Tips for Preparing a Desk Reference Manual

 

A desk reference manual is a tool which assists Christian lawyers and law students to provide on-the-spot legal advice to the poor and homeless in the course of an interview. It consists primarily of three parts.  The first is a mission statement which may also contain statements concerning the Christian legal aid Biblical foundations, the scope and type of services, the addressing of spiritual needs and of Christian mechanisms for resolving disputes. The second part contains brief topical statements of the law and procedures concerning the most commonly encountered problems of the poor and homeless who utilize the service and instructions on where the lawyer or the law student or the interviewee may go to obtain further information and service, including the names, addresses, phone numbers, hours of service and types of matters handled. The third part contains a list of the names, addresses, telephone numbers and areas of practice of lawyers who have agreed to serve as “back ups” for free consultations for volunteers who need answers to simple questions in rendering advice and assistance. The desk reference manual is usually a key to providing better on-the-spot advice as well as to furnishing a confidence level to volunteers who normally do not practice in these areas of law.

Two cardinal rules apply: don’t reinvent the wheel and keep it simple. Ordinarily, topical discussions of law should not exceed one to two pages in length. They should be very terse so that they can be immediately useful to the volunteer during the course of an interview. The initial desk reference manual should not try to cover every conceivable subject. It should be limited to those topics which are most likely to be encountered in the types of services being rendered. These frequently will include subjects such as domestic relations and family problems, housing and public benefits and (in many clinics) minor criminal law matters. Helpful information concerning the types of questions and answers which need to go into the manual can frequently be obtained from other agencies which help the poor. Some of these are referred to below in those areas of law in which the Christian legal aid clinic offers assistance.

The preparation of that part of a manual concerning the statements of law and sources of referral for further information involves three steps: information gathering, editing and simplifying the information, and compilation.

In approaching the first step, go for the jugular. Look for a similar manual of substantive and procedural matters, which may already have been prepared as a training or practice aid by your state or local bar association pro bono clinic, by the legal aid society, by a local law school clinical program or, with respect to criminal matters, by the public defender and by certain other pro se clinics and courts. If there are such manuals and they do not cover all the subjects you need, supplement these efforts by obtaining simple explanations and publications commonly issued for the public, and sometimes for lawyers. These can be procured from various easy to obtain sources such as the Legal Aid Society, other bar association publications, Pro Se, Courthouse Booth and other bar and court sponsored clinics and from various public agencies such as Welfare, Social Security, Families, Youth & Children, Health and Public Housing, Immigration and Naturalization and from courts, such as Domestic Relations, Small Claims, Housing, Pro Se and similar divisions. Most of the foregoing will be authoritative, simple and up to date. They will frequently meet most of the needs for similar basic information by volunteers.
 
Law students can often prepare the desk reference manual. The editing should be a fairly straightforward matter, that is, condensing these matters into the one to two-page format by hitting the highlights. You will want to run the end product by cooperating legal aid, public defender or other lawyers experienced in dealing with the respected fields of law to be sure that you have covered the problems from the perspective of the needy in order to put it in the form most helpful for volunteers.

Compilation should be a relatively routine effort including providing of indexes, and binding the product together into the most useable form.

Where existing manuals containing this information are not substantially concise enough to suit the purposes of your clinic, the preparation of the desk reference manual is advised. It can generally involve somewhere between 50 and 75 hours for an initial or “starters” version or 150-plus hours for a more complete one. Assistance in the preparation of the desk manual can generally be obtained as a contribution from some of your volunteers or backup lawyers who have experience in their respective areas of practice or from a law firm, law professors or law students. Or if not, you may want to raise funds to compensate those doing the work.

Don’t get hung up on doing the most complete job in the first edition. Put the obvious material into it and then let experience show you what additions may be necessary in the future. If preparation of the manual proves to be a substantial impediment or causes a substantial delay in the startup of a clinic, there may be times that you may want to start the clinic services and go temporarily with an unedited compilation of the materials obtained or from rough drafts of an initial manual while work is going forward to complete it.

For further information or assistance, including copies of desk reference manuals prepared in other states, contact CLS Legal Aid Ministries.