Northern County Legal Services Case Study

Northern County Legal Services Case Study

Northern County Legal Services is an organization who assist people who cannot afford legal representation find a lawyer. According the reading, they specialize in housing and employment law, but can assist in helping in other areas as well. The center has around 15-20 volunteers and law school students. The center is led by a director named Julie. She runs all day to day business, manages the volunteers and students, and finds attorneys.

You find out early in the case study that the staff and the clients are in disarray. The office is small, so it’s overcrowded. The staff isn’t properly trained or prepared to help with the cases and demands of the clients. You can tell that this office is a very displeasing place to work and conduct business in.

Organizational Development is the process of increasing organizational effectiveness and facilitating personal and organizational change using interventions. It is also used in organizations to achieve strategic goals (Anderson, 2017). OD would have helped Julie create a strategic plan, an effective mission statement alignment, creating standard operating procedures, and creating teams. A strategic plan would help Julie in understanding the state of her organization. It would help her in meeting the monthly goals of the organization. A plan would also lay out things that need to be complete with deadlines to ensure the organization is moving in the right direction. Alignment of the mission statement will evaluate if the mission of the organization coincides with the daily goals of the Northern County Legal Services.

Creating SOP’s would provide Julie with being able to document the process from start to finish when a person contacts NCLS for help. The standard procedures would include services provided, cost based on income, intake processes, lawyers list and approval processes. These would also be able to be used as a training tool for new and current employee so training is consistent.

Creating teams would help Julie consider the following: divide them up based on their strengths, trust your employees, delegate tasks and duties to team members to develop and build confidence, and the goal is to create an environment where the employees feel empowered to make decisions.