The Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinic(s)—A True Legal Community Effort

Marquette Law SchoolThe spirit and ideals underlying Marquette Law School’s embrace of pro bono work are timeless—part of our Catholic, Jesuit heritage and mission and reflecting the best traditions of the legal profession. Yet there are some key dates in our history, and, without doubt, one of them is from just more than 20 years ago.

Specifically, in 2001, a group of individuals began the Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinic (MVLC). Julie Darnieder, L’78, alluded to this background in a blog post a number of years later, and I remain grateful to all of the individuals involved in launching the initiative.

My purpose here is not to recount the story but rather—on the cusp of the ABA’s National Celebration of Pro Bono week—first to note the continuing prominence of the MVLC in our now much-expanded pro bono work. Indeed, Angela F. Schultz, assistant dean for public service, has taught me to refer to the MVLCs (plural). For we now offer the following locations (and times):

Permit me to emphasize, second, that we are dependent on—and grateful to—the many lawyers in this community who enable us to operate the MVLCs. After all, our students, who are there with them, do not yet have law licenses.

The lawyers volunteering each day come from a range of practices, law schools, and experiences. Some volunteers have had long careers—Herb Bratt, retired from full-time law practice but a frequent volunteer, graduated from Yale Law School in 1956. Others are newer to the practice: Jordan Jozwik, an associate at Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren, graduated from Marquette Law School in May 2022. Within weeks, she had done her first MVLC shift—as an attorney (she volunteered often as a law student).

Remarkably, of the 230 lawyer volunteers in the past year, exactly 115 were Marquette lawyers, while the other half graduated from other law schools. The latter group would form a long list, including the law schools at universities such as Cornell, Creighton, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, Harvard, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Northwestern, Tulsa, Vermont, William Mitchell, and Wisconsin (Madison).

We recently surveyed all these lawyers about their “reasons for engaging in pro bono with the Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinics.” Simply stated here, it is evident that all of them regard it as a privilege to serve the MVLC clients (in the brief-legal-advice format of the clinic) and to help develop the knowledge, skills, and values of our students.

Indeed, a prevailing theme is that the practicing lawyers regard themselves as getting more than they are giving from the experience. From the Marquette Law School end, truly, we could not operate the MVLCs without the many civic-minded lawyers in this area who already know, from their volunteering, “how great this is” (in the words of one respondent to the recent survey).

Kudos—and thank you—to all our attorney volunteers. To learn how to join with them—and with our students—by volunteering with the Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinics, visit our website.

Continue ReadingThe Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinic(s)—A True Legal Community Effort

The Mobile Legal Clinic Speeds Forward

On September 17, 2013, the following announcement was made in a Marquette University press release:

Marquette Law School and the Milwaukee Bar Association are partnering to launch the Milwaukee Justice Center Mobile Legal Clinic, a specially outfitted bus designed as a vehicle to provide free, brief legal advice to individuals who find themselves outside of the areas currently served by legal volunteer efforts in metropolitan Milwaukee.

The Mobile Legal Clinic is believed to be the only service of its kind in Wisconsin, and one of only a handful in the nation delivering volunteer legal services in underserved areas.

Mobile Legal Van
The Mobile Legal Clinic’s first director, Mary Ferwerda, Law ’11, and its current director, Marisa Zane, Law ’11, stand outside the new Mobile Legal Clinic, outside Eckstein Hall, on October 6, 2022.

The 2013 release detailed the origins of the project, the succinct statement being this: “The Mobile Legal Clinic was made possible by a gift from Frank Daily, Law ’68, and Julianna Ebert, Law ’81, to honor the pro bono work of Mike Gonring, Law ’82, their friend and longtime partner at Quarles & Brady.” It described the Milwaukee Justice Center more generally—a collaborative project of Marquette Law School, the Milwaukee Bar Association, and the Milwaukee County Clerk of Courts.

Since its rollout, the Mobile Legal Clinic has made an important contribution to access to justice in the Milwaukee region. Just to give a sense of it: During the past nine years (and one month), on the Mobile Legal Clinic, more than 240 volunteer lawyers and Marquette law students have served 2,945 community members at 43 host sites. These sites are key service providers in the community—venues that people are frequenting for help with a range of needs.

The sites include public libraries, food pantries, and health clinics—places where community members may seek services connected, directly or tangentially, to a legal issue. For example, someone in need of help feeding his or her family might be facing an eviction. Or someone visiting a free health clinic might wish to appoint a power of attorney or write a will. More precise locations have included multiple Milwaukee Public Library branches (e.g., Forest Home, Martin Luther King, Mitchell Street), the Milwaukee Rescue Mission, the Riverwest Food Pantry, St. Benedict the Moor Parish, St. John’s Lutheran Church in West Milwaukee, and the Sixteenth Street Community Health Center, to name (truly) only a few.

To be sure, some aspects of the project have changed. Some of the individuals involved in leading the project are different: For example, Mary Ferwerda, Law ’11, the original supervisor of the Mobile Legal Clinic, is now executive director of the Milwaukee Justice Center, and Marisa Zane, Law ’11, is the supervisor of the Mobile Legal Clinic.

And now, for the development occasioning this post, the original bus has been replaced by an entirely new one. (See the photo accompanying this post.)

The new Mobile Legal Clinic is different. It no longer is specially outfitted with office space inside. Instead, it is a passenger vehicle to transport volunteers. This change resulted from years of experience hosting legal clinics inside a vehicle during times of rain, snow, heat, and freezing temperatures. Most of the time, the legal clinics ran more efficiently and effectively when held inside a building to which the Mobile Legal Clinic had arrived.

Yet a few people associated with the project—and one important “thing”—have remained the same. The former include, in particular, the three people noted above in the excerpt from the 2013 release: Frank Daily, Julie Ebert, and Mike Gonring, in different yet overlapping ways, continue to support the Mobile Legal Clinic. We are so grateful for their support, example, and service.

And the thing that has not changed? Without doubting that it could be stated in any number of ways, I would describe it as the spirit and ideals animating this project. I would say the spirit and ideals of Marquette University Law School—the school’s mission of Excellence, Faith, Leadership, and Service—and there would be considerable truth to this. Certainly, this is what especially motivates us “at” or “from” the Law School—those who have the privilege to work here or are Marquette lawyers (or both).

Yet, for all the leadership that Marquette Law School may have furnished, this is a project, in both its origins and its operations, that also has drawn substantially on the talents and values of others in the legal profession, without a direct connection to the Law School. Once again, it is an example of how much better able we are to serve others when we have the sorts of partnerships that have characterized the Mobile Legal Clinic. If you are a lawyer or law student who would like to get on board the Mobile Legal Clinic, let us know.

Continue ReadingThe Mobile Legal Clinic Speeds Forward

Law Student and PILS Fellow Morgan Kaplan Describes the “Steps” Required of a Pro Se “Movant” in Family Court in Milwaukee County

Milwaukee County CourthouseEarly this semester, I had the privilege of meeting with Marquette law students who this past summer held Public Interest Law Society fellowships. These 25 individuals worked at organizations, geographically from Wisconsin to Chicago to Washington, D.C., with a variety of focuses—including public defender offices, legal services organizations, prosecutor’s offices, government agencies, and civil rights entities, scarcely to exhaust the list.

I learned so much from the conversation, arranged by Angela F. Schultz, assistant dean for public service at the Law School. Much of it would be worth relating, and I encourage everyone in our law school community to converse with one or more of our impressive PILS fellows.

In this post, with thanks to (and permission from) Morgan Kaplan, a second-year student, I want to highlight briefly one phenomenon that she observed this summer as a PILS fellow working at the Milwaukee Justice Center. More specifically, she described for the group some of the difficulties faced by pro se litigants hoping to modify family court orders in the Milwaukee County Circuit Court.

Here is the description, which I asked her to write up:

One might hope that filing a motion to modify a family court order would be a relatively straightforward proposition—perhaps even that a party could bring in the completed paperwork, drop it off (file it) in one place, and move on to preparing for the court date or other tasks.

This is not the case. Rather than a simplified process that promotes access to the civil justice system, pro se litigants must navigate a sea of forms and offices, even after they have filled out the modification form (the motion). The Milwaukee Justice Center has prepared a sort of map—a checklist—to guide their journey. Let’s travel with them.

1. Those who are eligible for a fee waiver, either based on income or receipt of public benefits, will start in Room 104, the Clerk of Court’s office, to have their fee waiver notarized.

2. That’s just notarization: Having the fee waiver approved requires a trip up to the Chief Judge’s office in Room 609. Once those interested have an approved fee waiver, then they can move on to the next steps to file the motion.

3. It’s time for filing. This happens in Room 104, the Clerk of Court’s office (a second time for those using a fee waiver). There, interested parties will either show their fee waiver or pay a filing fee, giving the original documents to the clerk. We may now call them “movants.”

4. Then they will move upstairs (a second time for those with a fee waiver)—all the way to Room 707—to visit the office of the Family Court Commissioner. There, movants will hand all remaining copies of the motion to the calendar desk and get a hearing date, which will be stamped on all copies of the motion.

5. If the desired modification—the relief requested by the motion—involves a child support order, movants will head back down to Room 101, the Milwaukee County Child Support Office, to drop off a copy of the motion there as well.

6. After those three stops (five, in fact, for those with a fee waiver), movants will head over to the Safety Building, Room 102 (connected to the courthouse via skywalk), to fill out paperwork in hopes of having the Milwaukee County Sheriff serve the other party (if a county resident) with a final copy of the motion.

We all know that the processes of our civil justice system were not created with unrepresented litigants in mind, yet no one doubts that cases with such pro se litigants, in fact, predominate in family courts across the country. We may well ask whether we have taken enough steps to facilitate access to justice for these pro se litigants.

Continue ReadingLaw Student and PILS Fellow Morgan Kaplan Describes the “Steps” Required of a Pro Se “Movant” in Family Court in Milwaukee County