Legal assistance offered at two-day event

By Troy Bannerman - Lethbridge Herald Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on March 30, 2023.

Herald photo by Troy Bannerman Kathryn Linder, the community program manager at Lethbridge Legal Guidance, will be part of hosting the Ask a Lawyer event this week.

Lethbridge Legal Guidance will be hosting its Ask a Lawyer event this week for two days.

The event runs Friday and Saturday

Kathryn Linder, the community program manager at Lethbridge Legal Guidance, spoke about the upcoming event in a recent interview.

“Ask a Lawyer event started out initially once a year in April in conjunction with provincial Law Day. We have expanded that. Now we do a second one in the fall with access to justice week, usually September, October, somewhere in there. Just sort of depending on what our schedule looks like and when Access to Justice week falls,” said Linder.

“Usually the spring one is held all day on March 31 and half day on April 1. So, people call in and we get their information. There is no income cap for this, so anyone can call. They can get information on things. We don’t handle clinics, wills, and estates, and property, corporate type of stuff. It’s more of if you have a question and you don’t really want to talk to a lawyer, but it’s nice to have that information,” she added.

Linder said people can contact Legal Guidance whose staff will set them up with a lawyer who specializes in whatever aspect is appropriate. They’ll get half an hour on the phone to get answers and information and to decide if they want to pursue matters further.

“Maybe they just have that nagging question,” said Linder

For those who are new to Lethbridge, or are unfamiliar with Lethbridge Legal Guidance, Linder said it was established in 2006 and incorporated in 2007 “to provide free legal advice to people who can’t otherwise afford a lawyer or access the justice system, whether it’s for mental health issues or language barriers, those kinds of things.

“Lawyers are very expensive – worth every penny. But for a lot of people that’s way out of reach. And those are the people who often need the most help because those kinds of barriers tend to exasperate legal problems,” Linder added.

Legal Guidance was incorporated by a group of city lawyers who wanted to provide that assistance in some kind of organized way.

The biggest program run at the operation is a call clinic where people are given an appointment on a Tuesday afternoon to talk with a volunteer lawyer for about 30 minutes to get advice and direction.

“Where it is deemed most important they are referred to our in-house staff lawyer for further assistance. More often than not they are given a list of instructions of places to call and things to do. They can come to multiple appointments and get advice on next steps and moving through their issue is. A lot of it is landlords/ tenants, family matters, divorce, and custody that type of thing. But it’s a very valuable service. I think over the course of a year we will speak to 2,600 people. Through clinic we see about 700-800 people. So, that is a valuable service. And that number is growing exponentially as people more and more struggle to handle just the basics in life. And landlords either don’t know the law or tenants don’t know, so they’ll call. . .it just protects everybody,” said Linder

“We pick up a lot of things that Legal Aid doesn’t do. They don’t do any civil matters; landlord, tenant, employment, any of that. So, we fill all of those gaps, too. Those are major issues for people. You lose your job and you don’t know if you’re fairly let go. … so we’re able to help somebody with that type of thing. And we work in partnership on employment matters with the Worker’s Resource Centre out of Calgary. With lawyers, if you don’t have a lawyer, they specialize in employment law and all of those kinds of claims, disability and that type of thing. We also have a lot of written resources and can direct people to other resources as well if they don’t qualify for our services or maybe they don’t need to talk to a lawyer, but just need some information, we can point them towards other resources that can help to answer some questions. All of our services are free.”