Lawyers may work in a variety of areas, including agreements, immigration, and criminal law. A person can also become a law professor, and paralegals, consultants, and researchers can all work in the legal field. Because the legal system is so vast, it allows for a wide range of skills and competencies. I was a lawyer in civil legal services for almost 15 years before joining Legal Hand, and I would say that about three-quarters of the cold calls I received from people did not need a lawyer. What they needed was information, they needed resources, they needed to be pointed in the right direction, and they needed someone to sit down and listen to them and help them solve this problem. That`s what our volunteers do. They provide information, they provide resources, they help people with applications when it`s needed. Really, just a gentle hand that guides them in the subject they come with. WOLF: And you said it`s about prevention. So how do these volunteers help prevent deeper legal involvement? But do they give legal advice? Are people supposed to be their own lawyers? JAUREGUILORDA: So the model, the model of the legal hand, has, like our employees and our partners, real lawyers from civil law organizations.
So we have lawyers who are there, not to take cases of incoming visitors, but to support volunteers in their work. They are important for the training of volunteers when they arrive. On the civil side, there is no such right. But there is a small group of lawyers who provide legal services for civil law issues to low-income people. But that`s 6,000 or 7,000 lawyers for, say, 54 million people. There is a huge gap between the services available in the marketplace or through these other sources and the huge population of people who experience these problems. They could benefit from advice, expertise or help in resolving their legal problems. The most common way people describe their civil justice problems that can be prosecuted is that it is either bad luck or God`s will for them. If I think something just happened to me in my life because the forces are out of my control, I probably won`t go to the local law firm and seek legal help for a matter I don`t understand to be legal. — Rebecca L. Sandefur It turns out, if you think about your daily life, that much of the ordinary things we do about our family relationships, our work relationships, our relationships of buying and selling things, are regulated by some kind of civil law.
Contract laws or the different types of rights that we might have, many, many ordinary things turn out to be a matter of civil justice. 7. Laws make human rights a reality: « I firmly believe that the rule of law is the foundation of all our fundamental rights. » Human rights guaranteed to all are known as fundamental rights. These include, but are not limited to, freedom of life and personal liberty, freedom to marry, and the right to freedom from discrimination. SANDEFUR: There are two different types of efforts. There are providers like Legal Zen and Rocket Lawyer that offer so-called unbundled legal services, and they want to sell them across state borders. This contradicts the way legal services are regulated commercially. And then there are various efforts on the nonprofit side to say that they should at least be charitable exceptions for tools or people who are not lawyers to deliver a small portion of what lawyers are traditionally provided. First, Ignacio sits down with me in my office to talk about Legal Hand, which he runs, which was launched two and a half years ago on the recommendation of the Standing Committee on Justice on Access to Justice. Legal Hand is a unique model that provides tools and information in several New York stores to deal with very common but very important civil law issues. Ignacio, welcome.
Take the time to talk to me. While much of the social change is brought about by material changes such as technology, new production models, etc., other conditions are also needed. For example, as we have already discussed, the legal prohibition of untouchability in Free India has not succeeded due to insufficient social support. JAUREGUILORDA: I would say no. What we are doing is trying to prevent these issues from becoming legal issues so that they do not even need a lawyer. There are attorney resources for low-income people, and particularly in New York, we now have universal access to people, housing court tenants, facing eviction.
