Word: legal-aid
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...practice of law by any lay agency, personal or corporate." Invisible Bar. Such restrictions were designed to protect the bar's right to set professional standards and the client's right to seek legal help in his own way. Unhappily, the canons also tend to isolate lawyers from many a vast pool of potential clients. Even the bar's free legal-aid societies are often so unadvertised that indigents are unaware of them. And millions of newly middle-class Americans have been buying, selling and bequeathing property with minimal legal help-either because they fear high fees...
...South. A hard-eyed screening committee has picked 177, rejected 97, put 68 on a waiting list. The council is now looking beyond purely racial problems. At the University of Illinois, it has just held a "conference on bail and indigency" attended by judges, prosecutors, policemen and legal-aid experts. The University of Mississippi sent a student delegation. "We are interested in all constitutional rights of all Americans," explained one Ole Miss student. If the council goes on uniting law students on those grounds, it will be doing quite...
...Odds. To make legal aid more accessible, a few bold souls have suggested the establishment of group legal practice, modeled on company medical plans or union health insurance. The organized bar, however, is still hotly opposed. The very idea raises the old specter of "lay intermediaries." Last week the Supreme Court itself raised the specter by upholding, 6 to 2, a legal-aid plan set up years ago by the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen...
...roots in the accident-prone 1880s, when the odds against a brakeman's dying a natural death were almost 4 to 1. Employers later became liable for injuries, but trainmen had a hard time hiring good lawyers to protect their rights. In 1930 the brotherhood opened a legal-aid department - a pioneering plan offering injured trainmen the services of 16 highly skilled lawyers. Stationed around the U.S., these lawyers agreed to limit their fees to 25% of the amount recovered, and they returned part of their fees to the brotherhood...