Who builds OCM
Built by people who understand both legal aid and the systems behind it.
Open Case Management is built and operated by Clark Management Consulting, which provides business management and technology solutions to governmental entities, law firms and human service nonprofits. We are not a venture-funded platform looking for a category. We are the people who have been doing this work.
2017
Our first civil legal aid customer
24+ yrs
This case management lineage in production in legal aid
19+
Legal aid organizations on OCM today
GPL
License, so the software outlives the vendor
The founder
A former legal aid attorney who writes the code
Alex Clark founded Clark Management Consulting and builds OCM.
He is a former legal aid attorney and a full-stack developer who has built software since 2003 and worked in legal aid technology since 2016. His credentials include CISSP, CISA and CIPP/US certifications, along with Microsoft and CompTIA certifications. That combination is unusual, and it is the reason this product looks the way it does.
Someone who has practiced knows why a conflict check cannot be a suggestion, why an ethical wall has to hold in the database rather than in the interface, and why a case number format that a program has used for fifteen years is not a thing to modernize away. Those are not product decisions you arrive at from a roadmap workshop.
The practice
OCM is not the only thing we build
The consultancy work is why the product knows what it knows. Programs bring us the problem before it becomes a feature request.
Case management
OCM itself, plus the migrations, integrations and custom reporting that programs need around it.
Online intake
Public-facing intake systems that hand a structured record to staff instead of an email nobody owns.
Guided interviews
Document assembly for the long branching forms that a merge template cannot handle.
Website assistants
Chatbots that answer from an organization's own material and route people to the right place, rather than guessing.
Court data
Systems that scrape and process public court dockets, which is how you find out about an eviction docket before the hearing rather than after.
The unglamorous parts
Data cleanup, reporting for funders, and the migration nobody else wanted to own.
Who we work with
Dozens of legal aid and public-interest organizations
Clark Management Consulting has worked with dozens of legal aid and public-interest organizations on case management, intake, reporting, migration and related technology projects.
OCM itself is in production at legal aid programs and state bar organizations across the country.
We do not publish our customer list, because a legal aid program’s choice of case management system is its own business and not our marketing asset. If you want references, ask and we will connect you with programs that agreed to take the call, including one whose situation looks like yours.
How we operate
What a small vendor owes you
Being small is a real risk for a buyer, and the answer to it is not to pretend otherwise. It is structure.
The license is the guarantee
OCM is GPL. If this practice disappeared tomorrow, your instance keeps running and any competent shop can maintain it, because the source is public and the stack is ordinary.
You reach a person
Support is a named human who knows your configuration, with documented systems and public technical material that can scale as OCM grows.
Shipped, in the open
Releases are documented publicly, with notes anyone can read. The current release is v9.6.0, published August 2, 2026.
No lock-in by data format
Your database and your documents are yours on request, in a format the public source code tells you how to read.
Priced in public
The price is on the website. You do not have to sit through a call to find out whether you can afford it.
We say no
If another system fits your program better, we will tell you. A poor fit wastes your staff's time, delays the work, and makes a future migration harder.
Talk to the person who would actually be working with you
There is no sales team to get past, because there is no sales team.