Technology can play a critical role in the successes and failures of any organization, and legal services are no exception. Despite the large number of client management software packages designed for legal service offices, there are no commercially available software packages designed to handle the unique needs of pension cases, reflecting the small number of legal services attorneys that have expertise in the area of pensions.
A number of skilled pension attorneys work at the Pension Counseling Projects but, until recently, they lacked a tool to track the work they do. The National Pension Assistance Resource Center has filled this gap, by developing the Pension Assistance Information Database (PAID), a proprietary client management application for the Pension Counseling Projects and the National Pension Lawyers Network.
Some of PAID’s pension-specific features include an actuarial calculator designed to determine the present-value lump-sum equivalent of an annuity paid out over the lifetime of a participant; pedagogically-designed contextual menus to teach attorneys and social workers how to classify complex legal issues and different types of pension plans, and a database to store detailed information about pension plans, sponsors, and administrators.
| Actuarial Software | Pedagogical Software |
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In addition to all of its valuable client management tools, PAID can generate many pension-specific reports, as well as more traditional demographic reports. By tracking the work that the pension counseling projects do, these reports can be used to help Congress identify the most common problems that people face in the private pension system so that they can craft laws appropriately to help the most people.
PAID recently moved out of its beta version and is currently being used by ten pension counseling offices around the country.
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