Pro Bono Coordinator s Report

Transcription

1 DAVID KELLER TREVASKIS PBA Pro Bono Coordinator 100 South Street/P.O. Box 186 Harrisburg, PA Phone: (800) ext Fax (717) david.trevaskis@pabar.org Pro Bono Coordinator s Report It has been a busy winter and spring for the PBA s Pro Bono Office and civil legal aid in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania pro bono efforts were featured on a national scale when the state hosted the ABA/NLADA 2006 Equal Justice Conference, March 30-April 1, 2006, in Philadelphia. The PBA, together with Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network (formerly Pennsylvania Legal Services) and Pennsylvania IOLTA, presented a session at the conference highlighting Lawyers on Loan 1 and the pro bono initiatives in Indiana, Wyoming and Sullivan Counties. 2 The Equal Justice Conference brought together all components of the legal community to discuss equal justice issues as they relate to the delivery of legal services to the poor and low-income individuals in need of legal assistance. The title and theme of the 2006 Equal Justice Conference was "Commitment, Service and Empowerment: Let Justice Ring." The PBA Pro Bono Office used an IOLTA grant in to hire law student interns and conduct training and outreach across the state to promote the and websites. New funding from IOLTA for will allow the Pro Bono Office to hire additional law student interns and continue its work of using technology to enhance the delivery of pro bono services in the months ahead. At the end of December 2005, the page views (hits) for PALawHelp.org reached 8,982, nearly 25% over the hits received before the PBA Pro Bono Office started working on its IOLTA grant. Total hits this spring have been averaging around 12,000 per month. Although only 10 cases were actually posted on PAprobono.net in 2005, the resources supplied by the IOLTA grant allowed PBA staff and interns to involve more than 400 lawyers and support staff across the state in new pro bono activity that handled 400 cases and brought 260 of the cases to resolution from the client s perspective during that year. Many of the cases were resolved through legal information provided through the PALawHelp.org site. Users of the sites found that posting cases on the PAprobono.net site is not currently as efficient as direct phone and solicitation through various lists and listservs, whether handled at the local level or handled at the PBA level. This is especially true as regards the Legal Assistance for Military Personnel which had a well-established listserv at the start of the grant and which has handled to date nearly every case posted on it. Use of the 1 See for a description of Lawyers on Loan, an innovative program that has private firms providing Neighborhood Legal Services in Pittsburgh with midlevel associates to work full-time in legal aid while remaining with their firms. 2 See the county updates at to learn more about these pro bono programs.

2 sites and handling of cases through the tools has increased this spring. The call of the PBA Pro Bono staff in the coming months is to auto-enroll as many existing pro bono lists the York County Bar s Pro Bono program was the first one to be so enrolled-- into the PAprobono.net site as possible so that the resource has sufficient numbers to be more productive. The PBA Pro Bono office has done a lot of awareness training to date, but the time is now ripe to push forward with recruitment on a large scale. Work to auto-enroll the Legal Services to the Public Committee listserv and the LAMP listserv at the PBA is now underway. At many Bar events, from CCBL to the Environmental Law Section Meeting, the Pro Bono Office has maintained a computer for immediate sign-up by PBA members and provided brochures and other information to all involved to motivate lawyers to register on PAprobono.net. Such a set-up will be featured at the PBA Annual Meeting. PBA staff also worked with county Bar leaders and pro bono coordinators to have the materials featured in various county Bar publications. The Allegheny and Philadelphia county bars have run electronic newsletters featuring the tools and articles about the websites also appeared in the Lackawanna Pro Bono news. Philadelphia s Volunteers for the Indigent Program notifies all of its volunteers about PAprobono.net and also has a check-off box for the site on the case status reports that go out to all its volunteer attorneys. VIP also includes PALawHelp information for its clients as part of its program. The PBA Pro Bono Office has expanded its traveling ethics CLE presentation to include hands on use of computers and the two websites as part of the CLE in places where multiple computers are available. The newly developed, two hour CLE is entitled Pro Bono, Ethics and Technology: PALawHelp.org and PAprobono.net. The CLE has been presented at Widener-Harrisburg School of Law and the Jenkins Law Library in Philadelphia. This hands-on workshop allows lawyers to access both sites directly while working through pro bono ethics hypotheticals. A variation of this session will be featured at the 5 th Annual Pro Bono Conference on June 7 th in Hershey and later sessions are scheduled for Westmoreland, Washington and Franklin Counties. The 5 th Annual Pro Bono Conference 3 includes far more than the ethics CLE featuring the two websites. The ethics piece will be followed by an updated presentation on the Office of General Counsel Virtual Law Clinic and on the recent Government Lawyers Section domestic violence CLE project. The comes Pro Bono Awards and the Women in the Profession luncheon, followed by a presentation on Civil Gideon and a look at pro bono and disaster relief efforts. 39 Pro Bono Award winners along with Judges Award winner Dauphin County Common Pleas Judge Richard A. Lewis and Legal Services Professional awardee Sharon M. Dietrich from Community Legal Services in Philadelphia will be honored at the 2006 PBA Annual Meeting prior to lunch during the 5 th Annual Pro Bono Conference on June 7th. 4 The Goffman Awards the next day will honor Butler County veteran pro bono 3 For information on the Pro Bono Conference, see 4 For information about the PBA pro bono awards, see

3 attorney Marion Laffey-Ferry for her consistent support of the neediest among us and the Lancaster Bar Foundation for raising enough funds to hire a legal services attorney dedicated to taking the family law cases that were jamming up the local pro bono program. A breakfast reception celebrating the pro bono accomplishments of Harrisburg attorney Jeffrey A. Ernico was held at the Harrisburg Hilton and Towers on March 22, The event was hosted by the PBA, the Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network and Ernico s law firm, Mette, Evans & Woodside. Last year the PBA inaugurated an award in honor of Ernico s longstanding commitment to equal justice and his pro bono efforts for those who had nowhere else to turn. An occasional award of the PBA's Legal Services to the Public Committee, the Jeffrey A. Ernico Award is to be given to individuals the committee determines to have provided unique service that has resulted in significant improvement in the provision of legal services to the neediest among us. The award was first presented in September 2005 to Jim Carroll, former president of the Allegheny County Bar Association. The PBA Pro Bono Office staffs the Legal Services to the Public Committee 5, the Military and Veterans Affairs Committee 6 and the Task Force on Student Loan Forgiveness and Debt Reduction. 7 The office also assists other Bar entities as it did on Friday, April 21, 2006, when fifty government lawyers in the greater Harrisburg area participated in a six-hour CLE Program jointly presented by the PBA Pro Bono Office, the PBA Government Lawyers Committee, and the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The program was entitled Tools and Tips for Pro Bono Attorneys: the PFA Case. The six-hour CLE presentation covered topics including Understanding Domestic Violence; the PFA Act; Central Pennsylvania PFA Practice and Procedures; detailed scenarios dealing with practical issues in the representation of a client and also dealing with pro se opponents and negotiation tactics. The fifty attorneys in attendance agreed to take at least one PFA case on a pro bono basis within the next 12 months. Also assisting in the presentation were representatives from the YWCA of Greater Harrisburg Domestic Violence Legal Clinic and the Dauphin County District Attorney s Office. General Counsel to the Governor Barbara Adams and Attorney General Tom Corbett jointly authored a letter highlighting the seriousness of domestic violence as a societal problem and inviting their attorneys to attend the seminar. Committee conference calls between meetings on Committee/Section Day were instituted by both the Legal Services and Military Affairs Committees to handle the business of the Committees. The major work of the Legal Services Committee focused on the Pro Bono Awards and the Pro Bono Conference. There was also ongoing attention to eliminating the Sunset Provisions of The Access to Justice Act, passed by the Pennsylvania General 5 For information on the Legal Services to the Public Committee, see 6 For information on the Military and Veteran s Affairs Committee see 7 For information on the Task Force, see

4 Assembly in The Act applies a filing fee surcharge on most court filings to increase the funding for people with civil legal needs. Families experiencing important and sometimes urgent legal problems, such as domestic violence, a custody dispute, eviction, mortgage foreclosure or victimization by predatory lending practices, benefit from this fee. It allows more poor people to receive needed civil legal representation. The act is set to sunset in 2007 and that is raising concern among civil legal aid leaders and their supporters in the private bar. Efforts to repeal the Sunset enjoyed some success with the recent passage of repeal efforts in the Judiciary Committees of both the Senate (as a stand alone bill) and in the House (as part of a bill on filing fees in Philadelphia). The hope in the field is to secure the passage of the repeal before the summer recess of the General Assembly. The Military Affairs Committee continued to collect soccer balls to be distributed to Iraqi children by Committee Co-Chair Andy Eisemann as he finishes up his tour of duty. The Committee also weighed in on the Continuing Legal Education requirements for attorneys returning to practice in the state following serving on active military duty. The Committee asked the PBA Board of Governors to take a stand for returning lawyer veterans and request that the CLE Board change its policy as regards these attorneys and their CLE requirements by waiving all such requirements for active duty lawyers. Following Board approval, PBA President Bill Carlucci sent a letter to the CLE Board asking for such action. The Task Force on Student Loan Forgiveness and Repayment Assistance, originally organized under past PBA President Tim Carson in 2004 plans to sunset after the 2006 Annual Meeting, as it presents the following seven recommendations to the Board of Governors and House of Delegates at that event: I. The Task Force recommends that the Pennsylvania Bar Association endorse the establishment of a statewide Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP) designed to enable law graduates to enter into and remain in public service employment in Pennsylvania. II. The Task Force recommends that the Pennsylvania Bar Association endorse and advocate for the enactment of state legislation authorizing the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) to administer a statewide loan repayment assistance program for law graduates engaged in qualifying public service employment in Pennsylvania. III. The Task Force recommends that the Pennsylvania Bar Association approve and advocate for a comprehensive statewide loan repayment assistance program that is carefully structured to respond effectively to the needs of law graduates entering into or remaining in qualifying public service employment in Pennsylvania. IV. The Task Force recommends that the Pennsylvania Bar Association approve and advocate for a strong public-private partnership that will provide adequate, reliable, and

5 recurring funding for a statewide loan repayment assistance program to assist law graduates employed in qualifying public service employment in Pennsylvania. V. The Task Force recommends that the Pennsylvania Bar Association strongly encourage each Pennsylvania law school to establish and maintain an effective and wellfunded loan repayment assistance program, independent of this statewide program, that is designed to make public service legal employment financially feasible to its graduates, regardless of the state in which such graduates choose to pursue public service employment. VI. The Task Force recommends that the Pennsylvania Bar Association provide technical assistance and financial information to law schools, prospective and current law students, and law graduates by, among other things, serving as a depository for information related to financial planning, counseling, public interest fellowships, LRAPs, and other resources that are available to help students and law graduates enter into and remain in public service employment. VII. The Task Force recommends that the Pennsylvania Bar Association support federal legislation and efforts that advance the goals and recommendations of the Task Force.