If you needed a lawyer, do you even have one nearby? Well, not everybody in South Carolina has one, including myself. If you live in a small town or rural South Carolina, you probably don't have access to one, and you might not have the money to call one nearby anyway.
That’s what got the South Carolina Bar Association to revamp its pro bono program to meet people where they are. On Tuesday, the Bar Association is making its second-to-last stop of its 2026 traveling legal clinic, in Clemson, to answer civil legal questions from wills and estates to family issues.
Reagan Knight sat down with Scott Morgan, who's been reporting on how South Carolinians can get legal answers when they don't always know where to turn.
Reagan: Scott, tell us about the pro bono clinics. What can folks expect?
Scott: Well, the clinic, the clinic is Tuesday at Little John Community Center, like you said, in Clemson.
It runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. All of it's free to income-qualified folks, and attorneys are there for the day to volunteer. They're helping with wills and, uh, healthcare and living wills, power of attorney, expungements, pardons, other civil matters.
I talked with Zach Ohanesian. He's the coordinator of these events for the South Carolina Bar Association. He says these clinics are often the first time some people are seeing a lawyer that they believe is actually on their side.
Zach Ohanesian: For some, it is the first time they've been in a space with an attorney and it's not adversarial.
Scott: And a lot of the times, he says, lawyers are talking to people who've always felt they're not really entitled to get legal help, like they don't belong in the system or something.
Reagan: So what kind of issues come up the most?
Scott: Well, Zach says about 80% of the people who come in, come in to deal with something about family law.
Reagan: Like what?
Scott: Mm, like custody issues, visitations, child support, divorce, all those kind of things that weigh people down because they're, you know, they're complicated and they're messy, and they deal with some kind of change that people don't really want or, you know, don't expect.
Basically, they're just trying to get the next steps in front of people, and that's [00:02:00] important to know because not everybody really knows where to turn. I talked with a lady named Marsha Jarmon who works at Clemson, and she'll be going to this clinic to get some help on a pretty sensitive family issue.
Her son's dealing with his own medical problems at the moment, and Marsha's trying to make sure that his new baby is getting taken care of.
Reagan: And Marsha is one of those people who didn't really know where to turn, right?
Scott: Right. Yeah. She reached out for help and was-- She was just given a number, like, "Here, call this number," which didn't really help her much.
So she told me it's easy to start feeling lost at times like this. Here she is.
Marsha Jarmon: There's no one to call when you don't know what to do legally about a situation. Situations come up all the time that you don't know what the next step is to, to navigate.
Reagan: And so that's especially a problem in rural areas because …?
Scott: Well, because, well, you know, like you said at the beginning, they don't really necessarily have a lot of access in a lot of rural areas.
If you're living in Columbia or Charleston or Greenville or something, there's lawyers all over the place. But if you're living, you know, in Powdersville or something, there's not really all that much access to legal help and representation right at your fingertips. But that's why the Bar Association started these traveling free legal clinics in 2025. They're trying to meet people where they actually are.
Reagan: And how has that worked out for them?
Scott: Well, since last year, they visited 45 counties. The only one they haven't gotten to so far is McCormick, uh, which is a perfect example of a rural county where there's just not any legal access available to people who live there.
Uh, but they've done 22 clinics so far since last year in some pretty small towns pretty far off the beaten path, and, uh, they've reached about 2,500 people so far.
You must register to attend the pro bono clinic. You can do so by clicking here.
The South Carolina Bar Association will host one more pro bono day this year, on Oct. 1 in Florence.