Colorado attorney to receive ABA Keane Award for innovation

Lindy Frolich, director of the Colorado Office of the Alternate Defense Counsel in Denver, has been selected to receive the James I. Keane Memorial Award for excellence in law practice innovation. The award will be presented during the American Bar Association TECHSHOW 2016, March 16-19 in Chicago.

The award, given by the ABA Law Practice Division’s Law Practice Futures Initiative Task Force, will be presented during a luncheon on Thursday, March 17, at the Hilton Chicago. More information about the James I. Keane Memorial Award and past winners can be found online.

“The work of Lindy Frolich and the Colorado OADC embodies the purpose of the Keane Award – recognizing innovation through use of technology in the delivery legal services,’’ said Chad Burton, chair of the ABA Law Practice Futures Initiative. “The OADC program is a great example of how the public and private sectors can work together to create better access to legal services for the public, while providing attorneys with tools to run more efficient practices.”

Frolich, who has practiced criminal, juvenile and appellate law for more than 25 years, has implemented numerous programs that have utilized technology to make the OADC contracting professionals more effective at representing clients with significant savings to the state of Colorado.

 Some of those programs include:

• Online motions bank: Launched in summer 2010 with about 200 documents, the bank has evolved into a multi-faceted interface that has separate sections devoted to criminal matters generally, social sciences information and materials specific to practitioners representing juveniles, and now contains approximately 7,000 documents.

• Online research and writing assistance program: Started as a pilot program in 2012, it now receives an average of 25 requests per week.

• Document processing for major cases: Started in 2009 as an online presence for attorneys to receive their discovery, which is picked up, scanned if need be and converted into a standard Adobe PDF format. The documents are placed on a server and accessible by attorneys through Egnyte within 24 hours.

• Online background checks: Contracted in 2010 with Lexis-Nexis to obtain Accurint background checks and hired tech-savvy individual to run the background checks and produce them.

• Online billing system: After inheriting a billing system in which attorneys submitted bills on paper that were then manually processed and checks manually disbursed, OADC launched an  online pay system in 2010. It was revamped in 2015.

• Communications coordinator: In an ongoing attempt to create greater efficiencies, the OADC has requested funds from the Colorado legislature to implement a Communications Coordinator position. If approved the position will facilitate remote attorney-client meetings for incarcerated clients, remote testimony at court hearings, electronic team meetings, coordinate discovery sharing methods and technological resources.

The James I. Keane Memorial Award celebrates innovative delivery of personal legal services that serve both moderate income individuals and the broad middle class. Lawyers, law offices and legal organizations that develop, use and promote digital legal services are all eligible for nomination.