Monday, November 08, 2004
Memories of a Summer Job
Last summer I worked for a community legal clinic which is predominantly staffed by university students from our city’s law school. It is a four month full-time job where you are supposed to learn the basics of working with clients in a legal setting. During our training, they covered subjects such as opening files, understanding conflict of interest and how to set up a tickler system. For those who are not familiar with legalese, a “tickler system” is the system of recording deadlines for any events such as filing deadlines. So I went to law school in order to learn how to use a planner.
They divided us into five divisions, such as landlord/tenant, which deals with landlord tenant disputes.
When students work at the legal clinic, they are expected to cover one of three walk-in shifts each week. One of these is on Thursday afternoons, the other two are on Monday and Wednesday evenings. The students who have childcare obligations try to get the Thursday afternoon shift where possible. I was a bit more flexible about my availability because my ex has the kids on Wednesday evenings, so I could do Wednesdays or Thursday shifts.
Even though there are about twenty law students working for the clinic, each shift had to have at least 4 students working, so that meant one usually had to do one shift each week.
During a shift, students might be expected to cover one of three roles, that of "desk" (receptionist), "screen" (triage) or "duty" (for one of the sub-teams there). These roles were rotated around to make it fair to everyone, but many of the students hated doing the desk duty, as it meant greeting all of the new clients who came in, getting them to fill in several forms, and being nice to them as they grew more and more impatient over a three hour period.
I really enjoyed doing desk duty, as I am a pretty outgoing person, and I could show my concern and frustration to the clients when they weren't being seen very quickly. Many of the clients brought their children with them, so I would show them where our box of toys was. Sometimes they needed the phone or the bathroom, so I would direct them there. As well, many of the clients could not speak English or French very well, so I tried to help them fill out the forms, which were bilingual and not that easy to understand. I always played the radio when I was on desk as I felt it gave the people waiting something to think about other than their legal problems. One night, we all listened to the hockey game, people started chatting together and it was a positively party-like atmosphere for once.
The first five people in line would be seen within twenty minutes, but anyone else in line might have to wait one - three hours. It would depend on how quickly the earlier clients were dealt with. Waiting could make clients very angry and despondent.
Once their forms were filled out, the time was written on the corner of the paper so we would know what order they had come in. The person on "screen" would then take the forms and check to see in our database of past clients whether or not that specific person or the person they had a case against had ever been a client of our clinic in the past. If they were, we had to make sure that there were no conflict of interest problems with seeing them as clients.
Sometimes this meant we would have to ask the client if they were the client we had listed in our database. We also had rules to deal with frequent users of the clinic. If someone had been in six times in the past year for different legal problems, we would examine whether there were problems with the client such as mental illness or other issues.
In most cases, there was no history, so they would be called in to meet with the screen staff who would quickly go through another form with them to identify exactly the type of legal problem they had. This was techinically supposed to take ten minutes, but often would take longer because people were emotional, wanted to tell their whole story, or couldn't speak English or French very well.
The purpose of the screen staff was to screen out any persons who either didn’t qualify for our services (ie. They weren’t poor enough) or that our services didn’t cover their problems.
On desk duty this time, I realize that tonight is going to be a long night. There are already 12 people waiting to be seen and it is past 8 pm. The basic rule is that if people arrive before 9 pm we will see them. Eventually.
At about 8:35, a man enters and approaches the desk. Everyone in the room notices him, because of the fact that he is carrying 6 full sized garbage bags. The bags appear to be full of newspaper. The next thing we all notice is that he smells very strongly of garbage or vomit or some other disgusting odour.
At first I think maybe he is the guy who does the garbage and he is just early. But when he comes to the desk, he asks to see a lawyer. So, I give him the clipboard with the intake form on it.
He fills it out impatiently, asking how long this is going to take. I inform him that this will take a while, as there are many other people in line ahead of him, and that he should take a seat.
He eyes the other people in the room warily, and starts pacing back and forth across the fifteen foot span of the waiting room. Every few minutes, he blurts out some startling word like “shitheads”. I wonder if perhaps he has Tourette’s Syndrome. His presence is obviously starting to disturb some of the other people waiting in the room.
They divided us into five divisions, such as landlord/tenant, which deals with landlord tenant disputes.
When students work at the legal clinic, they are expected to cover one of three walk-in shifts each week. One of these is on Thursday afternoons, the other two are on Monday and Wednesday evenings. The students who have childcare obligations try to get the Thursday afternoon shift where possible. I was a bit more flexible about my availability because my ex has the kids on Wednesday evenings, so I could do Wednesdays or Thursday shifts.
Even though there are about twenty law students working for the clinic, each shift had to have at least 4 students working, so that meant one usually had to do one shift each week.
During a shift, students might be expected to cover one of three roles, that of "desk" (receptionist), "screen" (triage) or "duty" (for one of the sub-teams there). These roles were rotated around to make it fair to everyone, but many of the students hated doing the desk duty, as it meant greeting all of the new clients who came in, getting them to fill in several forms, and being nice to them as they grew more and more impatient over a three hour period.
I really enjoyed doing desk duty, as I am a pretty outgoing person, and I could show my concern and frustration to the clients when they weren't being seen very quickly. Many of the clients brought their children with them, so I would show them where our box of toys was. Sometimes they needed the phone or the bathroom, so I would direct them there. As well, many of the clients could not speak English or French very well, so I tried to help them fill out the forms, which were bilingual and not that easy to understand. I always played the radio when I was on desk as I felt it gave the people waiting something to think about other than their legal problems. One night, we all listened to the hockey game, people started chatting together and it was a positively party-like atmosphere for once.
The first five people in line would be seen within twenty minutes, but anyone else in line might have to wait one - three hours. It would depend on how quickly the earlier clients were dealt with. Waiting could make clients very angry and despondent.
Once their forms were filled out, the time was written on the corner of the paper so we would know what order they had come in. The person on "screen" would then take the forms and check to see in our database of past clients whether or not that specific person or the person they had a case against had ever been a client of our clinic in the past. If they were, we had to make sure that there were no conflict of interest problems with seeing them as clients.
Sometimes this meant we would have to ask the client if they were the client we had listed in our database. We also had rules to deal with frequent users of the clinic. If someone had been in six times in the past year for different legal problems, we would examine whether there were problems with the client such as mental illness or other issues.
In most cases, there was no history, so they would be called in to meet with the screen staff who would quickly go through another form with them to identify exactly the type of legal problem they had. This was techinically supposed to take ten minutes, but often would take longer because people were emotional, wanted to tell their whole story, or couldn't speak English or French very well.
The purpose of the screen staff was to screen out any persons who either didn’t qualify for our services (ie. They weren’t poor enough) or that our services didn’t cover their problems.
On desk duty this time, I realize that tonight is going to be a long night. There are already 12 people waiting to be seen and it is past 8 pm. The basic rule is that if people arrive before 9 pm we will see them. Eventually.
At about 8:35, a man enters and approaches the desk. Everyone in the room notices him, because of the fact that he is carrying 6 full sized garbage bags. The bags appear to be full of newspaper. The next thing we all notice is that he smells very strongly of garbage or vomit or some other disgusting odour.
At first I think maybe he is the guy who does the garbage and he is just early. But when he comes to the desk, he asks to see a lawyer. So, I give him the clipboard with the intake form on it.
He fills it out impatiently, asking how long this is going to take. I inform him that this will take a while, as there are many other people in line ahead of him, and that he should take a seat.
He eyes the other people in the room warily, and starts pacing back and forth across the fifteen foot span of the waiting room. Every few minutes, he blurts out some startling word like “shitheads”. I wonder if perhaps he has Tourette’s Syndrome. His presence is obviously starting to disturb some of the other people waiting in the room.
