The clinic was started in June and allows those who choose not to hire a lawyer to meet with one via video conference at the Mancos Public library to understand the legal process, said Ric Morgan, a lawyer, co-chair of 18th Judicial District Access to Justice Committee and organizer of the clinic.<\/p>\n
The success of the Mancos clinic and two others set up in Montrose and Baca counties prompted the expansion.<\/p>\n
The clinics were set up by one of Colorado\u2019s access to justice committees to provide legal advice because of the growing number of people representing themselves.<\/p>\n
During 2012, 774,000 cases were filed in Colorado, and in about 60 percent of those cases at least one of the sides was not represented by a lawyer, according to the 2014 state judicial budget request.<\/p>\n
Morgan said more people are choosing to represent themselves because they can\u2019t afford an attorney and the burden of educating them on the process has fallen on the court system.<\/p>\n
Many of these cases involve a family dispute, custody battle, small-claims court or rent disputes.<\/p>\n
Morgan worked with the director of the Mancos Public Library, and Caitlin Stewart, a local self-represented litigant coordinator, to set up the local clinic.<\/p>\n
The clinic has served 30 people, and the response was so positive that Morgan decided to expand it.<\/p>\n
The Mancos clinic is hosted the second Thursday of every month from 2 to 5 p.m. at the library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
clinic was started in June and allows those who choose not to hire a lawyer to meet with one via video conference at the Mancos Public library to understand the legal process, said Ric Morgan, a lawyer, co-chair of 18th Judicial District Access to Justice Committee and organizer of the clinic. The success of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[488,1548,188,13,2822,1215],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-59539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-civil","tag-court-administration","tag-dolores-star","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-justice-and-rights","tag-lawyer"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59539"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=59539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}