Grant underwrites program SIU Law School tests legal
advice web site CARBONDALE, Ill. -You won in small claims court and now the guy won't pay up. The bank is foreclosing on your mortgage and you want to know what rights you have. You need to know how to get an order of protection. Free legal advice on these and other problems is only a mouseclick away, thanks to a web site created and maintained by the Southern Illinois University School of Law. A $35,000 grant from the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois helped underwrite SIUC's self-help legal program, which includes print materials, research assistance and classes as well as the Internet site. "But we realized early on that copying a packet and sending it through the mail was not going to work on a large scale," said Michael Ruiz, an SIUC Legal Clinic attorney who coordinates the effort. "We needed a way of delivering our materials quickly and cheaply. The Internet was the perfect solution." Folks tapping into the site at http://www.siu.edu/~lawsch/clinic/selfhelp will find information on handling problems with everything from automobiles to utilities. Want to know how to request a visitation order? Click on "Family." Need to know your rights as a tenant? Link to "Housing." The site also includes a directory of agencies that can provide further help, with links to many of them. An e-mail address, selfhelp@siu.edu, lets site surfers contact SIUC's self-help center directly. Those without their own computers should be able to get to the site on computers in libraries or at their local courthouses, Ruiz said. And technophobes can obtain the same information through the mail, though there is a $5 charge to defray the cost of printing and mailing the packets. Law students play a key role in making the program run. They answer questions, help with over Legal advice web site 2 research, process mailings, update information packets and create new ones. "If we get a lot of requests on a certain topic, we'll assign it to students-either through a class or through the center itself," Ruiz said. "This gives the students a chance to learn about this area of law and to provide a public service at the same time." SIUC will run the program for about a year-"We want to see where the snafus are," Ruiz said-before reporting on it to the state bar association. "We hope it will be a model for law schools across the state, because law students can provide a resource that otherwise would be very expensive," Ruiz said. "We hope that in providing this kind of legal assistance, we can make the legal system more user friendly. With the proper amount of instruction, there's no reason it can't be that."
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