The OU Student Government Association will introduce a new program offering students legal counsel at the start of the spring semester.
Student Legal Services will have one part-time attorney who will be available to answer student questions, provide counsel and give referrals, said Austin Coffey, letters, economics and entrepreneurship sophomore and an outgoing member of the current SGA cabinet.
“Student Legal Services is a student fee-funded, pro-bono service for students at the OU campus,” Coffey said. “Essentially, what that means is we all pay less than a dollar a year to hire an attorney and have them sit in the office for 24 hours a week, and then every student on OU’s campus can go to them with whatever problems they have within the realm of the law.”
Coffey said these problems can include landlord-tenant issues all the way to DUI charges, but cases such as criminal, student v. student and student v. university, as well as the need to actually be represented in court, will have to be referred to a different attorney.
“One of the best things about this program is the referral network,” Coffey said. “If you need representation in court, that’s just not something we can provide because there are so many students and one attorney. But we can refer you out to an another attorney who has experience in that area and who is friendly with our attorney.”
The other attorneys in the referral network will offer lower rates for OU students, Coffey said.
Michael Lutter, economics senior and the outgoing SGA vice president, said the funds for the program were drawn from the student activity fee reserve fund and in no way will the program place extra fees on students.
“We are trying to focus on helping students in any way that we can because we, through SGA, cannot directly lower tuition, but what we can do is try to alleviate some of the extra financial burdens that students are facing,” Lutter said. “Legal consultations run a pretty standard rate of about $150 to $200 dollars an hour. So the purpose of this program is to not only educate students on their rights and to have presentations for them, but to provide free consultations when they have issues arise.”
Lutter said the details are being finalized, but the program will be up and running at the start of the spring 2017 semester and will have two years of funding from the student activity fee reserve fund.
Finance and economics senior Eihab Khan, who has served on the current SGA cabinet to work on Student Legal Services, said OU is the only school in the Big 12 without a program like this for students and believes students will find the counsel very useful.
“We saw that this was something that was lacking on the OU campus and something we could do better,” Khan said. “At the very beginning, I said that this is something I see being very beneficial to students, and that’s really why we fought so hard for it — because we really believe we will see not only demand for it, but that it will have an impact in students lives.”
