A contested divorce or a child custody battle is generally a difficult experience.
It can be even harder if you can’t get a lawyer.
The New Hampshire Bar Association says that’s a problem people face especially often in the North Country.
New Hampshire Public Radio Correspondent Trish Anderton reports.
Marilyn McNamara directs the Legal Advice and Referral Center or LARC, in Concord.
LARC’s job is to give people free legal advice and connect them to lawyers.
A lot of the requests involve family law matters like divorce.
Their phones are busy, to say the least.
MCNAMARA: there are four people who do intakes, and our lines quite often are full. sometimes people will need to wait, or they’re unable to get through at all.
If they do get through, clients from northern New Hampshire face additional hurdles.
McNamara warns them there’s a shortage of free, or pro bono, lawyers in their area.
MCNAMARA: what we tell them is we can help you by phone. we will refer your case to the pro bono program. we can’t promise you that the pro bono program will find you an attorney.
The head of the state Bar Association’s Pro Bono program agrees there’s a problem.
Virginia Martin says she usually has a half-dozen or more people waiting for lawyers in the North Country.
Some never get one.
MARTIN: in the north country because of the limited resources we end up taking fewer cases than we’d like.
Martin says the problem isn’t with North Country lawyers, many of whom regularly win awards for their pro bono work.
Instead she says there are a number of factors involved.
For one thing the population up north is small.
Everybody tends to know each other.
That leads to conflicts of interest.
Longtime Berlin family lawyer Alethea Froburg says some clients even try to use that to their advantage.
FROBURG: I’ve had an interesting situation where people have come in and consulted with me not intending to hire me but to prevent the other side from hiring me. I think that’s an awful dirty trick.
Some lawyers serve as part time judges here, and that leads to conflicts too.
For example a judge who’s sat on a case involving a married couple may not be able to represent either one of them as a lawyer in a divorce.
Furthermore increasing specialization has left fewer of the old fashioned country lawyers who took all kinds of cases including family law.
The shortage may only get worse in time.
Marilyn McNamara, at LARC, says there’s currently a stable group of lawyers practicing family law across Coos County.
But they’ll begin approaching retirement age in a few years.
MCNAMARA: They would kill me if I said they were an aging bar, but they are definitely a bar of great depth of experience. they’ve ben around
for a long time.
The Bar Association is considering ways to entice more young people here to practice family law.
Virginia Martin says that could involve launching a program to help recent graduates pay off those big student loans.
But Froburg is skeptical that money alone will convince people to stay here.
FROBURG: we are isolated. we are away.
Froburg is a Southerner by birth.
She’s learned to love life in the North Country.
But she says small towns and long winters don’t appeal to everybody.
FROBURG: They need to come because they really want to be here. and if they can have some help doing that, because it is, I think, harder to
make a living up here, that would be good. that would reinforce something that’s already there.
Some lawyers see hope ahead in the form of Family Court, a program that’s expected to reach Coos County this summer.
Family court emphasizes mediation.
It’s also designed to be user-friendly to minimize the need for lawyers.
Phil Waystack is a longtime attorney at Waystack and King in Colebrook.
WAYSTACK 28 107 yes it is true that there are not many lawyers practicing fam law any more. but it also appears to be true that the change in the court system toward this family court is probably gonna make that change seem less onerous, if onerous at all.
Others aren’t so sure.
For one thing, many people here are already doing without lawyers.
The Coos County Superior Court says in 2003, 59 percent of divorce cases proceeded with both parties representing themselves.
76% of custody and child support cases were handled that way.
Marilyn McNamara with the Legal Advice and Referral Center says of the remaining cases, some will simply be too messy to resolve without legal help.
MCNAMARA people who need lawyers need lawyers whether the process appears to be easier in family court or not.
McNamara says she’s a fan of family court.
But she warns that making the process easier can have the unintended consequence of getting people in over their heads.
If people who need lawyers can’t get them, she says, they could suffer longterm consequences.
And in family law, those consequences aren’t just financial.
They could involve how often you see your child, or how well your family functions after divorce.
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