A free-legal-aid world was effectively invisible to ordinary families before the web.

Evidence

As soon as she got home, she powered up the computer and discovered the pro bono world of legal representation. Yasmin was stunned. There are lawyers who would take your case for free? It seemed like a godsend, an impossibility, a dream. She typed “pro bono” and “free” into Altavista, her search engine of choice in 2002, and page after page came up. She scoured her results and narrowed her search, until she finally landed on one Web site, Advocates for Children, a New York organization aimed at protecting the rights of children in public education. She couldn’t believe it. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 426

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider theme of how the marginalized discover that the official system contains channels meant to help them — parallel to earlier chapters where families learn such mechanisms exist only after harm.
• SEED: An essay angle: the search-engine era as a democratizing enabler for legal self-advocacy — ‘pro bono’ as a keyword that only becomes discoverable once free search tools exist.