Limited resources constrain services for students

Kemper is the director of UCLA Student Legal Services.

By Liz Kemper

I am writing in response to Paula Kim’s submission
“Custody dilemma shows how UCLA slights older students”
(Viewpoint, Nov. 16) in which she described her difficulties
obtaining low-cost legal assistance for her international child
custody dispute. Kim is facing a lengthy, complex court battle and
is understandably upset and frustrated.

Unfortunately, she makes several erroneous assertions about the
services provided by UCLA Student Legal Services. Student Legal
Services provides high-quality legal assistance to all registered
UCLA students, including older students with children. Indeed,
approximately half of the students we assist are non-traditional
undergraduate or graduate students.

The range of matters for which Student Legal Services provides
assistance is quite broad: landlord/tenant relations; automobile
accidents; domestic violence and harassment; uncontested family law
matters; criminal problems; automobile purchase, repair and
insurance problems; health care, credit and financial aid issues;
and consumer problems.

The office also assists students who are having problems with
other university departments in areas like housing, financial aid,
student discipline, harassment, discrimination and faculty
misconduct. These are problems that married and unmarried students
of all ages face.

Student Legal Services provides personal, confidential
counseling to students on these issues, and we frequently are able
to be an advocate for students by writing letters, making telephone
calls or negotiating a settlement.

Student Legal Services is staffed by only three part-time
attorneys and, for a portion of the academic year, six law students
who work under the direct supervision of the attorneys. All of the
35,000 UCLA students may utilize the services of this small legal
staff. Because both the department’s budget and staffing are
quite limited, there are certain constraints on the service we can
provide.

As Kim recognizes, cost-effectiveness is an important element in
creating policies that are rational and fair. In the context of
Student Legal Services, the “cost” of providing service
is attorney time; the office is funded for only 88 hours of
attorney time each week. If an attorney spends many hours helping
just one student, then many other students will not get legal
assistance of any type.

Consequently, the limitations on the service we provide are tied
directly to the cost in attorney time and our goal of providing
legal assistance to as many students as possible. Two of these
limitations affected Kim: we do not represent students in court,
and we do not handle complex, contested family law disputes (and
never have).

We wish very much that the Student Legal Services budget were
large enough to enable us to hire an attorney experienced in family
law litigation who would be able to spend the scores, or even
hundreds, of hours required to represent students with legal
problems like Kim’s. Unfortunately, we are unable to do that
and must make difficult choices.

We have decided that it is more cost-effective to be able to
serve 50 to 100 additional UCLA students than to exhaust our
limited resources representing one student in a highly complex
court case.

The good news is that Student Legal Services assists hundreds of
UCLA graduate and undergraduate students with their legal problems
every year. A significant number of these problems are extremely
serious, such as students being evicted from their homes, losing
financial aid due to a drug conviction or facing the threat of
domestic violence or sexual harassment.

In a great many of the cases, we are able to resolve the problem
for the student. In other cases, the students are given valuable
legal advice about their cases and are able to make informed
choices. Students just have to call our office to schedule a
confidential appointment. Because we want to reach as many students
as possible, we also conduct frequent outreach and educational
programs throughout campus and maintain a Web site filled with
legal articles and other helpful information.

While we regret that we cannot provide the full range of service
that every student would like to have, we are gratified that
thousands of students, particularly our older student-clients, have
said that receiving high quality legal assistance at Student Legal
Services enabled them to focus on their studies and enhanced their
ability to be successful at UCLA.