Pro Bono and the Guardianship Season
It was 11 years ago that Jim Calloway, then as now Director of the Oklahoma Bar Association’s Management Assistance Program and Senior Guru of all things legal management, suggested that the soon-to-be formed TheFormTool, LLC seemed to be ideally structured to actively support consumer-oriented pro bono legal services firms.
It’s taken a while to prove Jim’s theory valid, but the past year has done exactly that.
After reading our earlier case study, Consumer Credit &Business Formation, Jim reached out in June to explain that Guardianship Season in Oklahoma describes July and August, the pre-school months where hundreds of children face desperate needs for legal guardians to qualify for medical exams and entry to school.
As Jim explained that the demand for legal support for guardianship petitions and other documents overwhelms volunteers, we were all ears. Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation and its affiliate Oklahoma County Guardianship Clinic handle a huge workload in Guardianship needs for those unable to afford representation by private firms.
As a result of Jim’s suggestion, we were delighted to expand our pro bono support program by delivering 36 customized guardianship forms for both minor and adult needs to the OK A2J Foundation along with 16 Doxserá licenses for its volunteers. There is no cost to the Foundation.
At TFT we estimate that this combination will more than triple OK A2J’s immediate capacity for petitioning for guardianships and that it will provide a pathway to increasing capacity even more in the near future. All thanks to Jim’s foresight yesteryear and reaching out when he saw the need.
