Barbara Oro
Barbara Oro is a Professor Emerita at New England Law | Boston where she taught trial advocacy skills and supervised students in the Clinical Law Office. She also handled pro bono family law cases and provided monthly assistance to a law clinic for a battered women’s outreach program. Before joining the New England law faculty, she engaged in general practice and worked as a Suffolk County Bar Advocate, representing indigent defendants.
Barbara will help support Mass Legal Answers Online (MLAO), an innovative new statewide legal advice website managed by the Volunteer Lawyers Project and the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. MLAO is a “virtual helpline.” Low income Massachusetts residents can ask civil legal questions through a secure website. The questions are then answered by a pro bono lawyer through the same website. It is based on longstanding models of providing pro bono assistance via in person clinics and telephone hotlines, but moves these models into the 21st century through innovative use of technology. Barbara will help recruit pro bono attorneys to the project. She will provide advice and counsel directly to clients via the website, and also will support the pro bono attorneys who participate in MLAO through the website.