Vermont Bar Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 Vermont Bar Journal, Fall 2016, Vol. 42, No. 3 | Page 30

Interview with Tom Garrett

were coming in, so it meant we had to be
fussy, we had to be very strict about the
amount of services we would provide. That
is when we started talking about limited
services and pro se assistance. The other part of it was we wanted to empower
people in a couple of ways. One of those
ways was that we wanted to have a focus
on education and there are actually several of our lawyers who were also educators
who were in the program at that time, particularly Sandy Baird and Lisa Barrett, who
both spent a lot of time doing education
work and they had an educational mindset.
We wanted to be serious about educating
people about their rights and legal issues
and we wanted to reinforce their ability to
represent themselves. That was always our
first choice. If we can, we would rather help
somebody represent themselves because
they are going to take back from that an increased ability to understand the legal system and a better ability to sort of navigate
the world.
VBA: And that ended up being a main
difference between the two, right? Which
brings us to the divide between lawyers
as to how “access to justice” is defined: Is
it helping people get access to the court
themselves or helping people get lawyers
to assist them? So that is where are, it’s a
difficult question, right?
TG: When we started talking about it,
we didn’t talk about it in those terms.
VBA: But that’s how it ended up.
TG: That’s where we are now. Where
we sort of see two different ways of being
a lawyer, but that meant increased direct
services or increased pro se assistance and
forms?
VBA: That is another controversial subject, isn’t it, forms?
TG: Forms, plain language, describing
the law in terms that you don’t need a legal education to read, which is important.
VBA: But you need both things, right?
If you say ok, well there are certain things
that you really need a lawyer for and there
are certain things that you don’t, there’s
room for everyone, right?
TG: I agree. We wanted to help everybody to some extent, but we needed to
be smart about what was helpful and what
wasn’t. We simply had to do more. Helping one person was not enough. We had
to do that, but we had to be careful about
it, as that can consume all of your time, but
we did do that. That meant limited appearances and entering court appeals. We
pushed things hard, we pushed for changes. Our view of things is much more accepted now, but back then it was a pretty
new sort of ideas. It was fun. There are

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THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • FALL 2016

great people here and that was a fun way
to get started, helping clients represent
themselves.
VBA: So do you have a couple of different departments of this firm?
TG: Well about 3 years ago, we started
talking about taking over phone answering. Creating a hotline, in other words,
with the phones answered by lawyers. We
did that with Legal Aid. We piloted a project to have lawyers answer the phones.
The idea was that the lawyer would answer the phones and provide some services right then, right there and then pass on
the cases that needed additional services.
We have taken that on and now we have
a hotline that is manned/personed by attorneys. There is a single 800 number for
everybody, and an attorney will pick it up.
It is