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JACKSON, Miss. -- A North Mississippi Rural Legal Services attorney said she worries low-income clients will suffer because the agency plans to eliminate some staff jobs and restructure others.

Nebra Porter of West Point said Friday the agency's board is expected to eliminate all six paralegal jobs Saturday because of a budget shortfall. The agency's executive director, Ben Cole, said five of the 10 staff attorneys will be limited to helping clients over the telephone rather than in the courtroom.

Porter said the paralegals help people resolve problems with "life-sustaining" issues such as Social Security, food stamps or unemployment benefits. She said clients will be "devastated" without help from paralegals.

"Our clients being poor, a lot of them are functionally illiterate. They need people to sit face-to-face to help them," said Porter, who is chapter president for a union, the National Organization of Legal Services Workers, UAW Local 2320.

North Mississippi Rural Legal Services serves 39 counties and has offices in Oxford, Clarksdale, Greenville, Tupelo and West Point.

Cole said funding was cut this year from $700,000 to $80,000. The money comes from a Mississippi Bar Foundation charitable program called Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts. Lawyers' trust funds that are held for short periods are put into interest-bearing accounts, and the earnings help pay for legal services for the poor.

"Losing $620,000, we are going to have to lay off staff," Cole said Friday.

He said some longtime paralegals might keep their jobs but be given different duties such as screening telephone calls. That means call screeners with less seniority would be laid off.

The Mississippi Access to Justice Commission, a group created by the state Supreme Court in 2006 to examine the need for legal services for the poor, issued a statement Friday saying only one legal services lawyer is available for every 18,000 eligible people in the state. About 600,000 of Mississippi's 2.9 million residents live in poverty.

The commission said that "the crisis of access to justice for the poor has long been under-prioritized."

The commission said the current budget problems for North Mississippi Rural Legal Services should focus attention on the need for more funding and better systems to help the poor.

"This is not a North Mississippi Rural Legal Services problem," the commission said. "It is a national problem in our fight for equal access to justice."

Source: SunHerald.com