When attorneys do battle, the weaponry is usually facts, legal arguments, sharpened wits. But when these local lawyers do combat Nov. 5 at Vancouver’s Brickhouse Bar & Grill, they’ll wield the weapons of rock ‘n’ roll: powerful electric instruments blasting through big speakers. Who needs sharp legal wits when you’ve got a guitar pick and overwhelming decibels at your command?
A good cause motivates the lawyers who will set aside arguments for guitars that night: They’re volunteers for the Clark County Volunteer Lawyers Program, a nonprofit effort to provide free legal services — advice and sometimes representation — for low-income people with civil legal matters. That can include everything from family issues such as divorce and child custody to housing issues such as unfair evictions and homeless problems. Transients who rack up fines and fees for minor infractions often can’t pay, leaving their debt or other penalties mounting into serious legal barriers to progress.
The Volunteer Lawyers Program is where low-income folks with civil legal issues can turn for help. But the group, which provided the equivalent of nearly $450,000 in free legal services in 2014, has a budget of less than $150,000, which pays for office staff and expenses, interpreters and insurance, not attorney fees, according to attorney Matt Blum.
The Volunteer Lawyers are “reliant on grants and independent fundraising efforts,” Blum said, but these fluctuate from year to year. One grant aimed at “housing justice” expires at the end of this year, he said, even while the local problem of housing justice has been growing in recent months. So the group has decided to put on not just a fundraising concert but an adjudicated contest — a “Battle of the Lawyer Bands” — that Blum says he hopes will be the first of an annual tradition. Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt will lead a panel of three judges in critiquing the bands “American Idol”-style before chosing a winner.
