How Legal Aid Leverages Pro Bono Attorneys 

Episode Notes

Transcript

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Mytrang Nguyen: So what we’ve seen over time is legal aid commit to these full-time strategic leadership positions in their organization, and so this is a way to really enhance how volunteers can work alongside staff advocates now to provide relief from the volume of cases, to share in the workload in important complex cases. Thousands of more people have been assisted each year with this investment, but I just think that it’s been an incredible change.

Intro: Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice, An LSC Podcast, we will explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business, government and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Ronald S. Flagg: Hello, and welcome to another episode of LSC’s Talk Justice podcast. I’m Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. To mark the occasion of Pro Bono Week, which the American Bar Association and the legal profession have celebrated each October since 2009, we wanted to have a conversation that highlights some of the innovative and impactful pro bono efforts that legal aid organizations and their private partners are undertaking. The theme for this year’s pro bono work is “Voices of Democracy Ensuring Justice for All.” LSE’s most recent justice gap report show that low-income Americans do not receive any or enough legal help for 92%, that’s 92% of their substantial civil legal problems.

We also know that due to a lack of resources, LSC-funded legal aid organizations turn away half of the eligible requests for the service they receive. Pro bono volunteers are key resources that legal aid providers can leverage to expand their reach. It is inspiring to see the impact that partnerships between legal aid and private businesses, law firms, government lawyers, and other attorneys can have on their communities, and we’ll be discussing some great examples of that today. Joining me for this conversation are three guests. Aili Monahan is director of the Pro Bono Partnerships Project at Northeast New Jersey Legal Services. In this role, she manages the organization’s efforts to increase the involvement of the private bar in providing legal assistance to low-income residents of Bergen, Passaic and Hudson Counties.

Bob Farrington is vice president and assistant general counsel at JPMorgan Chase. He is the current JPMorgan Chase Pro Bono Fellow and will be working with Northeast New Jersey Legal Services full-time for the next six months. Mytrang Nguyen is program counsel for Pro Bono Innovation in LSE’s Office of Program Performance. My colleague Mytrang is part of a team that manages LSE’s Pro Bono Innovation Fund, a competitive grant program that annually invest $5 million in efforts to creatively leverage pro bono resources in the delivery of legal services in low-income communities. With that, let’s jump into our questions and Mytrang, let’s start with a broad look at legal aid pro bono programs. The Pro Bono Innovation Fund is about to reach a milestone, 10 years of grant making, 139 grants, over $40 million in funding for LSE grantee organizations across the country. What have been the biggest changes in legal aid pro bono as a result of this investment?

Mytrang Nguyen: Thank you, Ron. It’s incredible the amount of time and money that we’ve invested in legal aid pro bono. I would say Aili, actually, I mean, not to put you on the spot, Aili, but she is the embodiment of probably one of the most important changes we’ve seen in legal aid pro bono which is the development of full-time, professional, experienced, innovative staff and teams to run these legal aid pro bono programs. You know, when we started, staffing for pro bono tended to be thin. Organizations were rightly — you mentioned the justice gap, they were choosing to hire staff advocates to do the direct services work themselves. I mean, the justice gap is so overwhelming, you just really want to invest in those staff resources to folks who can do the cases.

So what we’ve seen over time is legal aid commit to these full-time strategic leadership positions in their organization, giving them adequate staff and teams, and what this has done over time, if you want to talk broader change, is giving these organizations the capacity to drive other things in the pro bono program. That’s flexibility to act quickly. You could expand your creative partnerships in the private sector, and even with community organizations. We’re seeing a lot more strategic engagement of volunteers of different types.

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You’ve got law students, paralegal students at technical and community colleges, in addition to attorneys using limited scope, unbundled services, best practices, and training and mentoring, they’ve been leveraging technology throughout. And so this is a way to really enhance how volunteers can work alongside staff advocates now. So it’s not just staff advocates, it’s volunteers working right alongside with them to provide relief from the volume of cases, to share in the workload in important complex cases. I mean, in a nutshell, obviously, thousands of more people have been assisted each year with this investment. But I just think that, again, bringing it back to Aili and people like her in our system, it’s been an incredible change.

Ronald S. Flagg: Thanks, Mytrang. Yes, I think the program has been strategic investment to promote strategic engagement, and Aili, the gauntlet was thrown your way. What are the challenges from the legal aid perspective in engaging pro bono volunteers? And how does a strong partnership between a private partner and a legal aid program come to be?

Aili C. Monahan: Well, first, I just want to thank you, Ron and Mytrang and LSC, for having, even giving us this opportunity today to talk about pro bono and Northeast New Jersey Legal Services, but also highlighting how important the pro bono volunteer attorneys are in meeting the needs of our greater communities, so we do appreciate this opportunity. That said, there are challenges. One of the big ones that we’re facing right now is finding volunteers who have an expertise in an area of law who can also deliver that service quickly. So a good example of this is, we have a large number of clients who come to us seeking assistance in family law cases. Because of the way New Jersey courts work in the family court, there’s not often a lot of turnaround time between when that client first comes to us and when they have to be in court to deal with a custody modification, a support modification. So we aren’t left with a lot of time to find an attorney who’s available, who can assist, but who also, most importantly, knows what they’re doing in that system. It’s a specialized legal field. So I would say that’s a major hurdle for us is what I call the trifecta, is you’re available, you can take a case, you understand the area of law, but you can do it today or tomorrow.

The other big challenge that we find is that because we represent clients in a very broad range of civil matters, housing, family bankruptcy, immigration benefits. It’s often hard to find attorneys who have expertise in some of our more niche legal fields, and so finding volunteers who can bring their existing legal knowledge to our clients can be difficult. What that means is we have to rely on training our volunteers. But to train our volunteers also requires resources. It requires the individuals who are going to do the training, the materials, and again, doing so in a way where we’re not asking clients to wait months for an attorney to get trained, get up to speed, and then turn around to take a case.

So I think those two, while they’re related to each other, are really the major challenge that we face trying to get services for our pro bono clients. Flipping to partnerships, I think our relationship with JPMorgan Chase and Bob is a really fantastic example of how a relationship can start one place and morph and merge and grow to where we are. So Chase started partnering with us in the fall of 2017. So for six years, they’ve engaged with our organization to provide pro bono support. And I think one of the things that’s important to remember is that the relationship we have with them today was not the relationship we had with them from Day 1. I think taking time to nurture a partnership, to talk to each other, to find out where strengths are and to start small. I think we have a natural tendency to want to jump in and tackle all of the problems at the outset, but I think that takes time and development, and so the scope of our relationship with them now was not the scope we had with them in 2017.

One of the things that I think has been really great about Chase using them as our example of really strong partnership is when we first started doing clinics with them six years ago, it was in person in one office serving one community, because that’s where JPMorgan Chase housed a huge population of its attorneys in Jersey City. It’s where we had an office.

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It was a natural fit, but then COVID happened, and we could not provide in-person clinics anymore and so there had to be another shift and that shift now turned to the virtual clinic model, which Chase helped our program pilot and actually start so that we could utilize it for our other partners. We morphed again. We started with uncontested divorce, then we started doing security deposits, then we started doing naturalizations and that’s where we find ourselves today. We run multiple clinics with them multiple times a year. We have a virtual model. We have Chase employees from all over the country, in Latin America, who would join us every time, and it’s really — that’s been the gold for us and then, of course, you end up with Bob. Bob, who started as a volunteer in a clinic, then volunteered again in another clinic and here he is, spending six months working right alongside our team in our office. We’re incredibly grateful for that, and I like to say this is the beginning of an even bigger relationship between Northeast and JPMorgan Chase.

Ronald S. Flagg: Well, that’s obviously a perfect segue into questions for Bob, but I’m going to resist the perfect segue to just say that, Aili you are a walking advertisement for the value of investing in pro bono and getting people with your professionalism and experience and strategic thinking to help expand services to your clients. It’s really remarkable, and thank you for that. Now I’m going to take advantage of that perfect segue you gave us and Bob, I’d like to get your perspective as a pro bono volunteer from a corporate law department. What are some of the barriers to engaging more volunteers in legal aid work?

Bob Farrington: Ron, thank you for having me on, and I do need to start out by saying that any opinions or personal views I express are my own and not those of JPMorgan Chase. But to answer your question, I think really one of the main barriers is convincing people to set aside the time to participate in pro bono activities. I know with me, I was at Chase for a while, and you’re so busy with work and so busy you’re trying to find time for your family, and time is really precious and at least for me, in the beginning, I was always putting off doing pro bono. So really, it wasn’t until 2020 when a colleague of mine who is just unbelievable participant in pro bono activities, she came to me. She asked me for some help to work with NNJLS and to join conversations with them to develop clinics. And I started doing that early 2020, and then the pandemic hit, and we still wound up doing our first virtual clinic on no-contest divorce in October of 2020. And I remember I did that and really, that was my first clinic that I had with NNJLS. It was so well set up, so well organized. I worked with someone who hadn’t been able to file for divorce for over five years and we went through the process with her, and it’s really complicated. There’s lots of forms, there’s lots of things you have to file with the court in certain orders and in certain timeframes and when I finished that call, she was so grateful, and I felt so happy that I was able to help her and I think that’s the thing. If we can get more attorneys to participate just initially and get involved and get that feeling of helping someone, I really think we’re going to be able to just get more and more attorneys after that to participate in pro bono.

Ronald S. Flagg: Yeah, I think that’s my experience as well. Before I came to LSC, I was chair of a large firm, pro bono committee, for decades and another barrier that we often face — lawyers are used to practicing in areas in which they have a lot of experience. There’s sometimes reluctance, as Aili mentioned, to taking on something new, and I always had to remind people that their alternative of their doing a pro bono case was not Clarence Darrow doing the case. Instead, it was the client being on their own, and they were much better off with a lawyer who was diligently going about training, helping them than going on their own. Bob, could you tell us about JPMorgan Chase’s Pro Bono program and the Pro Bono Fellowship program that you’re participating in?

Bob Farrington: Yeah, it’s really amazing, Ron. So JPMorgan Chase has a legal Pro Bono Fellowship that they award annually, and basically it’s for the goal of supporting legal pro bono, focused on strengthening communities, empowering families, and advocating for vulnerable individuals. And they award this once a year to someone in the legal department that allows that person to then go and work full-time with a pro bono organization to help them in their pro bono activities.

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And earlier this year, I was reviewing NNJLS’ Pro Bono Partnerships Project, and I was looking at how that could help and influence people and it was something that I wanted to do. I submitted my application for the fellowship, and I can’t be more excited that I was awarded this. I’m starting actually this week for six months and right now, according to the census, there’s over 200,000 people at or below the poverty level in Northeast New Jersey, which is Hudson County, Passaic County, and Bergen County. And the thought that I can now participate and help maybe that many people have access to legal advice and help their lives, is just incredible.

Ronald S. Flagg: Well, thank you for doing that. I know Aili is very excited about it. Aili and Bob, could you tell us about some of the initiatives that you’re planning to undertake during this fellowship?

Aili C. Monahan: Yeah, so what we tried to do is we tried to take a step back into the program and say, “From a holistic view, what are we missing? What haven’t we been able to tackle that having Bob on board in his professional capacity, with his professional connections, could allow us to build and fill the gaps that we aren’t able to do as a staff?” And from that perspective, we identified a couple of different areas that we really wanted to work on and going back to what we were talking about before with the hurdles of volunteering, one of the things that we want to create is we want to create a stable families program. So this program is modeled after existing programs that are already up and running. There’s specifically one in New York City that’s been very successful and effectively what it does is it acknowledges that while it would be best for a client to have an attorney go to court with them to assist them with their family matter, the reality is we can’t always do that. Either because we don’t have the resources to send somebody or because of the turnaround time or simply because they didn’t even think to ask and they find themselves in a situation.

So with that in mind, we said, “All right, what’s the next best option?” And that is teaching clients how to help themselves, how to be self-advocates, how to operate in a system that ask any New Jersey family attorney is not a super functioning system right now, unfortunately. And so what we want to do is we want to develop a program that would teach family law on a simple level to our clients, helping them file motions, helping them reply to motions, helping them request an adjournment, helping them make other requests of the court, teaching them to interview people.

So a big part of modification hearings can be bringing in witnesses and saying, “Why should you modify your parenting time?” And teaching clients how they can conduct those interviews. Our clients also find themselves having to go to agencies to get benefits, to apply for things, teaching them how to walk into those organizations and be their best advocate. So that’s one of the big programs that we want to develop. It’s a big ask, though and so having Bob come in to help us and spend time focusing on all of those parts and then creating an actual program that we could start recruiting clients for would be a huge success for us over the next six months and something that will carry us, when Bob returns to his real job at JPMorgan Chase.

Mytrang Nguyen: If I could just jump in and react quickly to this proposal, Ron, I think it really — for me, what’s exciting about it is that, you’ve got Bob obviously in here to bring his skills to look at this on a full-time basis as part of his fellowship, but what we’ve seen happen in the Pro Bono Innovation Fund and with a lot of our grantees, is when you get in there and you start to develop out these materials, what you start to tease out also are opportunities for limited scope representation potentially for pro bono. As you start to look at this area of family law, as you start to see what is available for clients, what they can do effectively on their own, with the right supports and scaffolding, you start to see areas that are fairly limited in scope in terms of a pro bono engagement or even a staff engagement that will allow you to potentially iterate the model and build out something where there is a higher level of service, but on a limited scope or unbundled basis that will allow volunteers to come in and provide some of those supports for the clients who have previously you could not serve at all. So again, for us, what’s fun to see when you engage in this type of process is the learning that comes from it and when you’re looking at it with a pro bono lens, you can shake out other things that can make a lot of sense for a pro bono program for volunteers, and obviously for the clients.

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Ronald S. Flagg: Mytrang, how do we spread? How does LSC spread the learning along the lines you’ve just described?

Mytrang Nguyen: I mean, there’s so much content and information out there in the world and on the web, as you all know. We have found some of the most effective ways to make these things happen is to connect Aili with her peers. Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing is when it happens. It’s where the rubber hits the road. So one of the greatest things that I can offer at times, folks look me at times and they say, “Wow, you’ve been in the Pro Bono Innovation Fund for this long. You’re the expert. Let me know.” Everything I learn, I learn from talking to people like Aili and then connecting people like Aili to others who want to also learn. So just really being intentional about being part of a community of support that has this information and great knowledge to share, staying engaged outside of New Jersey, like it’s so easy to stay in New Jersey and just look to New Jersey for answers. But if you take that time and get out to an equal justice conference, go out and engage with us, ask us who you should be talking to, it can really pay dividends for you as you move forward with this type of effort.

Aili C. Monahan: I think on that point, one of the things that I think is often missed in the Pro Bono world is that nobody has to reinvent the wheel.

Mytrang Nguyen: Right.

Aili C. Monahan: There are so many successful programs doing so many different things, and I think tapping into what is already there and then just modifying it for the locale and the jurisdiction that we have to do it in, has been a huge kind of source of my own personal, “Where do we want to go? What do we want to build?” I think it’s great, and look, one day and I’d be lying if I didn’t say. I would love for somebody to look at us as a program down the road and be like, “You know what? I want to do what Northeast New Jersey is doing” because I feel that way about the other programs that we tap into and that we look to as we build ourselves into a kind of a better place where we’re ultimately at the end of the day serving more clients and being able to help more people in our community.

Mytrang Nguyen: Oh, I see it already happening. I mean, honestly, because it’s not always the perfect finished product, it’s the process itself, like that did not work, and that it so valuable. That is so valuable for other organizations to have that conversation be really open about it and say, “Hey, this is where we struggled a little bit. Other folks will take that and do something with it that can really help the whole field.

Ronald S. Flagg: Bob, I’d like to get your take on all this. So Mytrang and Ai from perspective of LSC and Aili from a legal aid program’s perspective are very enthusiastic, will talk to one another and will excite one another even more. You’re coming at this from a private corporation, how does it sound to you?

Bob Farrington: Ron, right now my fellowship, I’m still kind of pinching myself because it’s still amazing to me that this is happening. When you say “I’m in the corporate world”, I am, but I’ve been working now with people at NNJLS for three years now and I know what a great job they do and how much they care about helping people. So it’s a real honor and a privilege for me to be able to work here for six months and then help them to help even more people.

Ronald S. Flagg: Well, thank you again for that and to JPMorgan Chase for sponsoring this. You got to underscore that a lot of the pro bono work volunteers for sure ought to get credit, but often the organizations with whom they work are also do a lot of credit because they are in essence making your time and you available, which is a terrific contribution.

Bob Farrington: And Ron, I just like to say too, how incredibly grateful I am to Chase for providing me this opportunity. It’s really something I don’t think many people get to do. So it’s just a great opportunity, and again, really grateful to Chase.

Ronald S. Flagg: So let’s take a step back from some of the things we’ve been talking about and take kind of a look across the board at the emerging trends we’ve been seeing in legal aid pro bono both from Mytrang, your perspective at LSC and Aili, your program, particularly we’ve now a couple, three years past March of 2022 when the world in general and the world of legal aid and the world of pro bono and legal aid changed. So what emerging trends have you been seeing, Mytrang?

Mytrang Nguyen: There’s been quite a few. I mean, it’s interesting because I do think — again, Aili, kind of your approach and how you described your flexibility in integrating the clinic that you had with Chase from something that was in person, to something that can now be done remotely or even hybrid in nature. That’s something that’s certainly is true, Ron, like folks, there are things to embrace about desktop pro bono, hybrid virtual that is here to stay and I think that’s great for clients and for volunteers in particular from an efficiency standpoint.

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What we’ve seen substantively, we use the actual grant-making process and the Pro Bono Innovation Fund is part of a bellwether. So what we’ve been seeing consistently is, there are newer topics that are emerging just because of policy changes happening in different jurisdictions. So criminal records, expungements, for example, in a lot of jurisdictions in recognition of kind of what has happened in the criminal justice system and the impacts of a record or even arrest on someone’s employment or housing options, has created a proliferation of local or state-wide laws on expungement. This is an area that makes a lot of sense for pro bono volunteers to do. We’re seeing it with driver’s license recovery where again, oftentimes it’s simply fees and financial reasons that are preventing someone to have their driver’s license, again, an area that can be scoped and you can kind of look at the workflow. You can see how to unbundle it and have something for a volunteer to do in a fairly time-limited way that is life-changing for the individual who is getting their driver’s license back.

So for us, we’re happy to see those types of projects coming through in addition to one’s like Aili is talking about where you’re looking at family law or more complex cases. How do we engage volunteers more substantively in that area and an area in particular that is staying true for Pro Bono Innovation Fund, we’ve probably put over $10 million into it so far since our inception is housing eviction defense and unlawful detainer work?

Now this is traditionally scary work for volunteers to get involved. These are tight timelines. The stakes are very high, but because it is such a mandate for legal aid organizations to figure this out, they are really putting all their creativity and energy into really thinking through how to do this in a responsible way for clients to really bring pro bono partners into part of the larger solution of what is a really, really challenging and constantly dynamic situation.

So that gives you a sense of the substantive pieces that we’re seeing coined through, and then on that, obviously leveraging technology to the greatest extent they can in a way that makes sense both for clients. I think the pandemic did highlight the digital divide in a way that was very sharp and very quick, but it also — leveraging technology and practical cost-effective ways both for volunteers and for the clients, and I think really kind of looking closely at how to again, engage and have your work in alignment with some of the strategic advocacy goals of the organization.

So again, that’s kind of broad brushstrokes. I’ve got lots of fun examples to talk about too in terms of what could be illustrative of this, but I’d love to hear Aili and Paul William too.

Aili C. Monahan: I think you hit probably at least three of the kind of the big ones for us, which is housing. COVID saw a moratorium on evictions. Our clients weren’t being evicted because they couldn’t be evicted. While that moratorium has been lifted, our clients can be evicted again, and so we are seeing an unbelievable influx of housing-related issues. We also happen to serve a part of the country that even in the best of circumstances, has a lot of housing issues. It’s very expensive to live in our three counties. So we have kind of a layered issue on top of that, which is affordable housing, affordable safe, clean housing, so that’s a huge one that we’re seeing.

We’re also on the expungement note, there has been a real push in New Jersey — obviously our jurisdiction, and so what we’re trying to kind of tap into is creating an expungement program where we can model it after existing expungement programs, but do so in a way that it can serve our clients and our three counties. But like anything, the way an expungement is handled in Hudson County is not the way it’s handled in Bergen County, which is not the way it’s handled in Passaic County. And so we really have to be mindful of where are our clients coming from because the best practices to handle a client who needs that assistance in one county is going to look different than from what a client in another client is going to need.

Mytrang Nguyen: It’s so true.

Aili C. Monahan: Which makes it — we were already at a high-level of what we had to provide and now we’ve just had to notch it up because now we have to basically create three different systems to do the same work. But with that, one of the things that Chase brought to us this year, which is new for us, Chase has an existing commitment to the Clean Slate Program. It is already something — it’s a program that exists in their branch offices and so when they came to us this year for a week of service for pro bono week next week, one of the things that they really wanted to do was to create a clinic with us so that we could help with expungements. This was not something that their pro bono team had done before. It’s not something we had done before.

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So for the past few months, we have been developing and getting off the ground, an expungement clinic that will host next Tuesday, and right now the goal is to serve eight clients, because as I said before, you start small. You figure out how it works. You figure out how you need to do it, and then the idea is you build from there the next time.

But we’re really excited, because that’s eight clients that no longer are sitting on a waitlist and who will hopefully have everything expunged and will be able to go get a job, will be able to apply for something that maybe they were otherwise not able to. So we’re excited about that and growing that into a bigger project down the road with Chase’s support and turning it into maybe — we serve 16 clients the next time.

Bob Farrington: Yeah, and I know that Chase is very excited about that too and we’re also hoping to grow that and get to where we’re having multiple clinics a year.

Aili C. Monahan: That’s great.

Mytrang Nguyen: Can I just plant a seed also, just touching on Ron’s point about larger trends and just bringing in something — lifting up a particular aspect that might be relevant for you and the Pro Bono Innovation Fund is — there’s been coming through the Pro Bono Innovation Fund applications, an increase in using navigators, non-legal professionals or other volunteers to help with some of these processes. The more we’re getting into driver’s licenses and expungements, the more we see that case management, getting the fingerprints, the photos, the records, the certified records. What a lot of our organizations are looking at, building a volunteer corps of folks who will do the case management, who will help you get to the next stage, will put the package together for the attorneys to go in and help, because it’s turning out that you can have a bottleneck. There’s a line of attorneys ready to take these cases, but if the client is doing all those things on their own, it gets to be too much.

And so, again, volunteers to help service navigators for all the pieces that are required and usually put on the client to be responsible for, to make sure that there’s follow-through on all those complex pieces to navigate these systems and make it happen.

Aili C. Monahan: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. One of the areas that we’re looking to tap into for exactly that reason because we are finding — there’s just a delay between getting – we’ve promised Gavel in New Jersey, that’s what we call our court system where you can look up criminal records. Between getting a report from there, getting our clients fingerprinted, getting the report back on the fingerprint to find out what’s on there, to find out what’s out-of-state, to then making sure that they’re even eligible for an expungement, to then getting them with an attorney sitting down, filling out the application, it’s taken an immense amount of work.

So one of the things that we’re hoping to develop and I am not going to jinx this, that we’re going to make this work is, we’re trying to tap into our legal student community. So our emerging 1Ls, 2Ls and 3Ls who can’t yet practice, but who have a need and a desire to work with our communities and work in a public interest setting, because those are the perfect people to sit and take the time to pull these reports and help get full out-of-state reports done and so, we’re very excited with the idea of kind of creating a new partnership with local law schools to get law students involved.

And also at the end of the day, I hope that those law students when they do pass the bar and become attorneys, remember what it was to work with our program and to work in pro bono, and no matter where they go in their legal career, that they might come back and they might re-engage as a pro bono volunteer down the road.

Ronald S. Flagg: Aili, that’s perhaps a great place to end because it’s the absolute embodiment of strategic thinking. Thinking about a problem and thinking about all of the means you can use to deal with a problem, whether it’s volunteers from law firms or from private corporations or law students and having somebody with your expertise and experience and creativity, to think about that in a strategic way, it’s really impressive and empowering.

I want to thank Aili Monahan and Bob Farrington and Mytrang Nguyen for being with us today, but more importantly for the work they are doing, have been doing, and will be doing to support clients throughout America. Thank you much.

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Outro: The podcast guest speaker’s views, thoughts and opinions are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the Legal Services Corporation’s views, thoughts or opinions. The information or guidance discussed in this podcast are provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. You should not make decisions based on this podcast content without seeking legal or other professional advice.

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