Pro Bono Project

PRO BONO SPOTLIGHT By: Caitlin Torney

Pro Bono Project Attorney Legal Aid of East Tennessee

Serving the Legal Community in Assisting Low-Income Persons To Navigate the Justice System

2022 PRO BONO YEAR IN REVIEW

It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with such an incredibly supportive and responsive Bar Association as the Knoxville Bar Association. I am excited to share all the amazing work you have done this past year, and I hope this will inspire you to continue to build on this year’s accomplishments in 2023. 2022 has been a wonderful year for the Pro Bono Project in Knoxville! We have launched new initiatives with community partners, local firms, and companies, and we have continued to match cases with the private bar for full representation. We are working with new local firms to provide opportunities for pro bono service and are excited to connect with in-house counsel programs such as the TVA and Clayton Homes. The need for help with civil legal issues like conservatorships, adoption, and probate matters continues to grow, and we are proud to provide training and resources to help attorneys from all backgrounds contribute to the effort to meet these needs. In 2022, we matched over 80 cases for full representation outside clinics, and with your continued support, I’m confident that we can match even more in 2023. 2022 has also been a banner year for clinics. This year we continued to offer many of our established clinics like the Faith and Justice Clinic, the Debt Relief Clinic, the monthly Veteran’s Clinic, and the 2022 ABA Louis M Brown Award Winning Virtual Debt Relief Clinic. At last Spring’s Faith and Justice Clinic at Cokesbury Methodist Church, 11 volunteer attorneys provided quality legal advice to over 60 clients! We are eager to resume more regular Faith and Justice Clinics in 2023 and hope to see you all at our next clinic in the spring. Please keep an eye out for the date and location on our social media or at the KBA’s Upcoming Legal Clinic page to sign up!

The Veteran’s Clinic continued to be one of our most popular clinics; attorney volunteers helped 68 service members and their families take the first legal step towards resolving their legal issues at 11 legal clinics. Join us the second Wednesday of every month at the Public Defender’s Community Law Office from Noon to 2:00 PM to give back to those who have given so much to us. We will take a break from this clinic for the month of January 2023 and jump right back in where we left off in February.

In 2022, we also debuted new clinic models, such as a Family Law and Housing Law Clinic in partnership with the YWCA of Knoxville and the Tennessee Valley and Centro Hispano in July. We plan to host another clinic at their Phyllis Wheatley Center next summer. Our most popular new clinic was, by far, the Virtual Pro Se Name Change Clinic that we held in August in partnership with Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and The Cumberlands and the Tennessee Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division. The clinic filled up completely in around 2 weeks with 30 clients, and we had an amazing response from attorney volunteers. We are going to offer this clinic again in June and October so please watch for dates and sign-up links if you’re interested in participating!

In 2022, we began holding document preparation clinics. We partnered with LMU Duncan School of Law to hold a Power of Attorney Clinic in Loudon County and again to hold a Simple Wills Clinic in November at LMU’s Knoxville Campus. These clinics are a great avenue for attorney volunteers to help meet community needs and mentor law students all at the same time. We are excited to partner with UT Law Students and the Knoxville Community Action Committee to hold another Power of Attorney Clinic in Knoxville at the Western Heights Community Center in the early spring of 2023.

Overall, we offered 22 clinics in 2022 serving fellow East Tennesseans in our Knoxville service area. That is over 260 clients who received legal advice or documents thanks to the incredible support of local attorney and law student volunteers. As of December 9, 2022, attorneys in our service area have reported 569.5 total hours of Pro Bono Service to our program—and that’s JUST the hours that attorneys have reported. This translates to a total value of over $150,000 worth of valuable time donated by the amazing members of the bar this year!

I want to close by reiterating just how amazingly engaged and supportive the Knoxville area bar is. Working with Marsha Watson, Tracy Chain, Tammy Sharpe, Bridgette Fly, Jonathan Guess, and Jason Galvas at the Knoxville Bar Association is such an incredible opportunity and both myself and LAET are so grateful to be a party to such a unique and valuable partnership. I am so thankful for your dedication and commitment to pro bono service and wish you all a very happy New Year.

COVER STORY, continued from page 17

as-moore-v-harper-takes-shape-a-broad-coalition-takes-aim-at-the-independentstate-legislature-theory/ (last visited Dec.7, 2022). 34 Amy Howe, Court Seems Unwilling to Embrace Broad Version of “Independent State Legislature” Theory, 7 Dec. 2022, 5:22 PM. SCOTUSblog , https://www.scotusblog. com/2022/12/court-seems-unwilling-to-embrace-broad-version-of-independentstate-legislature-theory; See also Moore v. Harper, Oral argument Audio, https:// www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/audio/2022/21-1271. MP3 download. 35 Supra note 33. 36 See id. (Justice Sotomayor referred to one of the ISL proponents’ distinction between procedural and substantive limits as a “logical morass”). 37 Id. 38 Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Comm’n, 576 U.S. 787 (2015); Rucho v. Common Cause, 204 L. Ed. 2d 931, 139 S. Ct. 2484 (2019). 39 Arizona State Legislature, 576 U.S. at 817–18 (“Nothing in [The Elections] Clause instructs, nor has this Court ever held, that a state legislature may prescribe regulations on the time, place, and manner of holding federal elections in defiance of provisions of the State’s constitution.”). 40 Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2506–07. 41 Id. at 2507. 42 Transcript of Oral Argument at 41-42, Moore v. Harper, 142 S. Ct. 2901 (2022) (No. 21-1271) (Justice Kavanaugh expressed concern that ISL proponents argued a version of the ISL that went “further than Chief Justice Rehnquist’s position in Bush v. Gore” because that opinion “acknowledge[d] that state courts would have a role interpreting state law. . . .”). 43 See generally id.; supra note 33. 44 See supra note 16.