LSJ Returns - New Empire Justice Center Website Launches

August 13, 2009

Author: Anne Erickson

We are pleased to be able to offer the first Legal Services Journal of 2009.  We have struggled with the time and effort needed to produce these Journals while also juggling the other critical work of our staff – providing training and support to local staff, engaging in ever more critical legislative advocacy, and tackling the legal needs of those we serve – both on an individual basis and at a class-wide impact level. 

We believe the LSJ is an important part of our work and we’re glad to have it back from hiatus and on a new quarterly publication schedule. 

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our rebuilt and redesigned website www.empirejustice.org.  As many of you know, our previous site was ruthlessly hacked into last summer, bringing the whole site down crashing and burning.  Since this is precious community resource we struggled to bring it back up immediately.  Unfortunately, the company providing our content management at the time had failed to provide the appropriate – and promised – backup.  So we were really at square one.  Thankfully, the On Line Resource Center was protected.

We have now posted about 1,200 documents – from memos and summaries of substantive law issues to full reports on the foreclosure meltdown and the racial disparities in the incidents of lead poisoning among our children.   We continue to rebuild the past while also adding new content as we move forward.

None of this rebuild would have been possible without the incredible work of our IT Manager Nancy Krupski and the team she pulled together – Tim Holler, Michelle Peterson, Marlene Cortes, Connie Wiggins and Tania Santiago.  Special thanks to Joe Kelemen and Tom Karkau at the Western New York Law Center, our partners in all things technological. 

A very special thanks to the Board and staff at the IOLA Fund for stepping in with the financial support we needed in the form of an emergency technical assistance grant which allowed us to contract with a national provider for a much more sophisticated, robust and secure content management system.

I urge you all to visit the new site and spend some time looking around.  We hope it provides easy navigation through which you can find all the resources you need to help you in your work.  For the first time, we have a registration feature which will allow you to customize both your use of the website and the materials and announcements you might want to receive.  We now have an interactive training calendar, allowing you to sign up for trainings and other events right through the website.  And we’re adding more as we go – so if you’re missing something or would like to see additional resources, always feel free to drop us a line. 

As always, there’s much more to be done, but at least for now, we have the LSJ back on track and we have the new website up and running – and for that, we appreciate everyone’s support and patience!