{"id":425,"date":"2006-12-28T11:26:57","date_gmt":"2006-12-28T15:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/shlep\/2006\/12\/28\/brooklyn-self-help-project-leverages-pr"},"modified":"2006-12-31T15:11:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-31T19:11:00","slug":"brooklyn-self-help-project-leverages-pro-bono-efforts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/2006\/12\/28\/brooklyn-self-help-project-leverages-pro-bono-efforts\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn self-help project leverages pro bono efforts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two months after its opening (covered in our prior post<\/a>), the Self-Represented Legal Services Project, at the Brooklyn Family Court, is receiving high grades.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A New York Daily News<\/em> article\u00a0“Family Court offers free legal advice<\/a>” (Dec. 28, 2006) explains that an “unprecedented partnership between private lawyers and state courts” has placed volunteer attorneys from some of the largest NYC law firms on site Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., since November 2nd.\u00a0\u00a0 The project is “Led by the Greenberg Traurig law firm, attorneys from Citigroup, Strook & Strook & Lavan; Reed Smith; Dechert and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.”<\/p>\n

According to the city’s chief Family Court Justice Joseph Lauria,\u00a0“It has been really exciting. It was a good idea conceptually and in reality, it is playing out well.”\u00a0 Judge Lauria explains that, although the court cannot give legal advice, “What we’re doing is making available those who can give legal advice to court litigants.”<\/p>\n

Attorney Bill Silverman, from Greenberg Traurig, told the Daily News<\/em> that 100 people have taken advantage of the project in the past eight weeks.\u00a0 “Family Court is truly the people’s court,” he said. “There are life decisions being made in congested courtrooms. People are simply not aware of their rights and don’t understand their rights.”<\/p>\n

Nota Bene<\/a><\/em>: Silverman goes on to make an especially important point: “[V]ery few among thousands who can’t afford attorneys actually get a judge to appoint one for free. Most lawyers, he said, are just too busy to take on many pro bono<\/em> cases.”<\/p>\n

\"tinyRedCheck\"\u00a0\u00a0 “This provides us with an opportunity to not take on a small handful of cases but to help dozens or hundreds of people,”\u00a0[Silverman] said. “It’d be better for everyone to have lawyers, but in this half-hour, we can sort of do a triage and help as many people as we can. It does use resources in a very efficient way.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Are you listening, bar leaders and groups, law firms, and individual lawyers?\u00a0 We plan to\u00a0make this obvious but ignored point\u00a0again and again<\/a> here at shlep<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0Helping pro se<\/em> litigants is an especially effective way to use the legal profession\u2019s scarce pro bono<\/em> resources.\u00a0 Most Family Court litigants do not<\/em> need a lawyer through every step of the process (in fact, lawyers often complicate, aggravate and prolong the process) \u2014 but, they can often use well-focused legal assistance. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Pro bono<\/em> projects, like the one at the Brooklyn Family Court, greatly leverage pro bono<\/em> efforts.\u00a0 New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye says she’d like to see this pilot project duplicated throughout New York City.\u00a0 We’d like to see it quickly spread across the\u00a0state and the country.
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two months after its opening (covered in our prior post), the Self-Represented Legal Services Project, at the Brooklyn Family Court, is receiving high grades.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A New York Daily News article\u00a0“Family Court offers free legal advice” (Dec. 28, 2006) explains that an “unprecedented partnership between private lawyers and state courts” has placed volunteer attorneys from some of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":437,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[991],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-items"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/437"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}