Supporting all Tennesseans
The US State of Tennessee Department of Human Services (DHS) delivers social, family and child support services to two million people every year, including many of Tennessee's most vulnerable citizens.
From its headquarters in Nashville, the DHS coordinates programmes that reach deep into all 95 rural and urban counties in the state, working with local agencies, partners and community organisations to help improve health, wellbeing, education and employment outcomes.
In 2022/23, the DHS distributed almost $600 million in child support payments and provided 34 million meals to children and adults through its food and nutrition programmes.
Transforming legal service delivery
The Tennessee Office of the General Counsel provides legal advice to all DHS programmes, as well as legal representation in all judicial and administrative litigation. "We're effectively the in-house law firm for the department," explains Deputy General Counsel, Beka Parkhurst. "We have a team of 30 lawyers and legal assistants handling all litigation cases.
"We draft legislation, review contracts and provide advice to colleagues throughout the DHS on all legal matters, from HR issues to ensuring our programmes comply with all state and federal rules and regulations. Our work is so diverse that our team requires a wide range of expertise and experience."
As the scope and scale of the Department's programmes grows year after year, so does the work of its legal team. Historically, the team's administration relied on manual, paper-based systems and Excel spreadsheets, with requests for support received via emails, phone calls, instant messaging and in person.
"It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of everything and to manage our resources effectively," explains Beka. "We didn't have an overview of what all our lawyers were working on and the progress of each request. We knew we needed a modern request management system with all the benefits that digital technology offers.
"The State has been a ServiceNow customer for years. When we saw a demonstration of the Legal Service Delivery solution, it looked fantastic. We could see immediately that it would enable us to manage requests and resources in one place, track progress and outcomes, automate lots of processes and connect seamlessly with our other systems."
A blueprint for collaborative solution design
To design a solution that met the team's many detailed requirements, Beka and colleagues worked closely with Kloves, a ServiceNow Elite advisory and implementation partner, and a specialist in Legal Service Delivery.
"We were building something from scratch and Kloves was fantastic at the detailed information gathering at the outset of the project, translating legal language and concepts into system speak, bridging that gap perfectly."
"It was a real collaboration, a co-creation and we involved everyone in the team to ensure that all our needs were met and everyone felt an ownership of the finished product. Kloves gave us options for every use case, explaining the positives and downsides of each and guiding us to reach a conclusion. Their people were always available and they had a great system for tracking progress and sharing information and updates.
"It was a fantastic experience and since go live we have only had to make a handful of enhancements, each taking around three business days on average to action. This is testament to the time and attention to detail that we all invested to get it right."
Automating request routing and management
The Now Platform has transformed the Office of Legal Counsel's ability to accept, process and manage all legal requests and matters, automatically routing each to the appropriate lawyer or team member by geography, practice area and availability.
For each matter, the system generates relevant tasks and prompts to work through which expedites progress and ensures that every step is completed and recorded.
"At any point in time I can log into the system, review my dashboards and see at a glance how many requests and matters we have open, which lawyers are handling them and the current status of each," explains Beka. "So if we have an urgent request I can see immediately in ServiceNow who has capacity to respond and track it through to completion."
Being able to access each lawyer's requests and review the status is a huge benefit, according to Supervising Attorney, Paul Helton. "We can assess workloads for our lawyers and re-assign requests, if necessary. It's also helpful to have case information in our system when lawyers take short-term or long-term leave. Being able to assign requests immediately makes our work faster and reduces misunderstandings about who may be working on each request or who is responsible for that case."
Integrations unlock speed and efficiency
Kloves also built discrete integrations between Legal Service Delivery and other State systems, automating a free flow of data that is delivering speed and efficiency benefits.
For example, an API connection ensures that all background information relating to adult protection cases can be automatically shared with the appropriate lawyers when legal input is required. Access restrictions and security levels can be set in the system to ensure that confidentiality and lawyer client privilege is protected.
"Most of our work is in childcare and adult protection and the licensing of delivery partners," explains Beka. "With this connection and the pre-populated templates that we've developed, we can substantially reduce our turnaround times for licensing and enforcement documentation.
"With this all captured in ServiceNow we can share it with anyone authorised to see it, with our regulators for example. The faster we can process the legal documents, the faster our partners can take action to protect our vulnerable children and adults."
Beka credits Kloves for spending time with the legal team examining each use case in detail to ensure that appropriate features and functionality were in place in ServiceNow from the outset.
"Previously, sharing information could take many days, with lots of back and forth, exchanging emails and agreeing protocols. Now, users have the comments functionality to ask questions and check progress, with everything tagged to each request. Automating the entire process in ServiceNow is a huge timesaver and, even though we provide an internal service, it's rewarding to see citizens benefiting as a result."
Showcasing progress and achievement
Meanwhile an integration with Adobe Sign is enabling electronic signatures on key legal documents, eliminating previously time consuming, manual tasks. "This can be vital when speed is essential when we need to take a citizen to a place of safety, for example."
Next, Beka intends to connect with the department's HR system. "Connecting our two teams and sharing information will be another huge advantage. For the first time I can produce a wide range of reports in ServiceNow, for our leadership and our legislature, to showcase the scope and scale of our activities. Now, we can measure the quality of our service and our performance, using authoritative data and demonstrate how we are delivering progress and improvements."