Legal Aid at Work Tackles Complex Ediscovery with Everlaw
Legal Aid at Work (LAAW) is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that provides free legal services to low-wage workers, helping them understand and assert their rights in the workplace. With a small team and a wide range of cases, LAAW often navigates complicated legal matters involving large volumes of data, multilingual documents, and limited resources.
To support their litigation efforts, LAAW turned to Everlaw through the Everlaw for Good program, which offers free and discounted access to the platform for public interest organizations. By leveraging Everlaw’s powerful ediscovery platform, LAAW is now able to take on more cases and better serve their clients.
The Pursuit of Wage Protection
Within the broader scope of LAAW’s services, the Wage Protection Program is dedicated to advocating for fair wages and representing parties that are subject to alleged wage theft across the state. They’ve helped win millions of dollars in settlements for their clients, and have taken on a range of different cases.
In this particular case, LAAW and co-counsel California Rural Legal Assistance represent 17 farmworkers who alleged they weren't fully paid for their efforts during the 2022 harvesting season.
According to the suit, workers were paid for each box of berries they picked, but claimed that their employer routinely undercounted the number of boxes, resulting in lower pay. The complaint also alleged failure to pay overtime, and meet the state minimum wage requirements.
Partnering with Everlaw for Good
When the team at LAAW took on the case, they did not have any discovery platform that was regularly used in-house. Discovery was often a fractured and inefficient process that made it difficult to handle some of the more technical cases.
Seeking a better solution for this case, LAAW’s Operations and Technology Manager Scott Neilson began exploring potential ediscovery technologies, with Everlaw for Good quickly distinguishing itself.
“Everlaw was the first to respond to our queries, and their reply felt personal and thoughtful, showing that they had taken the time to review our website and understand our needs,” Neilson said.
Beyond that, the team also appreciated how the use of Everlaw’s versatile, cloud-based platform through the Everlaw for Good program offers free access up to a monthly cap, and heavily discounted rates for larger matters. This helped make Everlaw an ideal fit—particularly for an organization like LAAW that’s mindful of budget constraints.
This was important for this case specifically, since many of the workers spoke different languages, and documentation wasn’t always comprehensive, which meant the discovery process was going to be complex.
“In this case, all the workers speak Spanish or various indigenous languages,” Kim Ouillette, the Director of the Wage Protection Program at LAAW, said. “This often means that documents received through discovery are in multiple languages, and these language barriers can make these communities harder to reach.”
With Everlaw, Ouillette and her team are able to upload and process different types of data seamlessly, and quickly search through it to understand who was speaking and what they were saying.
Valerie Sprague, a paralegal on the case, commented that her confidence in her work on the case has grown thanks to Everlaw’s robust metadata tracking and search capabilities, which has allowed her to know when and where documents and emails are coming from by reducing the time spent needing to validate every piece of information.
“When I pull exhibits for a deposition, what usually takes me hours and hours takes no time at all, and it’s all there in a folder for me to look at,” Sprague said. “With Everlaw, the time that’s saved can now be spent serving other clients.”
Everlaw’s ability to help LAAW sort hot documents and quickly organize key materials in a deposition helped the team save valuable time. For a nonprofit that handles complex wage theft cases—often involving multiple plaintiffs and hundreds of workers—this means more time can be dedicated to helping additional clients in need.
In fact, Ouillette and her team ended up identifying other people who were victims of similar wage theft through the ease of review and organization that Everlaw offered.
“We used Everlaw to review crew sheets and punch cards workers used to clock in and out,” Ouillette said. “These alone consisted of hundreds of pages of documents. Through these reviews, we were able to identify many other people who were affected by the same issues as the plaintiffs in this case.”
Freedom to Drive Meaningful Change
While the lawsuit is still ongoing, with trial scheduled for 2026, having a modern ediscovery solution at their fingertips has the LAAW team feeling more confident in providing comprehensive legal representation for their clients. Everlaw for Good supports organizations like LAAW by reducing costs of ediscovery in complex legal cases.
“Everlaw for Good enables legal aid organizations like ours to take on these types of complex cases without private support, and expand our options for what’s possible,” Ouillette said. “We can serve more clients, take on more cases, and help create a fairer legal system.”
