QED42 . Product . Legal Aid CMS

Legal Aid CMS is a suite of tools for creating, reviewing, publishing, and distributing public legal information

Each tool by Legal Aid CMS addresses a distinct challenge faced by legal aid organizations. Limited staff capacity, low-bandwidth access, high volumes of common questions, first-line intake, and keeping guidance relevant as laws change.

Tools can be adopted independently and configured around each organization’s jurisdiction, services, content, workflows, and existing systems.

Visit Legal Aid CMS

The suite

Search and assistance

People can ask questions in everyday language and receive answers drawn from the organization’s approved legal content. The assistant connects unfamiliar wording with the right legal information, shows the sources behind each response, and directs people to relevant guidance, intake, or human support. When the approved content is insufficient, it says so rather than generating an unsupported answer.

Omnichannel communication

Give people more than one way to begin seeking legal help. The Online Triage and Intake System, or OTIS, guides them through approved triage questions across supported channels. It connects them with relevant legal information, services, or referrals. Legal aid organizations can configure the process around their services, eligibility criteria, and intake requirements.

Campaign microsites

Launch focused microsites for urgent legal changes, public programs, community outreach, disaster response, or other time-sensitive needs. Each site can inherit the organization’s brand, accessibility standards, publishing rules, and approved content. Teams can respond to a specific audience or issue without rebuilding content, workflows, and governance in a separate system that must be maintained independently.

Cross-channel publishing

Publish approved legal information across websites, WhatsApp, SMS, and other supported channels from one maintained source. Teams can adapt the format for each channel without creating disconnected versions of the same guidance. When the source changes, they can identify where it appears and review the affected content before outdated information remains available.

Compliance Center

Support both content compliance and regulatory or legal compliance for self-help portals. The center checks accessibility, readability, disclaimers, terminology, metadata, and review schedules, while helping teams identify content that may require review when relevant laws, regulations, court rules, forms, or official guidance change. Qualified staff remains responsible for assessing and approving updates.

Staff content tools

Help staff draft, summarize, compare, and adapt content using the organization’s approved legal information. Teams can reuse existing guidance for new pages, campaigns, FAQs, or channel formats without starting from scratch. Every proposed change remains inside the organization’s editorial and legal review process, with staff responsible for checking accuracy and approving publication.

Voice intake and triage

Support first-line telephone intake by gathering structured information, following approved screening flows, and routing callers to the appropriate team or service. OTIS gives staff the context already collected when they take over and can pass intake information to an existing case management system. It supports intake operations without replacing legal judgment or case management.
"Illinois Legal Aid Online AI-powered semantic search and conversational assistant by QED42

Proven in practice with Illinois Legal Aid Online

QED42 has partnered with Illinois Legal Aid Online for more than 9 years.
‍
Recent work included a semantic search experience and conversational assistant that retrieves answers from ILAO’s verified legal content rather than relying on a model’s general training data.
‍
The retrieval, source attribution, and content governance patterns developed through this work inform Legal Aid CMS.

62%

increase in active users of the search experience

61%

increase in search page views

35%

longer average engagement time per user

2x+

session key-event rate

See the complete ILAO case study→

Capabilities across the suite

Legal Aid CMS gives every tool shared content, governance, integration, and data foundation. These capabilities keep the suite connected.

Shared content base

Maintain one approved body of legal information with clear source relationships, ownership, and review status. Tools across the suite work from this shared foundation, so teams can update the underlying guidance without losing control over how it is adapted, presented, or used in different contexts.

Human review and accountability

Define where editorial, legal, accessibility, or publishing review is required and who has authority to approve each decision. Review dates, revisions, approvals, and automated actions remain recorded, giving teams a clear history of how content changed, why it changed, and who authorized its final release.

Source-grounded intelligence

Search, summaries, comparisons, drafting support, and other AI-assisted functions work from sources selected by the organization. The system can show what supported an answer or suggestion and defer to staff when the available material does not provide enough evidence for a reliable response or decision.

Analytics and service insights

Use a dashboard to understand what people search for, which questions remain unanswered, where users leave an intake flow, and which content receives the most engagement. Teams can use these signals to identify information gaps, improve services, and prioritize content and workflows for further review.

Connections with existing systems

Connect Legal Aid CMS with case management systems, communication services, identity providers, analytics tools, and authoritative legal sources through APIs. This allows information to move between existing systems without requiring the suite to replace the tools used for casework, identity, reporting, or wider organizational operations.

Deployment and data ownership

Run Legal Aid CMS within infrastructure controlled by the organization. Teams retain control over content, configuration, permissions, integrations, retention policies, and the sources available to AI-supported functions. Deployment can align with the organization’s security, privacy, compliance, governance, specific data-residency requirements, and internal oversight policies.
Aeldris content intelligence platform powering AI search and content management for Legal Aid CMS.
Aeldris architecture illustrating AI-powered content intelligence integrated with Legal Aid CMS

Powered by Aeldris

Aeldris is QED42’s Content Intelligence Platform and the intelligence layer behind selected functions across Legal Aid CMS.
It supports content creation, review, reuse, and delivery by working with the organization’s approved sources and rules. Aeldris powers semantic search, source-grounded answers, document analysis, summarization, content comparison, drafting support, and the identification of content that may require review.
Aeldris does not sit between teams and their content. It works within the suite, while Legal Aid CMS remains the system for managing content, workflows, permissions, compliance, and public delivery.

Process

QED42 PROCESS 

How we work

We listen before we build. The partnership continues past launch

18 +

YEARS OF DELIVERY

4.85

Net Promoter Score

Drupal Diamond Partner

01

Understand

Technical debt, constraints, users need the things the brief doesn't say. That's where we start. Before a line of code is written

02

Build

Architecture, design, engineering — in cycles, with continuous client sync. No disappearing acts. Delivered in cycles, not in one go

03

Stay

Post-launch support, performance tracking, platform evolution. Results you can point to. The work doesn't stop at go-live

Recently asked questions

How is Legal Aid CMS different from legal aid case management software?
Is Legal Aid CMS a chatbot?
How does AI work inside Legal Aid CMS?
How can our legal team assess whether an AI-supported answer is reliable?
What happens when the approved content cannot answer a question?
How does Legal Aid CMS help keep public information aligned with changing laws?
Can Legal Aid CMS work with our current website and case management system?
Do we need to adopt the entire suite at once?

From the team

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