Everyone Benefits From
Your Participation in IOLTA
The Interest on Lawyers’ T
rust Accounts
(IOLTA) Program is an idea that originated
in British, Canadian, and Australian jurisdictions in the 1960s. In the United States,
IOLTA was pioneered in Florida and now
exists in every state in the country. The
Vermont IOLTA Program was established in
1984 as a voluntary program, and in 1989
the Supreme Court adopted comprehensive IOLTA rules.
IOLTA funds support the following:
• Legal services to the disadvantaged;
and
• Public education about the law.
Without IOLT nominal or short-term
A,
client funds were held in non-interest
bearing accounts, benefiting neither the
client nor the lawyer. Under IOL A, these
T
same funds are pooled in interest-bearing
accounts by financial institutions which
then remit them to the Vermont Bar Foundation. Each year, the Foundation runs a
grant program; its Grants Committee selects organizations from around Vermont to
34
be awarded a portion of the IOLTA funds.
Since the end of 2008, when the recession hit, the Foundation has seen a 25%
decrease in IOLTA revenue. That equates
to approximately $322,800. At the same
time, many Foundation grant recipients
have experienced shrinking funding from
other sources, especially federal funding.
Even as the economy slowly recovers, in
2014, grant funding is still below 2008 levels.
You can help!
• If your current bank or credit union is
not a leadership institution, persuade
it to join.
• Join us as we meet with banks and
credit unions to discuss the important
work of the Foundation and its grantees.
• Place your IOLTA in an Honor Roll institution.
Imagine:
Your spouse won’t let you drive. You
don’t have access to money, partly because
THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • WINTER 2015
he won’t let you have a job; partly because
your name isn’t on any of his accounts, and
he wouldn’t tell you where the accounts
were anyway. You aren’t allowed out of his
sight in public. He hits and yells. You wish
you could get a divorce, but you can’t get
to a lawyer, much less pay for one.
Ninety-five percent of the funds the
Foundation distributes are collected from
interest on IOLTA accounts. However, in
the past five years, the revenue from this
source has declined dramatically. At the
same time, other grant sources Foundation-funded organizations used to access
have decreased. The need for low-bono
and pro-bono legal services in Vermont,
however, has increased.
Where you bank matters. This is one,
simple way you can help enhance the availability of legal services to disadvantaged
Vermonters.
www.vtbar.org