Colorado’s federal trial court this spring began accepting participants in a pilot program intended to link incarcerated plaintiffs with attorneys for onetime legal advice calls, although the initiative has undergone changes since its initial announcement.

Colorado’s U.S. District Court authorized a limited legal assistance program last year, allowing prisoners at Fremont Correctional Facility who have filed suit in federal court to seek help from pro bono lawyers. As designed, plaintiffs would ask questions about their cases on 20-minute phone calls, with the pilot running from September 2023 until September 2024.

However, it was not until April that the program officially launched.

Kristen L. Mix, a former magistrate judge who pushed for the pilot before she retired from the bench last year, said there was a delay in getting an advisory committee and the Colorado Department of Corrections to approve the forms used by prospective participants. Also, the department needed time to line up personnel to make the program run smoothly.

“We were thinking that we could schedule calls for prisoners with attorneys and they would just make the calls from their usual phone bank, but those calls are not private in any way,” Mix explained. “Not only that, the phone bank is first-come, first-served. So, it was going to be very difficult to make that work on a particular schedule. After talking to the officials, we realized that really the way we could do it was by video call.”

Mix told Colorado Politics that as of mid-August, there have been 14 prisoners who asked for forms to request an attorney call. Eight forms were submitted and six people wound up having calls.

There is a flyer in the Fremont prison’s library and news of the program also appears to be spreading by word of mouth, added Mix, who is serving as the coordinator during the pilot.

“One of the prisoners put on his form, ‘I’ve heard about this from my cellmate,'” she said.

While there are other initiatives in the federal and state justice systems that enable lawyers to help self-represented, or “pro se,” litigants with their cases, the pilot program for incarcerated plaintiffs is a novel attempt to achieve several goals: be a one-time boost to pro se prisoners, entice attorneys into taking on meritorious cases, and easing the burden on judges’ dockets that arises when non-lawyers are litigating for themselves.

Mix said she did not know whether the district court and the corrections department would extend the pilot program beyond September to account for the delay in launching it. On Sept. 4, the court announced the program would run for an additional 12 months.

Alan Schindler, a commercial litigator in private practice who has previously taken pro bono cases of incarcerated plaintiffs, was one of the first attorneys to volunteer for the pilot program. The biggest challenge generally, he said, is not being able to speak to the client without advance coordination.

“That aspect slows everything down and impacts the attorney-client relationship quite a bit,” Schindler said. On the flip side, he added, prisoners who have access to the library are often “far more informed” about the law.

Schindler was assigned to speak with a plaintiff who alleged prison officials were deliberately indifferent to his serious medical needs and denied him access to the courts. In June, a magistrate judge recommended dismissing the complaint because some alleged injuries were time-barred and others suffered from insufficient detail.

“Ultimately, the magistrate judge was telling him he needs to amend his complaint, so I was giving advice on that,” Schindler said. He ended up talking to the man for 45 minutes, far longer than the advertised 20-minute limit.

“I just felt like no one was shutting down the call and no one was coming to get him, so I stayed and gave more advice,” Schindler said.

Nick Peppler, another commercial litigator who regularly volunteers for legal aid events, also took a call through the pilot program. Like Schindler, his call lasted more than 30 minutes. Although the program is designed for plaintiffs whose cases are already assigned to a federal judge, Peppler said his plaintiff had yet to file a complaint.

“He was interested to kind of explain some of the facts and just ask my general thoughts on likelihood of success or some of the hurdles that you would face,” said Peppler. “It sounded like the prison had actually already taken steps to grant him the relief that he was seeking. So, part of our conversation was, ‘OK, well, you know if they provide you X, Y, Z services, then you know that your claim will largely be moot.'”

Mix told Colorado Politics she was unaware the prison is allowing the calls to last longer than 20 minutes. She added that she tries to confirm each plaintiff has filed a complaint prior to assigning them an attorney.

She also praised Fremont’s law librarian and the virtual hearings officer for facilitating the program, while noting it is too early to say whether the consultations are affecting the trajectory of civil cases. Even if the plaintiff has missed a filing deadline, Mix said she will still refer the person for a phone call.

“I think that informing the prisoners of what the deadlines mean and what they need to do to try to address the deadlines is always beneficial,” she said. “They talk to each other. So, even if a prisoner has missed the boat on his own case, chances are the word will go around that ‘if you can’t meet a deadline, here’s what you do,’ because the prisoner learned it from his volunteer lawyer.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to note the district court’s recent extension of the pilot program.