We've all heard the saying that necessity is the mother of invention.

And if there's any place in the legal industry that we need a few more moms, it's the Access to Justice gap.

And I mean that figuratively, not literally.

Moms, I am not trying to put this burden on you.

And don't worry, I'm not going to do a deep dive today with the size and sweep of that A to J gap.

But if you've been paying any attention at all to the pleas of the Legal Services Corporation or legal aid organizations here in the US or anywhere, or to the public defender crisis, we've got a definite shortage here in Oregon that I think is reflected in a lot of other jurisdictions, down to even just the number of people forced to represent themselves in civil actions.

If you spend any amount of time near your local courthouse, or maybe just listening to friends and family members who are encountering things in their lives where they could use a lawyer's help but can't really afford to consult one or even know where to start finding someone that might be able to help, these are people that are probably hitting you up with some questions.

So as we enter this season of giving, I want to highlight an Access to Justice success story that I've been fortunate enough to be a part of, albeit one that is still very much in its early chapters.

And I want to do it not only to spread a little hope, but to illustrate some agile tools and concepts that you might be able to use in your own practices or maybe with other Access to Justice organizations, organizations that you're connected to.

And you'll hear how a clear focus on improving the client experience is leading to improved outcomes and streamlined workflows across the board for the client, for the court, and even for opposing counsel.

And yes, even opposing counsel should be considered a customer when it comes to delivering work from parts of your workflow.

So I'm excited to tell you this story.

Hopefully you get some stuff from it.

Ready to Become a More Agile Attorney?

Let's go.

Welcome to the Agile Attorney Podcast.

I'm John Grant, and I help legal professionals of all kinds harness the tools of modern entrepreneurship to build practices that are profitable, sustainable, and scalable for themselves and for the communities they serve.

And this is very much a episode about the communities that I help serve.

And I want to acknowledge that the day that this comes out is Thanksgiving here in the US Our neighbors to the north celebrated Thanksgiving a couple of months ago, and I hope that went well for all of you and for you listeners outside of English speaking North America.

I hope you and the people close to you are easing nicely into the holiday season.

If you have a kind of practice where the holidays are your busy season, I wish you a calm and orderly approach to that busy time.

And if you have a practice where the holidays cause things to slow down for you, then I hope you'll be able to use this opportunity to relax and recharge.

Ideally check out of your practice entirely for at least a few days, but at least give yourselves the opportunity to do some reflection and retrospection Today I want to share a story from the Commons Law center here in Oregon.

And I've talked about the Commons a few times already on this podcast.

I mentioned some of its programs back in episodes 10 and 15, again in episode 23 where I did a little deeper dive into those numbers behind the Access to Justice crisis that I'm not going to repeat today.

Today I want to specifically share some details around the Commons Tenant Eviction Defense program, which internally we refer to as ted.

And I think this is a really exciting program and I hope that you'll be able to learn a little bit about how you can approach your law practice in a better way from some of the lessons we've learned in developing this program over the last 18 months or so.

And I'm actually going to start by describing sort of the current state where we are today.

And so a few bits of background.

Number one, here in Portland, our county is Multnomah County.

We've got a very pretty brand new court building that was opened a few years ago, rebuilt from and also very pretty, but very old and aging.

1 But between 8 and 8:30 every morning in the Multnomah County Courthouse, as part of sort of the long line of people waiting to get through the metal detector, is a group of people who have received an eviction notice, meaning that they are at serious risk of losing their housing.

And they have been summoned to the courthouse for what's known as first appearances.

So they've had to take a day off work, right?

They've had to make their way into downtown Portland and find parking or find transportation to get themselves to the courthouse.

And for the most part they're in the security line more or less all alone.

Some of them bring a friend or a family member.

But, you know, a lot of folks are just there because they've been told to be there by the court.

They don't really know what to expect, but they're thinking it's probably not going to be good.

Once they get through security, they got to make their way up to the second floor into what's known inside the courtroom as the crane room room.

And it's actually because there's literally a crane on a steel I beam that's in there.

It's kind of cool.

But they're not necessarily paying attention to the decor.

Right.

They are thinking that this is just another waiting room like any other that they're forced to wait in, except that there's a difference.

And that's because the commons law center has set up a mobile eviction defense clinic inside of the crane room in the multnomah county courthouse.

So instead of just having to approach this big empty wheel waiting room, for the most part, when someone comes upstairs, they're greeted by a team member from the commons law center who is asking them, are you here for a first appearance on an eviction case?

Now here too, right?

The person that is there for their first appearance, they don't actually know who this person is.

They think maybe it's someone from the court staff or they're not quite sure.

So people are a little reserved at first.

But very quickly, the team member from the commons will say that, I'm from the commons law center.

It is a non profit law firm and we have a clinic here today that is able to provide you with free representation for your eviction defense.

Would you like to participate?

And the response that we get from people here is interesting.

A lot of people are pretty suspicious.

It won't surprise you, right?

These are folks for whom the system is not really proven to be a friend of theirs.

And so some people need a little reassurance or they need some more information about the program.

And of course, our team members are happy to give that.

Other people sort of recognize it right out of the chute.

And so they're quickly ready to say yes.

Here's where it gets cool.

If they say, yes, I'd like to be represented by the commons law center, then this sort of quick cascade of things happens.

The first thing is that the team member hands that person a laminated piece of paper.

It's a sort of bright teal color, which is the brand color for the commons law center.

And on the one side it says I am represented by the Commons Law center.

And then it has some other information for that person about what to expect in the representation.

And then on the other side is a QR code and the team member encourages that person to scan the QR code with their phone.

Or if they don't have a phone, they actually can use one of our laptops that is set up at a workstation inside of the Crane room.

But most people have a device with them and so they scan the QR code and that takes them to an intake form and they obviously fill out information in that form, but that then populates a series of systems behind the scenes with the Commons.

And just to reveal our tech stack a little bit, we're using Clio Grow for part of this, but we're also using Gavel, which used to be known as Docum 8 for document assembly.

So when they fill out that intake form, we are very quickly able to do the conflict check.

We're able to generate an engagement agreement that we can then send back to them to e sign.

We also then using Gavel, are able to generate a notice of limited scope representation.

And I'll talk about that limited scope nature in a minute.

We're able to generate a fee waiver form because most people by definition, if they're there for non payment of rent evictions, they probably also aren't going to want to have to pay or not able to pay the court filing fees.

And then it's got some other required court forms that automatically all of them get populated from that single intake form that the person fills out.

Now that limited scope representation, I want to drill on that just for a minute.

Number one, it is completely consistent with the requirements of RPC 1.2 here in Oregon.

Number two, the actual engagement agreement that we have with the client is very clear that it is going to be a limited scope representation, really just to see them through that first appearance and to negotiate with opposing counsel on their behalf.

We then also, under the Uniform Trial Court rules here in Oregon, have to file that notice of limited scope appearance and put that on record with the court.

Although we don't necessarily have to file it before we appear, we just have to file it within a reasonable amount of time after the appearance has happened.

And that's important because these appearances happen very, very quickly in the morning.

Once the judge sort of gavels the session into order, they're relatively quickly going through the docket in order to determine who's there, what their inclination is in terms of that first appearance, and most importantly, to encourage both the tenant and the landlord, usually represented by landlord's council or sometimes by a representative, to work something out so that it doesn't have to go all the way through to an eviction.

But let me back up a minute and talk about what actually happens after we get all those documents created, is that each person who accepts representation from the commons, and typically we can take on between 10 and 12 people a day on average.

It sort of depends on how many team members we have.

But we try to be very intentional about limiting the number of people we take in so that we can make sure that we are doing a good job for each of those people.

But once we engage each individual client, that client actually gets a card on a mobile Kanban board.

And this is a physical board, a sticky note board that we set up every day, every morning inside the crane room that has a few different stages on the columns of the board.

And then each person we represent gets a sticky note that represents their progress through this limited scope representation of the day.

And the columns on the board are pretty straightforward.

The first one is ready for consultation, then it moves into negotiation, then answer and fee waiver, then ready for either a trial date or to report back to the court that the case has been settled.

And then there is a final stage for that person to sort of check out when with us and get next steps.

And that's where we actually terminate the limited scope of representation.

And then the final column, as with any Kanban system, is done.

And so you can imagine that's more or less how the case flows through the day.

Right?

The person gets a 10 to 15 minute consultation with one of our staff attorneys in order to understand the situation and sort of develop at least an initial strategy.

Sometimes that consultation happens before the actual first appearance, sometimes it happens after.

And.

And one of the beauties of that teal card, and I should say the person hangs onto that card until the checkout phase.

And so when they're in the courtroom, that card actually serves as sort of a classic Kanban, a visual signal to both the judge and court staff and also to opposing counsel that this is a person who's being represented by the Commons Law Center.

So there's actually a sort of a kanban within a kanban for this overall system.

And then obviously during that first appearance as well, one of our staff attorneys is in the room and stating when the case comes up, stating for the record that we do in fact represent that particular person when the case moves to the actual Negotiation phase.

This is about a few different things, right?

Sometimes during the initial consultation, our attorneys might get wind of some bad behavior by the landlord or some other things that might lead us to think that there is a way out of this case in terms of an affirmative fence or a more of an offensive posture with wrongful eviction coming into play.

That's not common, but it's not unheard of.

It's actually a lot less common today than it was when we first started the clinic.

So one of the interesting things about this is when we first started showing up in the courthouse, there were a lot of deficiencies with the eviction notice or the various documents that need to accompany the eviction notice.

And our attorneys were on top of that.

And so if there was any deficiency at all, then of course, we would very quickly move to dismiss based on that deficiency.

Now, that doesn't mean the eviction goes away completely, right?

The landlord has the opportunity to cure that deficiency, but it at least buys that person time.

And a lot of cases.

That's what is most impactful is giving people an opportunity to move out on their own terms, find other housing and avoid having an eviction on their record.

Because having that eviction on your record makes life a whole lot more complicated when it comes to securing your next place to live.

And it can be that way for a while.

There were some other technical deficiencies we used to find.

One of the ones that was really common was if the building was held in a corporate entity of some sort, it was kind of common for us to find that the Secretary of State records or the other required business filings weren't up to date.

And that was an automatic dismissal because an entity that isn't current doesn't have standing to appear in court in Oregon.

But as you can imagine, it didn't take more than a few weeks of our attorneys finding those sort of common deficiencies for the landlords and the landlord council to sort of become a little bit bit more intentional about checking their work and making sure that the corporate filings are up to date before they make a court filing and things like that.

Before we showed up, these were things that weren't necessarily getting caught.

So I think that even our presence is making the justice system work more like it's intended to work.

And yeah, it requires a little more effort on landlord and landlord's council part, but that's what.

What is supposed to happen.

So one other thing to know about our system is that it's really common.

There's only sort of a handful of law firms in Portland, Oregon that tend to do this landlord representation.

And so there's sort of a, you know, a cast of usual suspect attorneys who their job is to be at this first hearing every day or at least most days of the week representing the various landlord clients that they represent.

And you know, even though those landlord attorneys are on the other side of the V from our clients, we've got a pretty collegial bar here in Oregon.

And also, you know, we want the system to work well.

And so one of the things that we came up with that I think works really well is if one of our clients is going up against a landlord represented by one of these usual suspect law firms, each of those firms actually has a different color sticky note that we use associated with their work.

So firm A might be orange, firm B might be blue, firm C might be pink.

Now what that means in practice is that the landlord's council actually wind up using our Kanban board because they can come over and at a glance, they can see how many cases they have where the tenant is represented by the Commons Law Center.

And then also by virtue of where those cards are on the board, they understand the status, the progress, and it actually makes it easier for them to manage their work, even though it's our system that they're using in order to do it.

I should also say, and this won't come as a surprise, when we first started showing up, the landlord council weren't exactly thrilled about it.

Right.

They'd sort of gotten used to being able to move through their cases in a relatively quick way.

And when there isn't counsel on the other side, they had come up with a certain way of working that they could push these cases through very, very quickly.

Right.

Certainly by lunchtime.

And when the comments first started showing up.

Right.

That got a little slower for a while.

Now, partly the reason it was slower is that we were finding these deficiencies in the cases that caused them some consternation.

Part of the reason it was slower is that it takes time for us to consult with our clients in order to then negotiate with landlords counsel.

And so that whole process took a little bit longer.

And also we didn't know what we were doing at first.

Right.

I mean, not that we didn't know, but we weren't as good at it in the initial phases as we eventually have become.

So again, not surprisingly, some of the landlord council were a little bit grumpy that they weren't necessarily back at their own desk in their own office by lunchtime in the early going of this work.

And we actually got some complaints from some of them again in the very early going.

And they even went so far as to complain to some of the judges that we were making the whole process really inefficient.

And our response to that was, look, due process isn't meant to be efficient, right?

In fact, I've said before, due process is an intentional inefficiency in the name of fairness.

And it's just one of the things that obviously as lawyers we sign up for relatively quickly.

Though I think most of the landlord counsel have come to really appreciate having the Commons lawyers there to work with the tenants, because it means that the landlord council, number one, doesn't have to do as much explaining to these people what's going on in the eviction itself, because they've got their own lawyer to do that.

Number two, the landlord council doesn't really have to listen to as many of the sort of long winded stories, right?

People that are experiencing eviction and aren't familiar with the legal system may have a lot of ideas and a lot of reasons why they think that eviction isn't right or isn't fair.

But of course, many of those ideas aren't legal ideas.

It's sort of practical things that may or may not hold water in a court of law.

And I think landlord counsel wind up having to do a lot of that explaining.

Before, these tenants had their own representation and now the Commons lawyers are doing a lot of that and they're doing it in a way that the tenants are more likely to accept because the Commons Commons lawyers are representing them, not the landlord.

So I think what the landlord council eventually realized is that even though it is now taking them longer to maybe start the negotiation where they might have been able to start it a little bit sooner, before the Commons lawyers had to do the consultations up front.

Now what they're finding is that those negotiations are a lot simpler, a lot smoother, a lot, lot faster, because two lawyers are able to have a let's get down to business conversation in a way that a lawyer going against an unrepresented tenant isn't able to do.

One other piece that's important is that we have some partner organizations we work with that provide rental assistance.

And so another one of the things that the Commons is effectively able to do that landlord Council weren't is connect tenants with organizations that are able to come up with some money to pay back rent or maybe even pay a little bit of rent in order to keep someone in their housing.

And generally a landlord is happy to accept that money and let the tenancy progress as long as they have reasonable assurances that they're going to continue to get paid.

All right, so I've talked a lot about sort of the practical pathway from the lawyer's perspective and even opposing counsel's perspective.

I do want to make sure I touch on what this looks like from the client's perspective.

So that's where I started.

Right.

They're coming through the metal detectors believing that they're in this all alone.

They get greeted in the Crane Room by a team member from the Commons that basically says, hey, we can help.

Assuming they accept that help.

The Commons now is really intentional about making sure that the client understands what the roadmap looks like for the rest of their morning inside of the Crane Room and the courtroom.

So we've got a lot of written materials that we give to people.

It starts again with that blue card that's got some high level information, but we've got some other handouts that help explain the process.

Then of course, when they do have the consultation itself with an attorney, they have an opportunity to tell their story, to engage in conversation, to ask questions.

And, you know, we make sure that they are really comfortable with sort of what their rights and responsibilities are based on what we understand their situation to be and based on the law.

We also try to be really, you know, straight with people that we can't always keep them in their housing.

Right.

That's obviously the primary goal.

If we can do that either again through rental assistance or through some other way.

But we, I think, are really careful to make sure that they understand that even if we can't keep them in their housing, we're really going to try to make sure that they wind up not having an eviction on their record, because as I said a minute ago, that can create all sorts of problems down the road.

And obviously the ultimate decision around what to do lies with the client.

But we're really careful about laying out options for them and probably options that no one else has made them aware of until that point.

And then, you know, there are times where the client has to do just a bit of sitting around.

Right.

We can only do one or two negotiations at a time, depending on how many attorneys we've got.

Right.

Obviously each attorney can only do one negotiation at A time.

And so the client has to, you know, just kind of hang out in the crane room for a little bit.

But they can always use the Kanban board to see where their name is on the card on the board and where we are in the overall process.

And I think that really helps give them some roadmapping and some expectation setting around how the rest of the morning is going to go.

Sometimes depending on the result of the negotiation or the strategy they came up with, they might have a little more paperwork to fill out.

In which case again, our paralegals or other team members, they're really careful to support them through that and even we'll go get the printouts for them.

We have a partnership with the law library inside of the courthouse that helps us use their printers and other things as if it were a self represented litigate all the way along.

There's also some like non legal practical things that we wind up doing, like making sure that they've validated their parking for long enough or that they don't have other things that are coming up that are going to force them to have to leave the courtroom before this whole thing is finished.

Because one of the things that winds up being true is they don't know how long this whole thing is going to take when they get that notice of appearance or when they get that summons to appear at the end of the whole process.

And I really think this is maybe the most important thing from the client perspective is when they leave the courthouse they've got a plan.

So either they've got a negotiated move out date, maybe they've got rental assistance that is going to be incoming and so they know what's going to happen there.

Or maybe even they've set a trial date after consulting with a lawyer.

And that's not uncommon.

It's not the most common thing.

But sometimes there are issues that need to be actually brought in front of a judge.

But either way they really understand, okay, here's what just happened and here's what my obvious next steps are.

And that I think is really, really valuable for people.

So as you can imagine, right, for people that actually are fortunate enough to get representation from a commons lawyer, although lawyer, but we're the ones that are doing the bulk of this work in Multnomah county.

The individual outcomes for those people are generally vastly improved over what they would have been had they been self represented.

I do want to take a minute and just talk about some data that shows the systemic impact that this program has had.

So one of the things that hasn't changed is the percentage of landlords who are represented by a lawyer or an agent in Multnomah County Eviction Court.

And that has hovered somewhere between 70 and 80% for as long as I can go back in the data.

Right.

It's not uncommon for landlords to have an attorney when they show up, or at least a representation, an agent who.

That's a funny quirk in the law that you can be represented by an agent and not an attorney.

But having landlords represented is, is more the rule than it is the exception.

Now, before the Commons started this in Court House Clinic, the percentage of tenants who were represented in an eviction case was hovering around 5 to 6%.

I'm really happy to report that today it is closer to 18 or 19%.

And so with this clinic, and like I said, we are only able to represent about, about 10 to 12 people a day.

And initially we were only able to do it three days a week.

Although thanks to some increased funding we've been able to expand that to five day a week representation.

Now that's still a pretty big gap, right?

If 70, 80% of landlords are represented by council, even if we get the tenants represented up to 20%, that's still a lot of tenants that are unrepresented.

But we're shooting for progress, not perfection here.

And I think we've been able to make some significant progress.

And you know, not surprisingly, the biggest reason why we can't help more people is capacity.

Even though we've got our systems pretty well dialed in, we've got a lot of things streamlined, there still is just a lot of one on one time that's needed either between the client and the Commons lawyer, or between the Commons lawyer and opposing counsel in order to do these negotiations.

That just takes time.

It's not, not easily scaled.

So we've kind of maxed ourselves out.

Short of being able to hire new lawyers, which we'll talk about funding in a minute, we're kind of capped out at what we can do.

There is just an interesting little aside and this, you know, kind of speaks to the law of unintended consequences, I guess.

But you know, as you all know, during the pandemic, the rise of remote appearances or the ability for people to either call in or zoom in to a court proceeding is now far easier for far more common.

And that's great because it really does lower barriers to access for those people.

But because our clinic is in the courthouse, only people who call in or zoom into their first appearance are actually at something of a disadvantage because as of right now, we haven't figured out a good way to provide representation to those people that are appearing remotely.

And we actually have some pretty good ideas about how to start doing that.

But what we don't have is enough people on our team to be able to put those ideas into action.

Oh, one more thing I want to point out, I meant to talk about earlier is, you know, this limited scope representation.

At the end of the day, the amount of time that these tenants are represented by a lawyer is somewhere on the order of about 90 minutes to maybe two at the outside.

Three hours.

Right.

They don't have a lawyer for very long.

Long.

But the impact of the work that we're able to do in that 90 minutes is really, really critical.

And I bring this up only because there are still a lot of lawyers and frankly, even some judges that we ran into in the early going that somehow see limited scope representation as being a lesser form of lawyering or maybe even not lawyering at all.

All.

And I'm here to tell you that it is borderline magical, like our ability to be laser focused on.

These are the issues that we're going to help you with.

This is the timeframe that we're going to help you within and then actually deliver on helping people on those issues within that timeframe.

It makes a really big impact on people's lives.

And so I am a huge fan of limited scope representation.

I think there are places where even private attorneys could be using it a whole lot more.

But I definitely want to sort of quash any notion that somehow limited scope representation is a lesser form of lawyering because it is really, really impactful when it's done well.

Okay, so what are some takeaways for you who more than likely are a private practice attorney, Although those of you that are legal aid or, or in other access to justice organizations, obviously I applaud the work that you're doing and welcome any questions from you about how you might be able to use some of these things in your practices.

But specifically for those of you who are private practice lawyers, what can you learn from this experience of the Commons in building and improving this program?

You know, number one is just don't be afraid to try something new.

And I'm already a little long on my timing here, but one of the things I want to make clear is that this is far from the first iteration of eviction defense help from the Commons Law Center.

We tried a lot of different things, some of which worked kind of and A lot of which led us to the place that we currently are.

But it's been very much an evolution and a learning experience where we try some things and some of them work, some of them don't.

We actually are really intentional about debriefing with the team, usually several times a week.

In terms of how did that day go, what did we learn from that day?

How can we make it better tomorrow?

Because this idea of getting feedback loops is really critical to our improvement cycle and delivering the best possible product we can deliver.

Number two, I would say that the real sort of inflection point in the evolution of the Commons eviction defense program was when we stopped looking at it through the lens of what does the lawyer need to do?

And we started looking at it through the lens of what does the client need to happen?

And obviously there are a lot of very practical things that the client needs to happen and we've addressed those.

But where things got even better was when we got more and more intentional about addressing the more social, emotional needs of the client and not just being sort of technicians and, you know, hardcore practitioners.

We started to treat the client as a whole person and not just as someone that has a legal thing that we can then practice on them.

Number three is the use of visual systems, right?

Both the Kanban board inside of the clinic and then that teal card that serves as a visual signal to other people inside of the clinic.

Clinic.

These visual systems have been really, really impactful in the efficiency of the program and kind of reducing the number of questions that would come in about what's the status of X case.

Right.

It's right there in the crane room.

Everyone who wants to look can see what's going on.

Right?

There's no client confidentiality, right.

We've had to make a notice of appearance anyway, so.

So the tenants can see where they are, the landlords can see where they are.

The judges don't obviously come out into the crane room, although sometimes they do after the court session is over.

Just out of curiosity.

But everyone who needs a status update can usually get it reasonably quickly using the systems that are in place.

And it doesn't require the individual time and attention of a person in order to give those statuses updates.

And then number four is to embrace technology and leverage technology in order to deliver sort of better experiences and better work product within the stages of the system that you've developed.

And it was very much the last thing that we did was to put these technology systems in place.

But the systems themselves have obviously, once we get the practices right.

Right.

The systems have enabled us to accelerate the rate at which we can deliver on those practices.

And I just want to give another shout out to our technology partners, both of whom give us deep discounts or even some freebies when it comes to the tools that we use.

The first is Clio, who has been very generous and very gracious in terms of giving us access to both Clio Grow and Clio Manage for use inside of the Commons Law Center Center.

And the other is Gavel and Dorna and her team have been super helpful in helping us use their tool to really drive some key parts of our practice.

So thank you to those technology partners.

One last thing to wrap this up.

I mentioned at the top of the episode that we have very much entered the season of giving.

And so I'm going to just expressly ask if you feel inspired by this work that we're doing.

The Commons Law center would welcome a donation from you.

You can go to thecommonslawcenter.org and the the is part of the URL.

So thecommonslawcenter.org donate or just, you know, go to the main home screen.

You'll see a big donate button.

Every little bit helps.

And in particular, the philanthropic money that we bring in is especially critical for this eviction defense program because it is free to the tenants.

Are other programs a little different that we have designed them so that they can be financially self sustaining based on the fees we charge to clients.

But we still need the philanthropic donations in order to help us stand up new programs, handle some of the administrative overhead of the firm, train new team members and things like that.

So every little bit you could give would be very, very welcome.

But don't feel like you have to donate to the Commons.

You know, whatever your local Access to Justice organization is, I really encourage you to support them.

Legal aid is the one that gets a lot of time and attention and a lot of bars have programs that directly benefit legal aid.

And legal aid needs help.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be donating to legal aid, but legal aid only sweeps in a relatively small part of the overall access to justice gap.

It is the people that are most in need because they have the most dire financial situations.

But the gap between people who don't qualify for legal aid because they make over 125% of the federal poverty level and those who can afford full service lawyers is pretty wide.

So if there is a modest means program in your area that you are aware of, I strongly encourage you to reach out and support them as well.

Especially because we don't qualify for Legal Services Corporation dollars, we don't necessarily have as much institutional support, and so the charity from individuals is especially impactful in those Modest means programs.

All right, that's it for today.

As always, if you have thoughts or questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me@john grantilattorney.com if you enjoying the podcast.

It really helps me if you go rate me in Spotify or Apple podcasts and leave me a review.

This podcast is produced by the amazing team at Digital Freedom Productions who make me sound better and the theme music is the song hello by Lunara.

Thanks for listening and I will catch you next week.