The thing that irks me about Legal Aid of Southern Nevada the so called “lawyers” there are not full members of the bar. They get a special number. Most don’t practice law. They don’t have clients. They send the cases out to “volunteer pro bonos.” You can see that they want to make “pro bono” mandatory. Try sending a client to LASN. They never get to see a lawyer. They are so hard to deal with. Sent a veteran who was down and out and had beaucoup problems. They did not help and turned him away. With my help, he finally got a lawyer on his own.
The need is great, but the workers are few. LASCN is overwhelmed by a demand that can sometimes seem infinite. Deserving clients are turned away by LACSN. The solution isn’t to complain and shirk, but to sign up for a pro-bono case/ask-a-lawyer clinic, and put your shoulder to the wheel.
The workers are few? How many attorneys are on the tax-payer and Bar dues-payer funded LACSN payroll? Here’s an idea: How about the lawyers who are paid to do the job start actually working as lawyers full-time instead of always trying to get lawyers who are employed by others to do LACSN’s job for free?
Its their wheel to put a shoulder to, not mine. I’ve got my own wheel, and I’m busting my shoulder against it.
The lawyer staff are administrators not attorneys. They are promoters and marketers. They send out every conceivable case that they can. It is like a Public Defenders Office that does not handle cases. Unacceptable. They need to do an audit of LACSN.
These comments are amusing about Legal Aid. I previously had a general practice. I have since limited my practice to personal injury. All areas of law involve unpaid work which is sort of private pro bono work. Lawyers work for free all the time. Lawyers can work day and night helping clients and never see a dime. In the personal injury arena, I spend hours speaking with clients only to find out they don’t have a case or even if they do there is not enough insurance or no insurance to cover their loss. Meanwhile I am helping them with their moving violations, getting their car fixed or repaired. Seven out of ten cases and prospective clients are duds. In general practice it was worse. I was constantly fielding calls helping clients with one problem only to find out there was another. So welcome to the world of being a lawyer. The secret is getting paid. The lawyers at LACSN never have those issues. They get a paycheck every two weeks. Yes there is an unmet demand for legal services for those who can’t afford an attorney. Legal Services has done a good job in providing resources with landlord tenant. I learned a long time ago to never get involved in evictions or stopping them. I learned a long time ago to get out of family law matters. Just not worth it.
Are they working insane case loads? Don’t they have FOUR DAY work weeks over there??? LACSN hounds attorneys in private practice working 50+ hours a week to take a case. How about everyone at LACSN takes one extra case instead?
If they hounded each attorney there to just take one more case, they would already take care of the entire pro bono list they float around at their various lunches.
All good -Except
The pro bono client for a civil matter will often need to litigate. The lawyer accepting the case soon comes to an impasse. Although filing fees are waived, any district court case is going to require discovery. There are no funds for depositions or experts. The LASCN referral cannot pay. Even if i am willing to devote significant time trying to pull a pig of a case into silk, I cannot eat the discovery/expert costs.
So, taking on an LCSN case is a bit of a circle jerk.
Not always. You tell the client upfront the limitations of their case. I am one of the biggest proponents of LACSN that there is but it does not promise that the client gets more than representation. Pro bono representation means competent and professional access to the courts, not to have a lawyer finance the litigation for them. And pro bono clients lose sometimes because their case is weak or by battle of attrition.
Strongly disagree. If you know you don’t have resources, especially if the case is good, how are you providing a service to the client if you cannot prosecute to a verdict? That only leads to client disappointment and bad mouthing the attorney and the legal system.
“You tell the client upfront the limitations of their case.”
So then, what’s the point of taking on the case, filing a complaint? The only play is to throw sh*t at the wall and see what sticks. There is an ethical issue here somewhere.
Not at all. If its not a professional malpractice case or matter which requires an expert to set the standard of care, you can try cases without experts. You can tell your client that you would like to take 10 depositions but they cost money and so you may not be able to do the maximum amount of discovery (or any discovery) beyond NRCP 16.1 Disclosures. You can tell your client that while it would be great to have experts that in this case they probably cannot afford them.
By the way– these issues are not unique to pro bono matters. Lots of paying clients have to grapple with the same limitations on what they can afford. This is what lawyering is which is prosecuting or defending your clients’ rights with the facts, law and limitations of a mattter.
Expert not needed? Let’s see. Auto repair – red an expert to testify about the quality of the repair. Forge signature, hand writing expert. Home sale/ purchase undisclosed defect, realtor and contractor expert. We are not talking an out of state PhD, but P’s opinion alone is not enough, especially when D has competent counsel. If you are going to fly without discovery you should keep the case in Small Claims.
With attorneys fees in arbitration still ridiculously low, it is hard to litigate normal cases with extensive discovery. This notion that you cannot litigate many cases without experts is simply a wives’ tale.
First your statement “the so called ‘lawyers’ there are not full members of the bar” is not necessarily true. There are quite a few full members of the SBN there.
Your statement “They don’t have clients” is also largely false. The CAP unit has clients. Guardianship unit has clients. The eviction unit has clients. The administrators recruit outside counsel but LACSN attorneys do represent clients
“Try sending a client to LASN [sic]. They never get to see a lawyer.” Yeah because there is a backlog of need versus attorneys willing to take cases. If the client can wait on the waiting list, they get help. But LACSN is way overstretched. If that is a problem, take a case and lessen the backlog.
Guest
Anonymous
February 10, 2026 12:11 pm
Boomers,
Explain this. Print all of the motion and all of the exhibits. Wet ink sign. Scan all of those pages you printed off. Turn it into a PDF. File.
Spoken like a true partner that hasn’t stroked a key twice. It takes several minutes to convert a PDF into OCR, if the PDF is even capable of being OCR’d. Most of these @yahoo.com attorneys’ filings look like they were done on a typewriter and faxed from in 1986 and Adobe can’t even recognize the text. EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY PEOPLE.
I think there are also some assistants who refuse to do it any other way because they’ve never been asked to adapt to modern technology & are enabled by the older attorneys to continue to do so.
I don’t particularly notice it because it takes some fraction of a second for me to see there is no text layer and then start the OCR process. That said, it is stupid that people do this. I knew a case manager who would print out his ENTIRE DEMAND no matter how many hundreds of pages, just to scan it right back in as a PDF to send. I was like “bruh, you know all those records were already PDFs, right?” Dude just did not get it.
No, no, it’s $0.50 per page to print it, $0.50 per page again to scan it, and $0.50 yet again once more for the chambers courtesy copy and the unnecessarily mailed copies to the other side. So I guess clients should refuse to pay for the unnecessary interstitial steps too.
wow. my first legal career was a file/clerk runner and this just brought me back to all those mini charges. Scan/Copy/mail/postage etc. It really added up!
A perfect example of “this is how we’ve always done it,” we just added some half-hearted electronic distribution step along the way and decided to just scan the one and only physical original.
That would be nice, but it’s a bit more complicated. In this situation, the requirement is to meet a variation of WCAG 2.1 AA, the accessibility standard the DOJ adopted for ADA compliance.
Some Word documents can be exported directly to PDF and meet the standard if they’re set up correctly. Scanned documents are a different story and usually require more hands-on remediation.
Guest
Anonymous
February 10, 2026 2:07 pm
Kudos to whomever at the Bench/Bar asked why writs and summonses are backed up for weeks. The answer that the Court gave was not satisfactory. “Well we are missing staff and trying to hire.” Sorry but weeks to issue a Summons is outrageous. A month to issue a writ (which involves nothing more than stamping the writ) is outrageous. Clerk’s job is to stamp and issue documents. It is not complicated.
Generally, the Clerk’s that handle the Summons and Writs also handle the front counter of the many pro se people that come into their office. Just FYI.
I want to call BS on this excuse. Go to the Court’s employment page and the Court has exactly ZERO jobs posted for the Clerk’s Office. Does not appear that the Clerk is trying very hard to hire.
I’m not sure the court is directly responsible for the hiring of most of the courts’ support staffs. Rather, I think the County is responsible for that. Lots of turf wars between the courts and the County on that front.
There is nothing on the County website either. Hard to hire people or get sympathy for being understafffed if you don’t tell anyone that you are hiring.
I would’ve untied him before releasing him tbh
Anyone know why there was a huge shakeup and case reassignments today?
Because Sturman Retired
check new AO regarding case assignments
Sharted myself during court today again
That’s one way to get your case called next.
You definitely did here
Why does every civil bench bar meeting include legal aid and nv legal services?
It’s old.
The thing that irks me about Legal Aid of Southern Nevada the so called “lawyers” there are not full members of the bar. They get a special number. Most don’t practice law. They don’t have clients. They send the cases out to “volunteer pro bonos.” You can see that they want to make “pro bono” mandatory. Try sending a client to LASN. They never get to see a lawyer. They are so hard to deal with. Sent a veteran who was down and out and had beaucoup problems. They did not help and turned him away. With my help, he finally got a lawyer on his own.
The need is great, but the workers are few. LASCN is overwhelmed by a demand that can sometimes seem infinite. Deserving clients are turned away by LACSN. The solution isn’t to complain and shirk, but to sign up for a pro-bono case/ask-a-lawyer clinic, and put your shoulder to the wheel.
The workers are few? How many attorneys are on the tax-payer and Bar dues-payer funded LACSN payroll? Here’s an idea: How about the lawyers who are paid to do the job start actually working as lawyers full-time instead of always trying to get lawyers who are employed by others to do LACSN’s job for free?
Its their wheel to put a shoulder to, not mine. I’ve got my own wheel, and I’m busting my shoulder against it.
The lawyer staff are administrators not attorneys. They are promoters and marketers. They send out every conceivable case that they can. It is like a Public Defenders Office that does not handle cases. Unacceptable. They need to do an audit of LACSN.
These comments are amusing about Legal Aid. I previously had a general practice. I have since limited my practice to personal injury. All areas of law involve unpaid work which is sort of private pro bono work. Lawyers work for free all the time. Lawyers can work day and night helping clients and never see a dime. In the personal injury arena, I spend hours speaking with clients only to find out they don’t have a case or even if they do there is not enough insurance or no insurance to cover their loss. Meanwhile I am helping them with their moving violations, getting their car fixed or repaired. Seven out of ten cases and prospective clients are duds. In general practice it was worse. I was constantly fielding calls helping clients with one problem only to find out there was another. So welcome to the world of being a lawyer. The secret is getting paid. The lawyers at LACSN never have those issues. They get a paycheck every two weeks. Yes there is an unmet demand for legal services for those who can’t afford an attorney. Legal Services has done a good job in providing resources with landlord tenant. I learned a long time ago to never get involved in evictions or stopping them. I learned a long time ago to get out of family law matters. Just not worth it.
An audit is LONG OVERDUE.
The lawyers working at LACSN have insane case loads. There will never be enough. Its like the story with the starfish. You can’t save them all…
Attorneys in private practice have insane case loads too.
We all have insane case loads, everyone just does what they can to help our society.
Are they working insane case loads? Don’t they have FOUR DAY work weeks over there??? LACSN hounds attorneys in private practice working 50+ hours a week to take a case. How about everyone at LACSN takes one extra case instead?
How many lawyers are employed by LACSN (i.e., paid by taxpayers)?
Close to, if not over, 100 attorneys. https://www.lacsn.org/who-we-are/staff-and-board
If they hounded each attorney there to just take one more case, they would already take care of the entire pro bono list they float around at their various lunches.
A hasty count on the Nevada Bar site comes up with 96 listed there.
I want someone to tour the LACSN office at 3 p.m. on a Friday and see how many attorneys are working.
Someone call the Veterans in Politics guy…or the RJ!
that’s the equivalent of the Vegas office sizes of Brownstein, Snell, Womble, and Holland/Hart combined. Possibly bigger.
They’re advertising to hire more. The sun never sets on the LACSN Empire.
All good -Except
The pro bono client for a civil matter will often need to litigate. The lawyer accepting the case soon comes to an impasse. Although filing fees are waived, any district court case is going to require discovery. There are no funds for depositions or experts. The LASCN referral cannot pay. Even if i am willing to devote significant time trying to pull a pig of a case into silk, I cannot eat the discovery/expert costs.
So, taking on an LCSN case is a bit of a circle jerk.
Not always. You tell the client upfront the limitations of their case. I am one of the biggest proponents of LACSN that there is but it does not promise that the client gets more than representation. Pro bono representation means competent and professional access to the courts, not to have a lawyer finance the litigation for them. And pro bono clients lose sometimes because their case is weak or by battle of attrition.
Strongly disagree. If you know you don’t have resources, especially if the case is good, how are you providing a service to the client if you cannot prosecute to a verdict? That only leads to client disappointment and bad mouthing the attorney and the legal system.
“You tell the client upfront the limitations of their case.”
So then, what’s the point of taking on the case, filing a complaint? The only play is to throw sh*t at the wall and see what sticks. There is an ethical issue here somewhere.
Not at all. If its not a professional malpractice case or matter which requires an expert to set the standard of care, you can try cases without experts. You can tell your client that you would like to take 10 depositions but they cost money and so you may not be able to do the maximum amount of discovery (or any discovery) beyond NRCP 16.1 Disclosures. You can tell your client that while it would be great to have experts that in this case they probably cannot afford them.
By the way– these issues are not unique to pro bono matters. Lots of paying clients have to grapple with the same limitations on what they can afford. This is what lawyering is which is prosecuting or defending your clients’ rights with the facts, law and limitations of a mattter.
Expert not needed? Let’s see. Auto repair – red an expert to testify about the quality of the repair. Forge signature, hand writing expert. Home sale/ purchase undisclosed defect, realtor and contractor expert. We are not talking an out of state PhD, but P’s opinion alone is not enough, especially when D has competent counsel. If you are going to fly without discovery you should keep the case in Small Claims.
With attorneys fees in arbitration still ridiculously low, it is hard to litigate normal cases with extensive discovery. This notion that you cannot litigate many cases without experts is simply a wives’ tale.
I am not certain you know what LACSN does.
First your statement “the so called ‘lawyers’ there are not full members of the bar” is not necessarily true. There are quite a few full members of the SBN there.
Your statement “They don’t have clients” is also largely false. The CAP unit has clients. Guardianship unit has clients. The eviction unit has clients. The administrators recruit outside counsel but LACSN attorneys do represent clients
“Try sending a client to LASN [sic]. They never get to see a lawyer.” Yeah because there is a backlog of need versus attorneys willing to take cases. If the client can wait on the waiting list, they get help. But LACSN is way overstretched. If that is a problem, take a case and lessen the backlog.
Boomers,
Explain this. Print all of the motion and all of the exhibits. Wet ink sign. Scan all of those pages you printed off. Turn it into a PDF. File.
I receive. I, or my staff, has to OCR your PDF.
Why are you creating so much unnecessary work?
WHY?!
OCR’ing a PDF requires, what, two keystrokes?
Spoken like a true partner that hasn’t stroked a key twice. It takes several minutes to convert a PDF into OCR, if the PDF is even capable of being OCR’d. Most of these @yahoo.com attorneys’ filings look like they were done on a typewriter and faxed from in 1986 and Adobe can’t even recognize the text. EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY PEOPLE.
The solution is courts enforcing rules for filing native PDFs of attorney-prepared documents. I agree with you, there’s no excuse here.
It’s a combination of stubbornness, petty gamesmanship, being stuck in ways, and just not knowing better.
I think there are also some assistants who refuse to do it any other way because they’ve never been asked to adapt to modern technology & are enabled by the older attorneys to continue to do so.
Also probably true. Best way to solve it is court enforcement of native PDF rules. Barring that, it’s going to take a generational and cultural shift.
I’m old and don’t know any better.
I don’t particularly notice it because it takes some fraction of a second for me to see there is no text layer and then start the OCR process. That said, it is stupid that people do this. I knew a case manager who would print out his ENTIRE DEMAND no matter how many hundreds of pages, just to scan it right back in as a PDF to send. I was like “bruh, you know all those records were already PDFs, right?” Dude just did not get it.
I just insert a scan of my signature most of the time.
If you don’t print it, how can you bill .50 per page to the file.
No, no, it’s $0.50 per page to print it, $0.50 per page again to scan it, and $0.50 yet again once more for the chambers courtesy copy and the unnecessarily mailed copies to the other side. So I guess clients should refuse to pay for the unnecessary interstitial steps too.
wow. my first legal career was a file/clerk runner and this just brought me back to all those mini charges. Scan/Copy/mail/postage etc. It really added up!
The NV Supreme freaking court does this!
Their advanced opinions look terrible, it’s so crazy that it’s how they want to present their decisions to the world.
A perfect example of “this is how we’ve always done it,” we just added some half-hearted electronic distribution step along the way and decided to just scan the one and only physical original.
But they also generally OCR everything themselves before releasing their scanned PDFs into the wild.
Not for long! The SCN clerks office are currently training on ensuring that all outgoing PDF’s are remediated for issues like this.
Can you clarify – they’re training on how to click “print to pdf” in Word?
That would be nice, but it’s a bit more complicated. In this situation, the requirement is to meet a variation of WCAG 2.1 AA, the accessibility standard the DOJ adopted for ADA compliance.
Some Word documents can be exported directly to PDF and meet the standard if they’re set up correctly. Scanned documents are a different story and usually require more hands-on remediation.
Kudos to whomever at the Bench/Bar asked why writs and summonses are backed up for weeks. The answer that the Court gave was not satisfactory. “Well we are missing staff and trying to hire.” Sorry but weeks to issue a Summons is outrageous. A month to issue a writ (which involves nothing more than stamping the writ) is outrageous. Clerk’s job is to stamp and issue documents. It is not complicated.
Generally, the Clerk’s that handle the Summons and Writs also handle the front counter of the many pro se people that come into their office. Just FYI.
I appreciate the FYI. However something is broken if the Clerk cannot process (read: stamp) documents for a month.
I want to call BS on this excuse. Go to the Court’s employment page and the Court has exactly ZERO jobs posted for the Clerk’s Office. Does not appear that the Clerk is trying very hard to hire.
https://www.clarkcountycourts.us/general/employment-opportunities/
I’m not sure the court is directly responsible for the hiring of most of the courts’ support staffs. Rather, I think the County is responsible for that. Lots of turf wars between the courts and the County on that front.
There is nothing on the County website either. Hard to hire people or get sympathy for being understafffed if you don’t tell anyone that you are hiring.
Someone asked for a Ty Maynarich update earlier. Well, here’s an update: https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/judge-issues-warrant-for-arrest-of-attorney-who-has-felony-case-filed-odd-suit-3618408/