This week:  Pro bono, Mick Dundee-style; exploring solutions to expand legal services in Mississippi; comparing public defenders and private defense counsel; Comcast shows a little  love ($$$) to a medical-legal partnership; a legal services hotline for California seniors loses funding; more on Missouri’s ailing public defense system; the wheels of justice turning in New Mexico; terrific legal work on behalf of veterans in Michigan; and two former Minnesota legal services lawyers form a for-profit firm, but work primarily with low-income clients. 

• 8.27.10 – Fallen behind on the pro bono scene Down Under?  Well, The Australian has a piece about new data from the country’s National Pro Bono Resource Centre. The data show that, just as in the U.S., large firms are making large pro bono contributions: “24 firms with more than 50 lawyers did 322,343 hours of pro bono work last financial year.  The resource centre did not provide costings, but a conservative hourly rate of $250 shows the firms gave away legal work worth at least $80m.”  Read the Australian’s article on the National Pro Bono Resource Centre’s new data.  The two reports which present the data are presently available on the Resource Centre’s homepage.  As an aside, the PSLawNet Blog met the Centre’s director, John Corker, a couple of years ago at a public interest conference in Minneapolis.  We sat next to him as he took in his first baseball game.  The PSLawNet blog explained the basics, and apologized for both the Metrodome and for the diabolical Red Sox Nation, which had overrun the place to see the visiting Sox.

• 8.25.10 – a short piece in Southern Mississippi’s Sun Herald notes that “A Mississippi Supreme Court committee has asked for public comment on proposals to improve poor people’s access to legal services.  Proposals under review call for making 20 hours of annual pro bono…service mandatory for Mississippi attorneys, raising to $500 the payments lawyers may make in lieu of doing pro bono work and increasing fees paid by out of state lawyers to $500 per case” in order to fund civil legal services.  The comment deadline is October 1.

• 8.24.10 – Miller-McCune reports on new research in the Journal of Criminal Justice: “A newly published look at Chicago-area courts finds that, when you consider the actual outcomes of judicial hearings, these underpaid and underappreciated attorneys do just as well as their private-sector counterparts.”  The study looked at a random sample of 2850 convicted felony defendants and compared outcomes – between those defendants who had public defenders and those who had private counsel – at four stages in their trials: whether bail was granted; plea-bargaining decisions; whether defendants ultimately served a jail sentence; and length of sentence imposed on those jailed.  There are “[t]wo important caveats” regarding the study: “The researchers did not look at convictions vs. acquittals. And they found that retaining a private attorney is apparently beneficial ‘for certain offenders and at certain stages’ of the process.”  [Tip of cap to the ABA Journal.]

• 8.24.10 – the Florida Times-Union reports that “Comcast has donated $15,000 to Jacksonville Area Legal Aid for its Northeast Florida Medical-Legal Partnership.”  The eight year-old Partnership has recently expanded to serve additional medical centers.

• 8.24.10 – according to the Senior Spectrum (a publication covering seniors’ issues in California): “After providing free legal advice to more than 100,000 callers over the past two decades, the California Senior Legal Hotline has been forced to suspend most service following the loss of all state and federal funds for its general statewide program.”  Seniors in Sacramento County will still be able to access the hotline for help on a broad array of issues, but those outside the county will have only limited access to hotline services.  The hotline program is seeking new funding sources.

• 8.23.10 0 – the Lincoln County Journal reports on Missouri’s indigent defense caseload crisis.  “Public defender offices statewide are seeing increasingly heavy case loads putting attorneys well over their monthly limits.”  District Defender Thomas Gabel, who oversees programs in Lincoln and Pike Counties, observed that “Missouri is ranked 49th out of 50 states for public defense funding and in the past decade the state has taken in 12 thousand additional cases a year with no additional funds.”  Also, on 8.21.10, KSPR in Springfield reported that “Missouri Auditor Susan Montee plans to review the state Public Defender Commission.”  The PSLawNet Blog has been covering this series of events; to track back to past coverage, begin with our 8/20/10 Public Interest News Bulletin.

• 8.21.10 – the Las Cruces Sun-News in New Mexico reports that, in spite of budgetary pressures on the prosecutor’s and public defender’s offices, and in spite of the public’s misperception – driven by television crime dramas – about how fast the wheels of justice should turn, the Do-a Ana County courthouse is moving with all deliberate speed in handling criminal matters.

• 8.22.10 – an Associated Press story on the Michigan Live website tells of the successes of Project SALUTE , a pro bono program housed at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law that serves veterans with legal needs.  “Combined with the law school’s Veterans Law Clinic, the two UDM-run programs are designed to address the compelling needs of veterans around the state.  The programs focus on veterans’ federal disability and pension benefits through education, law student representation, and pro bono attorney referral.”  For more, see the PSLawNet Blog’s post yesterday which explores Project SALUTE and other efforts to help low-income vets throughout the country. 

• 8.21.10 – according to the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, two former legal aid lawyers formed their own law firm, specializing in “destitute and low-income clients.”  While some clients can afford to pay a little bit of money, the firm will also rely on a Minnesota program that “pays advocates to help low-income adults with the complicated paperwork to go through the [federal Supplemental Security Income application] process.”  It can be a win-win-win when a client is approved to receive SSI benefits: the client has increased income, the attorneys are compensated by the state, and the state will actually save money because the client’s move to a federally-funded support program will often take them off of the rolls of state programs.