NY Times Highlights Alum's Business
A new concept for legal assistance, LawyerUp, promises to provide legal assistance within 15 minutes when urgent legal help is required. A recent story in the New York Times (registration required) described the new service, which was co-founded by Alex Ruskell, a member of Washington and Lee’s Class of 1994.
Billed as “America’s First Urgent Legal Assistance Service,” LawyerUp operates in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, with criminal lawyers who have agreed to take late-night calls. College students represent one of the primary target audiences for LawyerUp, which has a set of statistics on its website noting that “people aged 16-20 are more than twice as likely to be arrested than be a driver involved in a car accident.”
An English major at W&L, Alex went on to earn degrees in fiction writing (M.F.A.) from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in English (A.L.M.) from Harvard University and in law (J.D.) from the University of Texas at Austin. He’s been associate director of academic support at Roger Williams School of Law since 2007. He previously worked at the Southern New England School of Law and the Legal Writing Center at the University of Iowa School of Law, and as a litigator in Boston.
In his role at Roger Williams, Alex has taught courses on bar exam preparation, water law, contractual drafting, law and literature, and art law. For 10 years, he has edited Thomson West’s national law bulletins in Search and Seizure, Narcotics, Arrest and Investigative Stops, and Thomson West’s law bulletins focused on California and New York law. You can read his blog about everything from relaxation techniques to study tips here on the RWU site.
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