Jones Day announced last Veteran s Day that it was working with the American Bar Association (ABA) on a project to create a centralized platform to connect veterans to pro bono or low-cost attorneys. That project, VetLex, now has a website allowing attorneys and organizations to sign up to assist with veterans legal matters when the platform is complete.
The platform will be available on a pilot basis by this coming Veterans Day, and the ABA estimates that VetLex will be fully operational nationwide by 2018. When it s fully operational, the site will serve as a space to connect attorneys and veterans services organizations to any veterans service-related and non-service-related legal matters.
Laura Ellsworth, partner in charge of global community service initiatives at Jones Day, led the projects efforts from the law firm side. She and her team repeatedly heard concerns from legal services providers serving veterans about their struggle to coordinate their efforts across legal and veterans organizations. Ellsworth, with financial backing from the Jones Day Foundation, sought to create a centralized space to bring together legal practitioners and organization in order to serve veterans.
It s based on the very fundamental precept that these are men and women who have fought for freedom and rule of law around the world, and they ought to have access to justice here at home, Ellsworth said.
The project was spurred in part by the ABA Veterans Legal Service Initiative. Outgoing ABA president Linda Klein championed the initiative during her tenure as head of the national bar association.
The ABA is so pleased to be partnering with the Jones Day law firm as a part of our Veterans Legal Services Initiative to create the VetLex online pro bono platform to meet the legal needs of veterans, their families, and their caregivers, Klein said in a statement. We are working to design VetLex as not only an accessible and efficient portal to legal services, but also to serve as a supportive resource to lawyers and legal organizations around the country already engaged in critically important pro bono legal work for our veterans.
Once the project is complete, Ellsworth imagines that the platform will offer participating attorneys access to educational resources like trainings and sample briefs to help attorneys, especially those without much experience in working with veterans. Additionally, Ellsworth said that the team working on VetLex is integrating some useful data collection tools into the platform to track things like matter trends and population sizes.