organizations.
