HIRING OF CONTRACTUAL PUBLIC ATTORNEYS

I do not know how many attorneys the Public Attorney’s Office (PAO) has, but I am sure that the supply is always short of the demand. Right now, the remedy to the shortage is for a judge to assign any lawyer, wherein the chosen lawyer practically works as a volunteer, under the legal fiction that he or she is also an officer of the court. There appears to be no problem in assigning volunteer lawyers to serve the needs of indigent clients, but if it is done too many times, it could already affect the incomes of those lawyers, one way or the other. Besides, if they are providing their services on a pro bono basis, they may not be giving their indigent clients the same attention as they would give to their paying clients. The obvious solution is to increase the budget of the PAO, so that they could hire more lawyers, but the cheaper solution could be creating a special fund so that the PAO could pay some reasonable honoraria to these volunteer lawyers, so that they could be compensated even to a small extent. I also do not know the existing distribution of PAO lawyers, but if that special fund could be established, it would be possible to assign volunteer lawyers everywhere in the country, because of the fact that there are indigent clients all over the country too. Any other ideas to help the PAO? IKE SENERES/03-01-2024