This leap year, Amarillo College is celebrating its purposeful values: Family, Fun, Innovation, Wow and Yes through a special series we're calling by Leaps and Bounds.

The Legal Studies Program at Amarillo College has received a $25,000 grant from the Texas Bar Foundation to add a service-learning component to its curriculum, and low-income Panhandle residents will be among the beneficiaries.

Beginning this fall, students in the Introduction to Law and Legal Profession class at AC will be required as part of their coursework to serve as primary staff at workshops designed to assist real clients who do not typically have access to legal service or aid, including low-income AC students who qualify.

The initiative has been dubbed “Legal Student Internships with Community Legal Clinics,” and it is a project that AC administrators believe is the first of its kind to be administered by a community college in Texas.

The workshops will be scheduled and overseen by a bar-certified legal education advisor, whose services, though largely pro bono, are afforded in part by the grant. That individual will sanction the legal documents generated at the workshops, counsel clients on how they should proceed, and establish a network of additional pro bono attorneys who will lend vital support and a broader knowledge base (specialty areas of law) to the initiative. 

Clients receiving legal aid will be selected through established organizations such as Legal Aid of Northwest Texas (a supporting partner of the initiative), or referred by AC’s student-support network.

Between five and eight workshops will be scheduled per semester, each specific to a single area of need: family/divorce, immigration, veterans’ benefits, housing, etc.

“This is ideal for multiple reasons,” Robin Malone, AC legal studies coordinator, said. “Legal Studies majors, most of whom want to become paralegals, will get valuable hands-on experience interviewing clients, drafting documents, and even observing attorneys render legal advice. And because this will be part of an introductory course, they will find out early on if this is truly the career for them.

“They also will be providing a valuable community service to low-income clients who have no other legal recourse,” Malone said. “So many in the Panhandle community, and even within our own student body, face legal issues but cannot afford an attorney to help them navigate the process.

“We are excited about helping our students learn optimally and at the same time lending vital assistance to those in need.”

Since its inception in 1965, the Texas Bar Foundation has awarded more than $16 million in grants to law-related programs. Supported by members of the State Bar of Texas, the Texas Bar Foundation is the nation’s largest charitably-funded bar foundation.

AC’s first order of business for taking full advantage of the grant is to hire the clinical legal education advisor – an attorney who will be charged with, among other things, establishing the program’s policies and procedures. Soon thereafter, students within the Legal Studies Program at AC will begin authoring legal documents for people in need.

For more information about the Legal Studies Program at Amarillo College or the grant obtained from the Texas Bar Foundation, please contact Robin Malone at (806) 345-5671.

May 31, 2016