“As a student you can come in and bring all your information here, so when you have classes and finals and what not, it’s nice to know that a professional, an attorney, and his paralegals are working on your case.”
– Anthony Villalobos, Director of Personnel for the University Legal Clinic

The University Legal Clinic provides students access to free legal advice and assistance on campus. Anthony S. Villalobos, Director of Personnel for the clinic, talked with the Post about what exactly the clinic is meant and used for. They currently have 15 paralegals and six more incoming. The clinic also employs an attorney, John D. Wartman, who puts in office hours two days a week, and deals with a campus containing roughly 28,000 prospective clients.

UWM Post: What exactly is the legal clinic and what is its purpose?
Anthony Villalobos: It is a way for students to resolve their legal issues. Unfortunately we can’t help students against the university or against another student because everyone pays into the university clinic with their segregated fees, but we can refer them out to someone else in that instance. People utilizing our services must be currently enrolled students without any other representation. Basically someone will come in, they will meet with our paralegals, and our paralegals will gather all the information that they can. They are then to take care of the issue, whether it’s a lease or a landlord, and gather information. Then we tell the person when they’ll get back to them and our paralegal will meet with our attorney and go over the case. We then set up a meeting time, so we can get them in here and figure out how to rectify the problem.

Post: What is the most common legal situation that you run into?
A.V.:The majority of the things we get are problems involving tenants and landlords. Issues like people not getting their security deposits back or only a portion, and tenants getting deductions for carpet cleaning and painting, things that aren’t necessarily legal. It’s nice to have the clinic because as a student you can come in and bring all your information here, so when you have classes and finals and what not it’s nice to know that a professional, an attorney, and his paralegals are working on your case. You don’t have to try to get a hold of your landlord everyday, trying to get your money back for your next month’s rent, knowing that you have a professional and professional staff working on it.

Post: What is your success rate with these types of cases; is there a statistic like that?
A.V.: It’s a little hard to always get a monetary amount, although we have won thousands of dollars in cases. A lot of times an issue will be resolved with a landlord right off the bat. After an initial letter citing the violations we will [often times] receive a check or the landlord will stop by and figure out the situation he or she is violating at the time. Sometimes it will go farther and go to small claims court and that’s when a decision will be made on a higher level as opposed to trying to find some middle ground between the two parties.

Post: Do you feel like landlords and people who are in the position of taking money from students take advantage of students because they might not know how the system works?
A.V.: I don’t think that landlords are necessarily in the know about a lot of these things. A lot of times when we send out a letter saying, “You charged so and so for carpet cleaning and painting, and that’s not a legal thing to do,” they’ll send a check right away and say, “Oh sorry we didn’t actually know that that wasn’t do-able.” So it’s sometimes that the landlords aren’t always informed. I mean, it is a business, so on occasion you can have some people like that (taking advantage of students), which is unfortunate, but for the most part it is just misinformed parties. We help a lot of landlords as well, students who are landlords, so it isn’t that we are anti-landlord. We are trying to help the student.

Post: How long has this legal clinic been around?
AV: I’m not sure. We have found stuff dating back 40 years. Lately we have been trying to hire more paralegals, because we have been noticing an increase in caseload, and I think a lot of that comes from us having a lot of positive cases. Students are passing us around through word of mouth. We have a great attorney (John D. Wartman, the only attorney on staff,) who went to Marquette University and graduated as one of the top of his class. He is an awesome guy; he’s been doing small claim stuff for quite sometime, and has a real good feel for it. A lot of people look at attorneys and see a cliché figure, but he’s actually a really personable guy and 110 percent for the student.

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