About Legal Aid CMS
Legal help begins before a person speaks to a lawyer
It often begins late at night, on a borrowed phone, in everyday language. Can my landlord do this? What happens if I miss this deadline? Which form applies where I live? For the person asking, this is not a search for information. It concerns their home, their safety, their family. The answer has to be understandable, and it has to be right.
Public legal information carries responsibility
Legal aid organizations have spent decades creating guidance people can rely on. Attorneys review it, editors make it understandable, translators make it accessible, program teams connect it to services.
But the systems supporting that work often grew separately. Information lives across pages, documents, intake tools, campaign sites, and communication channels. When a law, form, or court rule changes, teams have to find what is affected and update it before old guidance stays in circulation. A person experiences only the final answer. The organization carries everything required to make that answer trustworthy.
That is why we built Legal Aid CMS
Legal Aid CMS is a suite of connected tools for creating, reviewing, publishing, and distributing public legal information. It helps organizations maintain one approved body of guidance and use it across public search, legal information assistance, intake, campaign sites, and supported channels. Each tool can be adopted independently and configured around the organization's jurisdiction, services, workflows, and existing systems.
The purpose is not to place more technology between legal aid organizations and the people they serve. It is to help the knowledge and judgment already inside those organizations reach more people.
Technology should know its limits
A legal information system should not sound certain when its sources are insufficient. It should not turn a general answer into legal advice, hide where an answer came from, or decide which risks an organization is willing to take.
Legal Aid CMS works from sources the organization selects and approves. It can show the material supporting an answer, account for jurisdiction, and direct people towards guidance, intake, referral, or human support. When the available information cannot support a reliable response, the system says so rather than filling the gap. Legal judgment, editorial approval, and service decisions stay with the people responsible for them.
One source, many ways to reach people
People do not all begin in the same place. Some search for a website. Some need a guided intake process, respond to an SMS campaign, or need information in another language. Some encounter a legal problem during a disaster or an eviction surge.
Legal Aid CMS lets organizations use approved information across those experiences while keeping control of how it is presented, reviewed, and updated. It connects with existing case management systems, identity providers, and authoritative legal sources rather than replacing them. The channel changes. The responsibility behind the information does not.
Built through legal aid work
Legal Aid CMS did not begin as a generic product later adapted for the legal sector. QED42 has partnered with Illinois Legal Aid Online for more than nine years. Recent work included a semantic search experience and conversational assistant that retrieves answers from ILAO's verified legal content rather than a model's general training. The retrieval, source attribution, and content governance patterns developed through that work inform the suite, and the engineers who built it are the engineers on this.
Who we are, and what we are not
QED42 is a Digital experience company. We have been building for 17+ years, we are a Drupal Diamond Partner, and we work in open source because organizations should be able to inspect what they run.
We do not practise law, and we are not a legal aid organization. Legal Aid CMS is not case management software either. Your case management system holds clients, matters, and deadlines, and it should keep holding them. We work on the public side, on what someone finds before they reach your intake line and whether it is still true.
If what your organization needs most is more attorneys, this will not solve that.
Serve more users without giving up what makes legal information trustworthy
No legal information system is ever finished. Laws change, forms change, and the language people use to describe their problems changes. We would rather learn where this breaks in your environment than promise that it will not.