The attorneys at Student Legal Services aim to confidentially advise and counsel students on legal matters in order to maintain a safe educational environment.

Pamarah Gerace, director and staff attorney, has been working with Student Legal Services since it was formally established in August of 1987. According to Gerace, common cases that the staff attorneys deal with include landlord/tenant issues, underage drinking, traffic tickets, car accidents and working with students’ financial aid.

“The major kind of consumer cases we do are landlord-tenant,” Gerace said. “We do a lot of advice on criminal, we do all the pot possession cases that come in. Even though we don’t go into court on that, we’ll be able to help the student get resources or let them know that they can do a diversionary program so that they don’t get a criminal record.” 

Student Legal Services also helps students with cases of sexual harassment, sexual assault, stalking and domestic violence.

“Three of the four attorneys are in court almost every week on domestic violence cases on behalf of our students,” Gerace said. “It always takes us by surprise that we see it as prevalent as it is — it doesn’t seem to be lessening as you would expect. As a matter of fact, it’s gotten heavier and heavier.”

According to Gerace, the employees of Student Legal Services are neither employees of the state nor the University, but are instead independent attorneys that are here to solely help students.

“We have a contract to be here,” Gerace said. “The way we look at ourselves is that we are the law office on campus for the students. We actually do off-campus matters, that’s basically what we do. We do not represent against the university. It’s contractual that we don’t represent against them. We don’t represent one student against another. And then we don’t represent against the state of North Carolina.”

Even though Student Legal Services does not work directly for NC State, they work closely with other offices on campus like the Women’s Center, the GLBT Center and Military and Veterans Services.   

Michael Avery, one of four staff attorneys for Student Legal Services, discussed that the office communicates with many different resources both inside and out of the University.

“We get help from the surrounding community,” Avery said. “There’s also other attorneys in this area too that, say we have an issue that we just want some clarity on, we can refer to and ask them. And you know we’ve got good relationships with a lot of parties around that can help us and help our clients.”

Avery says that while Student Legal Services does not practice a specific kind of law, the attorneys mainly try to focus on the issues that students could experience.

“We are truly a general law practice,” Avery said. “We do a lot of different areas of law because you know students have a wide variety of different issues that they’re going to come to us with, you know we can’t be every lawyer for everyone. The law is so large that we can’t cover everything, but we certainly try to focus on those areas that we see that students have the majority of the problems with.”

According to Avery, attorneys can see up to 100 clients at a given time. While all cases are important, an attorney will prioritize a more serious or time-sensitive case.

“We have to determine what really needs attention first,” Avery said. “We are all juggling so many cases and only have so much time of the day. I would say that is the biggest hurdle that we have, but our clients are generally very receptive to helping us.”

Gerace emphasized that Student Legal Services has never had any issues working with NC State, despite the fact that they are independent from the University.

“We never had any issues whatsoever with the university wanting us to be here,” Gerace said. “I’ve been here over 30 years. I have never since I’ve been here ever felt that I’ve had pushback from university.”

Gerace said that Student Legal Services does their best at trying to advertise their services, and while knowledge of this free on-campus resource could improve, they still see thousands of students every year.

“I will tell you though we see almost 3,000 students a year, and it keeps the four of us very busy,” Gerace said. “So students do find us. But yes I always think there is a lot of room for improvement with letting students know that we’re here.”

Student Legal Services is located in 1107 Pullen Hall at 201 Dan Allen Drive.