U of A Veterans Clinic to use financial gift to expand staffing, services

The University of Arizona’s Veterans’ Advocacy Law Clinic will benefit from a $300,000 donation to hire new employees and expand initiatives.

The gift, which the clinic received earlier this summer, was given by Philip Morris International, which specializes in smoke-free tobacco products. The company has donated the same funding to the veteran’s legal clinic at the University of Florida and the Rocky Mountain Veterans Advocacy Project in Colorado.

“It’s super exciting,” said Kristine Huskey, the director of the Veterans’ Advocacy Law Clinic at the UA College of Law said. “With the money we could hire our third licensed attorney.”

That attorney, according to Huskey, is both a veteran and a UA graduate.

Also with the new funding, the law clinic is now able to head up a new project to increase legal access to rural and tribal veterans. Huskey is hoping to hire a fourth lawyer to head up that initiative soon.

“This has been something I wanted to do for several years, but we just never had the resources,” Huskey said. “The goal is to do outreach to rural areas and reservations to try to provide legal assistance to veterans.”

Last year, the UA’s veterans’ law clinic served over 200 former service members. There are more than 150,000 veterans in southern Arizona alone, according to the clinic, so Huskey is expecting the gift to make a real impact.

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The clinic provides pro bono legal services, meaning veterans, and their families, don’t have to pay. Lawyers, paralegals and staff members of the clinic provide assistance in veterans treatment courts and for discharge upgrade assistance, benefits and intake and referral issues.

While doing that, the clinic provides “law students with a high-quality legal education,” according to its website.

Philip Morris chooses to invest in law clinics, specifically, because they’re “multipliers,” J.B. Simko, the company’s vice president of regulatory and public policy said.

“The law schools offer a multiplier because giving them the ability to hire one new paralegal or one new supervising attorney, they then are able to take on five to nine more students which are then able to provide that much more reach and scope,” Simko explained. “The other bonus to that is we’re also helping to support future leaders.”

Simko was especially excited about funding the UA’s legal clinic because of its reputation.

“The Arizona program is one of the more sophisticated in the country,” he said. “It is held up as a model to others, and (Huskey) provides guidance to other clinics, both in terms of setting them up and in terms of running them and also there was a great need.”

Huskey said it was “really cool that a corporate entity has discovered that law clinics are a great organization to fund.”