As a veteran of the Marines, Sean Irwin knows the difficulties his fellow vets can face when returning home from service and setting up benefits.
“When I got out of Marine Corps, the whole process of the VA was just so kind of convoluted and cumbersome that it’s really kind of hard to even wrap your head around starting the whole thing,” he said.
Now he’s trying to help vets as a law student at the University of Denver.
Irwin is one of eight students this semester participating in the Veterans Advocacy Project at DU’s Sturm College of Law, which sets up shop at Denver’s Volunteer’s of America Veteran Services Center and provides legal advice.
The law clinic runs for the full semester and gives students in their second year or beyond a chance to work in a setting that allows them to get first-hand experience with taking on cases and interviewing potential clients while earning six credit hours. Students spend one night a week in a classroom and must volunteer at least 150 hours at the clinic at the VOA’s Veteran Services Center, 1247 Santa Fe Drive, throughout the semester.
Students can take the class multiple times and four students this term are holdovers from last year.
DU Law professor Ann Vessels started the Veterans Advocacy Project in August 2015 after forming it during a sabbatical semester. The focus is to help veterans with their benefits or with discharge upgrades such as going from “dishonorable” to “other than honorable.” She switched her original project after seeing her son come home from Iraq and struggle to get benefits.
“We want to help veterans and help law students,” she said.
After some training, students spend time in the clinic at the VOA and are available to provide legal advice and take on cases for veterans. Officially, either Vessels or fellow instructors Mike Shea and Tim Franklin are the attorneys for any case, but the students are able to do the bulk of the work.
“Our hope is that when a student finishes the clinic they could go out and start a practice. They would struggle like everyone, and it might not be the best thing, but they could start a practice,” Vessels said. “The clinic model is set up so that you hope the students struggle with learning the process.”
The class has stayed busy in the past two years. Vessels said there are about 80 open cases involving benefits or discharge upgrades and several more pending that students are deciding whether to take. If a veteran comes in with another problem that’s unrelated to benefits or discharge status, the students can point them in another direction for help.
Some veterans who now know about the law clinic at the VOA will make appointments, but many others drop in to the VOA and are sent in. According to Vessels, that has been one of the biggest benefits of setting up at the veteran services center as opposed to having the law clinic on campus.
“We chose to have it here. This is where the VOA focuses on its homeless initiative for veterans, and we thought there was a good possibility a lot of clients would come,” she said.
The law clinic is one of several organizations that makes its home at the VOA, and Brenton Hutson, division director for Volunteers of America’s Colorado branch, said it is a welcome addition.
“They’re an extremely reliable partner,” he said.
Having walk-in clients can provide difficulties as some of the veterans are living on the streets and don’t have regular access to phones. Connecting a disability to time in the military is also tricky.
“The biggest problem is you have to make a connection between their illness or injury and their service,” Shea said. “If you lose a leg or an arm, it’s pretty obvious, but most of our veterans here have injuries like PTSD and they can’t really be tied back to service without some work.”
Franklin and Shea both have worked with veterans in the past. Shea recently retired from private practice and will pass on calls to the clinic. Franklin, who still has an active law practice, provided some of the first clients for the law clinic.
Franklin said the growth of the students from the beginning of the semester throughout their stay has been impressive each term.
“I’m super proud of the students and the growth,” he said.
Franklin remembers several cases the students have assisted with, including one where a veteran was about to lose much of his disability rating and it would have likely pushed him and his daughter out of their home and onto the street.
He watched as a student argued to Veterans Affairs on behalf of the clients and was able to convince the office to give the veteran a 100 percent unemployability rating, which at least kept his income relatively the same.
“As a lawyer, I wasn’t happy about (the decision), but the student did all the research and saved the vet and his daughter from becoming homeless,” Franklin said.
Several of the students who have gone through the class or are currently enrolled have a military background or have family who served.
For Irwin, his hope is to help veterans while he can before heading to a public defender’s office to begin his career.
“It’s just my personal feelings, but to be able to help the less fortunate, I think it is a duty to me and an obligation to serve the public,” Irwin said.
