New online portal offers free legal counsel to Mainers unable to afford it
The Maine Volunteer Lawyers Project on Tuesday unveiled an online portal, or virtual clinic, offering free legal counsel to Mainers otherwise unable to afford it or get to real clinics from remote rural areas.
Free Legal Answers, as the service is known, is a project of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service.
Maine’s version is being called Free Legal Answers Maine, or FLAME.
Qualified users can pose questions on civil matters via the ABA’s secure portal, through which registered attorneys respond on an anonymous basis.
Lawyers can register in the state where they’re licensed. Once they get the green light from the site administrator, they can go online and answer questions at their leisure — whether during lunch, on weekends or after business hours.
The ABA awarded a $10,000 grant for Maine to participate in the portal. Steve Scudder of the ABA said 42 states have adopted the online clinic so far, with more than 38 sites currently operating.
Over 14,000 questions have been posted since the site’s inception and more than 3,000 attorneys are participating, he added.
The Maine Volunteer Lawyers Project, a legal aid organization formerly housed within Pine Tree Legal Assistance, is leading the FLAME initiative. Following this summer’s soft launch, organizers are now getting the word out to the public and lawyers across the state.
“We have great lawyers but we don’t always have lawyers where the underprivileged population is,” David Soley, a Portland attorney who helped secure the ABA grant, said at Tuesday’s launch event at the Portland Public Library on Congress Street. “Today we kick off a 21st century technological solution to meet this need.”
Juliet Holmes-Smith, director of the Volunteer Lawyers Project and FLAME’s site administrator, said the portal is a good way to ‘triage’ matters that may require legal representation as well as offer attorneys an “efficient and easy way” to take on pro bono cases.
Pro bono pipeline
Soley, a Bernstein Shur shareholder who has been doing pro bono work his entire career, runs the Maine Homeless Legal Project. He said the hope is that volunteer lawyers who register on the portal will not only answer questions but also agree to take cases pro bono or recommend them for referral.
“I think we finally have a way of solving some of the pro bono issues we have in Maine,” he said.
Mainers who can’t get online from home will be able to go to any of the state’s public libraries, who will be working with the Volunteer Lawyers Project to train librarians on using the portal. As Soley noted in an interview, libraries can be found all over the state, even in the “middle of nowhere,” and they all have internet.
Among the judges who spoke at Tuesday’s event in Portland, Associate Justice Andrew Mead of the Maine Judicial Supreme Court said the Free Legal Answers portal is “truly innovative and it’s definitely a step forward.” Noting that legal service organizations are “desperately” underfunded and understaffed, he thanked all the lawyers who are doing pro bono work “from the bottom of our hearts.”
Speaking by video from Washington, D.C., Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, called the new portal a good idea and had a similar message of thanks to Maine’s pro bono lawyers for “making the promise of America real for everyone.”
A second kickoff event will be held this evening (Oct. 26) at the Bangor Public Library, 145 Harlow St., from 5 to 7 p.m.
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