College of Law Clinic to help with investment losses

Jacqueline Rosado/ Contributing Writer

South Florida investors now have a helping hand.

According to Robert Savage, who leads the Investor Advocacy Clinic in the College of Law, the clinic’s overall mission is to provide legal service to underserved communities in South Florida.

The clinic represents people who have suffered the loss of some or all of their investor accounts or investment assets. In other words, if someone invests in a brokerage firm to profit from it and loses his or her money, the person loses the investment.

The clinic’s interns, University students, are the ones that represent the clients under Savage’s supervision. These interns, who must be at least third-year full time law students, are trained by Savage, who holds seminars to teach these students how to be lawyers. Savage holds mock interviews, engages the interns in discovery and the interns are drilled until they are ready to interact with actual clients.

Glastier Brown, law student and current intern for the clinic, explained that his experience has helped him grow professionally, mainly because the students are the ones that represent the clients.

According to Brown, the training prepares him in building a professional relationship with his clients. “It makes us more comfortable working with people as opposed to just the law.”

He added that interacting with clients distills a legal language to something that their clients can understand, which you can’t really experience in a classroom.

“It’s like translating in a way. This makes the clinic more unique in that aspect,” Brown said.

The clinic focuses on clients that are not considered by mainstream legal offices because of their low-income salaries.

The investor can get legal counseling and find out if he or she has a claim or not. If there is a claim, the investor is represented by advocates to get the investor’s money back.

If a student or anyone outside of the University has suffered or been a victim of investment losses, they can receive legal counseling at no cost. Their office is located in the University’s Rafael Diaz-Balart Hall, room 1010.

The clinic also aims to educate the public. According to Carrazana, they hold seminars to educate people on investments, scams and lend tips on how to avoid becoming a victim. Savage emphasized that these seminars also try to make people more aware of the power they possess in America.

According to Savage, visiting clinical assistant professor, these seminars let the clients know that they have certain rights that they might not be aware of because they might have come from a country that did not give the people as many rights or as much power.

The College of Law’s Investor Advocacy Clinic was founded in the fall of 2010 after receiving a grant by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Investors Education Foundation.

Claudia Carrazana, spokesperson for the clinic, said the Investor Advocacy Clinic is a non-profit organization that works with investment regulations. Savage said the clinic does not usually charge attorney fees. If there are fees, it’s because for expenses the clinic does not cover, which is usually solved by signing a waiver clients must qualify for.

“The two things that we do to serve are represent and provide counseling to communities that can’t find legal help elsewhere and we provide a service to the legal profession in which we train skilled and socially conscious lawyers,” Savage said.