Monthly legal clinics to be held at refurbished site
New conference room debuts at law library
With a snip of the ceremonial scissors, a new conference room was officially opened in the Yuma County Law Library & Self-Service Center on Friday -- the place where all of its free monthly legal clinics will now be held.
Attending the room’s ribboncutting ceremony were Superior Court judges, attorneys, court employees, county officials and members of the public.
Trial Court Administrator Kathleen M. Schaben, at the invitation of presiding Superior Court Judge David Haws, actually cut the ribbon that declared the room open to the public for use.
Among the speakers at the occasion was Superior Court Judge Brandon Kinsey, who had the pleasure of informing those in attendance that the law library had also been selected as the recipient of the prestigious 2018 Strategic Agenda Award in the general jurisdiction category for Improving Court Processes to Better Serve the Public.
“It is a really great improvement,” Kinsey said of the new conference room afterwards. “We have been blessed to have the kind of law library we have here.”
Kinsey also talked about the motto of the King County Law Library in Seattle, Washington, which is “without access to information there is no justice,” and how much he thinks it applies to the Yuma law library as well.
He explained by saying that there is a large segment of the population that makes too much money to apply for legal aid, yet cannot afford to hire a private attorney. Yuma’s law library, with its resources, he continued, provides that information to that segment of the population who otherwise wouldn’t have any access to the law.
“Laws are complicated,” Kinsey said. “They are hard to navigate, and a law library like this really helps those individuals who otherwise wouldn’t have any access to the law.”
Manager Danae Figueroa explained that since 2016 the law library has been partnering with Community Legal Services and members of the Yuma County Bar Association to present free legal clinics on a variety of topics including, Setting Aside Convictions, Divorce/Child Custody; Child Support; Landlord/ Tenant; Adoption; and Guardianship. So when the Arizona Office of the Courts offered to donate money to have the law library repurpose some of its existing space to create a place to hold the free clinics, as well as an additional hub to film them, Figueroa said it another was for the law library to improve its services to selfrepresented litigants.
“This was a necessity,” Figueroa said. “We had the space to do it and we live in an era of technology, so we needed to do it for our patrons.”
The room they chose, Figueroa said, had previously been filled with several movable shelves of outdated legal books and was hardly ever used. After being refurbished, the room is equipped with a smart television, a laptop computer, editing software and a camera.
The project began in May and took two months to complete. While the clinics will be edited and posted online, the goal is to eventually stream them live on AzCourtHelp.org.
“We hold these clinics during the weekday when people are at work, so if we record and edit them, once they are posted online people can watch them at their convenience,” Figueroa said.
Also, the law library recently conducted its first free clinic in the newly dedicated space, which can accommodate 30 to 40 people, and the video from it is currently being edited and will be posted on YouTube.