I know very little about lawyering, but I could imagine a UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer advising pro bono bc of generosity or good publicity on a very newsworthy case

Anyone on here friends with a UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer who might be interested but doesn’t read HN?

Do American university students belong to unions?

It's very common in the UK. The most visible part of the unions is running social activities, often bars and events, but they can also provide legal advice to their members.

Not undergraduates. The "student union" in this context is 100% a social entity.

Graduate students sometimes are part of unions, but usually only if they're also employed by the university (somebody paying full tuition for an MBA probably isn't in a union, but a doctoral student teaching or doing research might be).

Undergrads doing part-time work at the university to pay bills (dining hall, bookstore, etc) could be, in theory, but probably aren't.

Graduate students (who teach, do research, and some administrative tasks for the university) occasionally do. What American schools usually have is a “student government” which is approximately 90% roleplaying as elected officials, and the remaining 10% is deciding which banquets they should host themselves to spend the small budget the university gives them.

Even if this student isn't a member, the local graduate student union (https://www.uaw4121.org/) would probably be a useful ally. All TAs are in the bargaining unit, and UW CSE has _a lot_ of undergrad TAs, so I wouldn't even be surprised if this student is a present (or former) member.

They can have a conversation without being representation and should connect OP to someone who can represent them.

No they can't have a conversation when they know of a non waivable conflict.

Surely they could refer the enquiry to the bar association or something in this jurisdiction.

How would the lawyer even know, without conversation, that there was a conflict?

They can basically say "i can't speak to you". More than even that is tricky.

As for the latter, that's why i said "when they know of a non waivable conflict".

Emphasis being "know of".

Here, they know they have a conflict - they have a client, it's not this person, and they know their client will be adversarial to this person. They aren't even part of a law firm that represents multiple clients regularly or something like that where sometimes the conflicts might be waivable (often not, but still)

This is a very very easy case.

If they don't know they have a conflict, sure, they can have a conversation for the purposes of understanding if they have a conflict.

That's not this case though!

> Surely they could refer the enquiry to the bar association or something in this jurisdiction.

They might but in many cases wouldn't even do that because they still wouldn't get paid for it. Doesn't matter, you don't need them for that.

To be fair, in many cases, they can be held responsible for whether you refer people to the right place.

An example of the difference between being independent vs third party.

Who mostly pays them sets the rules.

The entity paying the lawyers isn’t making the rules here. This is professional ethics: the attorneys in question have a conflict of interest.

It’s subtler than conflict of interest.

Anyone working for students while being paid for by the university (like some ombudsman) might think twice before going too hard after anything in the institution side that they work at, with people, etc.

This isn’t to say it should be adversarial, just not endlessly borne back against the currents into being neutralized by bureaucracy and office politics.

If it was independently funded..

You describe why this is a nonwaivable conflict of interest.

Precisely