Alternative legal services providers come into their own as major players, says new report

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Michele Mirto: Stepping up A2J while cutting cost

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Photograph of Michele Mirto by Bob Torrez Photography. Michele Mirto’s commitment to access to justice started as a little girl. Her parents drove home the importance of community involvement by leading their kids to donate to the food bank and homeless shelter. Working for a legal aid provider out of college showed Mirto, 54, that her destiny was a public interest law career. She’s worked in legal aid ever since, earning her degree from the University of Dayton School of Law in 1991. But it wasn’t until 2017 that she learned she’d end up turning the legal aid business model on its head—for the better. As executive director of Step Up to Justice , a Tucson, Arizona-based privately funded legal aid nonprofit, Mirto wields a shoestring budget and just three staff members armed with legal technology. They lead an army of volunteer lawyers in resolving low-income clients’ civil matters—mostly family law but also guardianship, consumer law, bankruptcy, and wills and probate. You can...
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NYT: credit card companies should cut off (or report) gun sales

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In the New York Times, financial writer Andrew Ross Sorkin asks why credit card companies and banks should not be made to monitor customers’ accounts for unusual gun purchases and share the information with law enforcers. Excerpts from my response at Cato . …In an advocacy piece imperfectly dressed up as a news story, New York Times financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin observes that some perpetrators of mass public shootings have bought guns and ammo using credit cards, and asks why credit card companies and banks should not be made to stop this. How? Well, they could “create systems to track gun purchases that would allow them to report suspicious patterns” and “prevent [customers] from buying multiple guns in a short period of time.” Invoking the Patriot Act – you knew that was coming, didn’t you? – the piece goes on to ask why the sweeping financial-snooping powers bestowed on the feds by that act should not be deployed against everyday civilians who purchase more guns than w...
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