Utah Legal Services offering solutions to money problems
Money is hard to come by, especially when it involves the law, but the Utah Legal Sevices have a plan to help those who have questions.
The office tries to offer service to everyone, but it is hard when they have more than 15 thousand people that come to them each year.
“We haven’t had a systematic outreach plan for some of the hardest-to reach populations,” said Anne Milne, director of Utah Legal Services. Even though they haven’t had a program, they are trying to work toward new goals.
The council is trying to find out ways the state can work together to stretch scarce resources, and be the most efficient.
Another issue is they don’t have enough money to provide a lawyer for everyone.
“We don’t get funded based on the number of legal needs, so we have try and prioritize and decide where our assistance makes the most difference,” Milne said.
Most of the funding comes from a national legal services corporation. They provide funding per poor person in the state based on the census.
“It’s not like the public defenders where it’s enough to do every valid case. We get a set amount and then lots of requests for our services,” she said.
For most divorce cases, they do not offer a lawyer but will help people head in the right direction.
“We still have limited funds, but one of the things is maybe there’s things where we can’t represent somebody, but we could publish something that answered common consumer questions or problems and try to advise people how to handle it on their own,” she added.
But if the divorce case involves domestic violence, they get a lawyer.
“The courts have put forms online, but it’s confusing. People file them, but may not know the next step,” Milne said.
Volunteers help in Salt Lake County every Tuesday night and try to answer case questions. The volunteers don’t take the cases on, but they will try to provide help for others, beyond the online process.
“I think the part of this that’s a challenge for us is just to increase the resources and then just match them up with people.”
“We’re starting to see more consumer problems,” she said. “As we start to get into that we think, oh, we haven’t really been active in this area; there may be more problems like that.”
An example of a consumer problem was a man who could not see very well and was talked into buying a very expensive vacuum. Milne said she would like to help more people so this does not continue.
“Sometimes the people that are the most disabled will have the hardest time collecting the information and filling out the forms,” Milne said.
“The good news in consumer cases is the division of consumer protection here puts a lot of resources into that and will investigate things.”
Funding will always be scarce, but they are trying to find ways to serve the whole state. They have 55 members on staff Statewide in Cedar City, Salt Lake City, Provo and Ogden, and they work with some private attorneys in San Juan County and Washington County.
-ranaebang@cc.usu.edu