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All too frequently in recent years, Luzerne County’s court drew attention from the state’s legal community for the wrong reasons.

So it is encouraging to see court-related workers take pride in a program that, at least two people close to it argue, could serve as a model throughout Pennsylvania.

“It’s an out-of-the-box way of looking at things – and it works,” county Manager C. David Pedri recently told a Times Leader reporter. The program involves a supposedly more cost-effective way to provide legal defense for individuals who cannot afford lawyers but whose cases pose conflicts of interest within the public defender’s office. Conflicts typically arise in cases involving multiple defendants.

John Hakim, the county’s conflict-counsel administrator, described the setup he established since 2014 in an article he wrote for The Pennsylvania Lawyer, a magazine published by the state bar association. The article appears in its May/June edition.

Previously, the county had relied on a rotating pool of 10 or more private lawyers who moonlighted as conflict-counsel attorneys. In addition to their yearly salary, these part-timers received county health care and retirement benefits. “Conflict-counsel attorneys usually did not participate for long,” Hakim wrote, “as the caseload was often overwhelming and could overshadow their primary private practices.”

Under the new system, Hakim handles some cases and oversees four full-time attorneys, plus a few independent contractors. One of those contractors represents only juveniles.

The full-time lawyers each get assigned about 100 cases per year. They are salaried county workers, yet they are prohibited from practicing law outside of their county duties and don’t function together as a typical firm or department – further minimizing the likelihood of conflicts.

“The full-time attorneys have virtual offices,” Hakim wrote. “They are required to work 37.5 hours per week, but where they perform that work is at their discretion. … The attorneys are required to keep timesheets to account for their work time.”

Pedri described the system as less costly for taxpayers and more beneficial to the defendants, who have ready access to “excellent representation.”

If anyone – in or out of the courtroom – knows of flaws with this conflict-counsel program, we urge them to speak up, letting people know if either tax money or justice is at risk for abuse.

As it stands now, however, Luzerne County officials apparently have something good about which to crow.

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