Program provides legal advice to Benicians who can’t afford it, don’t know if they need it

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Need legal advice but can’t cover the retainer? Be at the Benicia Public Library on Thursday and you may get the counsel you need — for free.

The library is offering a program titled “Lawyers in the Library” on the first Thursday of each month. Helaine Bowles, volunteer and outreach coordinator at the library, organized the program that provides a 20-minute face-to-face session with an attorney, free of charge, that can cover anything from small claims matters to California case law and points between.

Bowles said she didn’t have to look far to find a roadmap for setting up the program, which began in November.

“We’ve been talking about doing this for about eight or nine months,” she said. “I talked to Nancy Atkins, who works at the JFK (Public) (L)ibrary (in Vallejo). She has been doing it for years and she does a great job — so why reinvent the wheel?”

With Atkins’s help, Bowles laid the groundwork for the program in the library. Then all she needed was actual attorneys to participate.

That proved to be a challenge — in fact, “the hardest part for me was to get in touch with the attorneys,” she said.

But a conversation with Scott Reep and Suzanne Sprague of Benicia-based law firm Gizzi and Reep changed that.

“Suzanne had worked for the Lawyers in the Library at the JFK library and Scott has done work similar to this,” Bowles said. “So I got in touch them.”

Reep and Sprague offered to contact other lawyers in the area, and soon had about a dozen on board. Lawyers in the Library officially launched in November and “has been a wonderful program,” Bowles said.

She said collaboration was the key to putting the program together.

“To me, the most important thing in anything you do is collaboration,” she said. “We could not have done it without them, and they could not have done it without us.”

The roughly one dozen attorneys who have volunteered for the program rotate every six months, Bowles said. “Scott and Suzanne got a great group of people — people who are willing to do it,” she said.

“The attorneys that have done it so far just love it. It reminds them of why they are practicing law.

“They’ve helped people a lot, in just the two times (the program has been held),” she said.

While each attorney has one area of law they specialize in, they know other areas of law, too. “The only thing they do not do is criminal cases,” she said. “Because nine times out of ten, they have a criminal attorney.”

A pair of lawyers are on hand each monthly installment. Because the attorneys can only see as many as 16 people in an evening, Bowles said, the program is first-come, first-served.

To talk with a lawyer, participants must sign up at 5 p.m. in the art gallery in front of the library’s Doña Benicia Room, where the lawyers are set up; it is split into two areas that are far enough apart to keep conversations private.

The attorneys have no client-attorney relationship with participants; they just give advice. Still, the service, and whatever is discussed, is confidential.

Not only are the attorneys volunteering to advise participants free of charge, Bowles said, they can’t advertise or even hand out business cards. “If the person says, ‘Can I hire you?’ they can say ‘You can call me at my office,’” she said. “It’s not for them to get business, it’s basically for them to do pro bono work and help the community.”

The service is used by low-income people in Benicia who can’t otherwise afford to get expert legal advice, she said. But it’s also for those who “are not sure if they need one. That’s where I felt that it was going to be beneficial in Benicia,” Bowles said.

“I think it’s a great service that the library can do for the community,” she said.

If You Go
Benicia Public Library will host the monthly Lawyers in the Library program on Thursday. Signup begins at 5 p.m. and the program is from 6-8 p.m. at 150 East L St. in front of the Doña Benicia Room. Signup is on a first-come, first-served basis in person. For more information call 707-746-4358.