Data and Technology
Community Legal Centres Australia’s Data and Technology (DAT) team is responsible for managing centralised sector data and supporting centres in their reporting obligations under the National Access to Justice Partnership 2025–2030 (NAJP). This includes:
- Six-monthly performance reporting for each jurisdiction to the state and territory governments
- Providing select, de-identified unit-level legal assistance data to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) annually
Centres can request assistance via Community Legal Centres Australia’s DAT Helpdesk portal.
Priority projects
To streamline mandatory reporting requirements and improve our capacity to tell the sector’s national data story, Community Legal Centres Australia delivers the priority projects below.
National Data Repository
Under the NAJP, Community Legal Centres Australia is the custodian of select centre data as it relates to our sector’s reporting obligations to the Commonwealth. To improve the consistency and quality of data, Community Legal Centres Australia has delivered a digital transformation project to create a secure, central repository that brings together key NAJP data from community legal centres across the nation.
Community Legal Centres Australia’s National Data Repository (NDR) is built and hosted in CLCs Australia’s Microsoft environment and is designed to:
- Integrate with modern CMSs used by community legal services
- Receive selected legal assistance data from services’ CMSs
- Transform services ’ data to be used in reports, dashboards or data visualisations
- Make reports, dashboards and data visualisations available to services and the sector’s stakeholders
This project supports national reporting, evidence-based policy development and sector advocacy. Strong governance, privacy and security controls are embedded into the NDR design to minimise risk and protect sensitive client and service information.
End of CLASS
CLASS is ending on 30 June 2026
Community Legal Centres Australia is ending our role as a CMS provider.
From 2016, we developed the Community Legal Assistance Service System (CLASS) as a reporting and basic case management system for community legal centres. However, CLASS is an ageing system that is no longer fit for purpose.
To prepare for the NDR we have supported centres to transition to modern CMSs of their choosing for their legal assistance data.
CLASS will no longer be accessible after 30 June 2026. Once CLASS ends, centres will not be able to access any information stored in the system.
If your centre has not been in contact with us about retrieving your data and documents from CLASS, please contact the DAT Helpdesk, icthelp@clcs.org.au, immediately.
Member organisations can access more detailed information about our vision for the sector’s data and technology future in the User Portal.
Regular reporting under the NAJP
Six-monthly NAJP service data reports
In January and July each year, community legal centres funded under NAJP must report service data to Commonwealth, state and territory governments.
Community Legal Centres Australia produces performance reports for all jurisdictions. We assist centres to ensure all relevant NAJP service data in their CMS is included in the reports to state and territory governments. Once data is received, we quality check it and apply the transformations required to produce reports.
From 1 July 2026, we will progressively onboard services using different CMSs to the NDR. Over time, the NDR will receive select data from all services needed to meet the sector’s reporting obligations and to tell the national data story.
We will have interim reporting processes in place while onboarding takes place. Member organisations can find detailed information on arrangements for the January–June 2026 reporting process in the User Portal.
Annual unit-level data reporting
In September every year centres funded under the NAJP report on select, de-identified unit level data to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) under Schedule D of the agreement. Community Legal Centres Australia compiles this data in an amalgamated dataset and sends it to the ABS, which produces an annual publication which presents statistics on services funded through NAJP. Community legal centre data is shown along with Legal Aid Commission and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service (ATSILS) data for services delivered during the financial year. The ABS data release page summarises national data showing who accesses legal assistance services, what types of help they received and key trends across providers in the sector.