The Ohio Veterans and Military Legal Assistance Project begins work today in central Ohio.
Funded by grants from the Ohio State Bar Foundation and the Walmart Foundation, the project will develop a statewide system of volunteer attorneys willing to represent service members and veterans on civil legal matters free of charge. Service members and veterans will have to meet income eligibility guidelines to qualify for representation by one of the project’s volunteer attorneys.
The Project’s director is Michael J. Renner, a retired attorney who served as chief counsel to former Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery and as the first executive director of the Ohio Tobacco Prevention Foundation. Renner most recently served as a volunteer coordinator for the Volunteer Resource Center at the Legal Aid Society of Columbus, a resource that connected cases accepted by Columbus Legal Aid with lawyers in private practice willing to handle those cases at no charge to the client.
The Assistant Director is Summer A. Moses, an attorney and Army National Guard veteran who served in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The Ohio Veterans and Military Legal Assistance Project is a spinoff from the Ohio Veterans WrapAround Project, devised by Supreme Court of Ohio Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton to ensure that Ohio’s veterans are delivered the entire array of critical medical and social services.
The Project will not be ready to accept referrals for some time.