Spring Feature
Ask the Attorney Celebrates Six Years bY Kelsey Pohlman More than 200 calls. One and a half hours. A team of trained attorneys. Are you up to the task? This call of duty is what many of our volunteers offer to do every single Wednesday at ABC6 for Ask the Attorney. Ask the Attorney began more than six years ago in September 2011. The fact that it became so successful was a feat all its own. “When Tom Sussi from Channel 6 called, I thought it was worth the try, but I was skeptical because we’d tried it before in various ways,” LRS Director Marion Smithberger explained. “We had tried it
before on WTVN radio Saturday mornings; no one wanted to call then. We had lawyers taking end of life questions on Channel 10 during the Terri Schiavo case. The phone bank was so loud that you could hear it during the News; but that was a one shot deal.” Little did Smithberger know just how successful Ask the Attorney was going to be… it’s now a weekly segment that many CBA members regularly volunteer for, most of whom come from Columbus Bar inc and the Barrister Leadership program. One of the first volunteers came from our very first inc class, the CBA’s Diversity Director Jocelyn Armstrong.
“Ask the Attorney is a great thing for the young lawyers who volunteer because it helps them practice intake,” Armstrong said. “On Ask the Attorney, the client describes the need, then we help them navigate what they need and share how we can help them.” But what if a phone call comes in and the person taking it doesn’t know anything about that practice area? Smithberger and team have found a way around that. “When we first started I invited some people who would be good sports because I thought it was possible we’d get no calls,” Smithberger stated. “The way we originally transferred calls was by handing the phone across the desk to our volunteers in bankruptcy or workers comp or what have you.” While this system has now improved to transferring calls to another volunteer who’s there that night, some attorneys might still have an initial fear to overcome. “[I was] afraid I wouldn’t know the answer to their questions. But you know more than you think,” frequent volunteer and former inc attorney Jacob Levine reasoned. “But if you don’t know the answer, that’s okay…