2023 Award Winners
Army
.Fort Irwin Legal Assistance Office
In 2023, the Fort Irwin Legal Assistance Office provided high quality legal assistance services for soldiers on post, on rotation, and outside California. With an office wide-staffing shortage, Fort Irwin continued to prioritize clients, aligning their hours with the installation’s operations tempo, addressing complex immigration matters, developing a robust pro se divorce program, providing filing assistance for uncontested divorces, housing walk-throughs, and implementing and maintaining weekly walk-in hours. Fort Irwin educates clients by providing in-depth worksheets and articles to service members and their families on common legal issues such as immigration naturalization, estate planning, and the California divorce process. Fort Irwin Legal Assistance attorneys are uniquely qualified to assist crime victims, as all attorneys are dual legal assistance attorneys and full-time Special Victim’s Counsel. In 2023, their civilian attorney was among a select group of competitive applicants chosen to participate in the Civilian Special Victim’s Counsel Pilot Program.
LTC Ruth A. Cresenzo
Lieutenant Colonel Ruth A. Cresenzo is a Judge Advocate who is instrumental in successful advocacy for resourcing for the National Guard to provide representation to victims of domestic violence and their dependents, as well as those subjected to sexual harassment. A thoughtful leader and advanced comprehensive specialist in victim rights advocacy, she has been a leader in the development and classification of positions to expand legal assistance to survivors, many of which have been filled. She has successfully pursued every opportunity to share her knowledge and expertise with her subordinates; state National Guard leadership and her home state of North Carolina; active component counterparts, and the civilian legal/victim support community. In 2023, she worked for the North Carolina National Guard Staff Judge Advocate to develop a visionary framework, key functions and roles and responsibilities for the new Special Legal Adviser, who was to be the expert in legal processes, policy, domestic violence representation and proceedings in special matters in the states and territories. She was also appointed as an Advisory Member to the North Carolina State Bar Legal Assistance for Military Personnel.
Navy
Ms. Cricket Tryon
Ms. Cricket Tryon's primary duty is provision of advice and representation to eligible victims of domestic violence perpetrated by servicemembers subject to prosecution under the UCMJ. Ms. Tryon helps her clients best position themselves for successful acquisition of protective orders and leads Navy Domestic Violence (DV) attorneys with a 100% success rate for issuance of protective orders. Representing 143 clients in 2023, she also had the largest case volume of any DV attorney in the Navy. Recognized as RLSO SW's Fiscal Year 2023 Third Quarter Senior Civilian of the Quarter after less than a year on board, Ms. Tryon has become the go-to subject matter expert (SME) for difficult family law cases due to her expansive knowledge and experience. She has developed and presented training for legal assistance practitioners at the Marine Corps Legal Assistance Symposium at Camp Pendleton. Outside of her routine duties, Ms. Tyron took the initiative to train new and inexperienced attorneys and paralegals. One of only four Navy DV SMEs, Ms. Tryon routinely goes above and beyond the basic requirements of her job and has established a new foundation for legal assistance practice at RLSO SW and the Intimate Partner/Family Law DV program across the Navy enterprise.
Air Force
628th Air Base Wing Legal Office (628 ABW/JA), Joint Base Charleston, SC
The 628th Air Base Wing Legal Office (628 ABW/JA) is a small office that shoulders a considerable workload, ensuring the success and continuity of Joint Base Charleston. Taking lessons learned from the pandemic, the office has developed and refined online tools that provide clients with educational resources on common topics, maximizes virtual appointments for the convenience of the client, and partners with community luminaries to enhance legal services for the JB community. The team has perfected lasting strategies for top-notch remote legal services; clients are no longer confined to specific meeting times for in-person visits and are to be able to speak unhindered with an attorney within hours rather than days of a requested appointment, for which the feedback has been near universally positive. Despite continued disruption from high operations tempo resulting in increased active-duty deployments, in 2023 the 628 ABW/JA assisted 1,730 legal assistance clients, totaling well over 1,450 hours of superior legal service. The team produced nearly 3,500 legal documents and notarized nearly 2,100 signatures. The 628 ABW/JA has delivered superior legal assistance services to a total force of over 70,000 military members, dependents, and retirees in the greater Charleston area, all while continuing full-spectrum legal support in the “new normal” of current operations.
Captain Kelsey Knitter
Captain Kelsey Knitter, Hill Air Force Base, has provided exceptional service to the Armed Forces legal assistance effort by significantly expanding the scope of services offered related to immigration. The partnership she established with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and other base agencies lead to a 90% improvement in application processing times and a 63% increase in immigration clients helped. She organized and hosted the first-ever naturalization ceremony on base which was attended by over 50 service members, including multiple squadron and wing commanders. She also led the first-ever Immigration Q&A Event which allowed members to speak directly to immigration officers in charge of processing applications. Given the complexity of immigration law, she has taken steps to educate both legal assistance attorneys and clients through trainings, drafting advisory documents, appearing on a Public Affairs interview, and hosting a Legal Assistance Podcast on immigration. She is even working to change immigration policy at the congressional level by working with different Senators to highlight the hardship faced by service members when stationed abroad with non-citizen dependents.
Marine Corps
Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Yuma Legal Assistance Office (LAO)
The MCAS Yuma LAO supported the personal legal needs of individual Marines, Sailors, Soldiers, and their family members in the Yuma area, increasing their personal readiness and thus unit readiness in 2023. The LAO provided legal advice and assistance in family law, estate planning, powers of attorney, naturalization, landlord-tenant disputes, consumer law, the Servicemembers' Civil Relief Act (SCRA), bankruptcy, and other personal, civil legal matters. For the calendar year, the LAO assisted more than 2024 personnel in total, including over-the-counter services, such as notarizations, and represented over 125 clients. During this year, the LAO provided nine legal readiness briefs to over 400 deploying Marines and Sailors, educating them in the benefits of wills, powers of attorney, childcare powers of attorney, advance medical directives, and their rights under the SCRA. The Yuma LAO was able to accomplish these services even though, for most of the year, there was only one dualhatted legal assistance attorney and no more than two full-time legal assistance clerks serving at any one time. Despite the MCAS Yuma LAO's geographic and jurisdictional isolation and its small and rotating pool of almost entirely dual-hatted personnel, it has nevertheless succeeded in providing top quality legal advice to individual servicemembers, retirees, and their dependents.
Mrs. Lisa Kuhl
In 2023, Lisa Kuhl of the Legal Assistance Office at Cherry Point demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to her clients' best interests through her extensive workload, long hours, and dedication to providing the best service possible. Mrs. Kuhl's experience and leadership were the bedrock of the office's high quality legal services and compassionate care for clients. Mrs. Kuhl has personally acquired an increasingly complex portfolio of legal services which includes family law, estate planning, immigration, and adoption services, enabling her to provide over two thousand legal services throughout 2023. Additionally, Mrs. Kuhl has drafted more than 2,200 legal documents in 2023, each of a superior, professional quality with a focus on detail that ensures these documents embody the intent of the clients. Beyond servicing those aboard the air station, she has also overseen the provision of services to clients that were either conflicted from Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune services or unable to be seen by MCB Lejeune Legal Assistance Office during the overwhelming rapid deployment schedule this past fall. Mrs. Kuhl is unmatched in her dedication to the military families of the Cherry Point area and in the quality of her service. She stands out from her peers and personifies the best that the legal assistance program aims to achieve.
Coast Guard
Eleventh Coast Guard District Legal Assistance Team
The Eleventh Coast Guard District Legal Assistance Team, led by Mrs. Belinda Alcantara, provided truly exceptional service to Coast Guard members, dependents, and retirees throughout California during 2023. Their efforts ensured military clients received critical legal assistance services on over 950 distinct legal matters including Estate Planning, Consumer, Landlord Tenant, Servicemember’s Civil Relief Act (SCRA), Taxes, Family Law, Immigration, Special Education, Power of Attorneys, Notaries, and Protecting Individual Rights. Of particular note was the Team’s ground-breaking civil referral to the Department of Justice that resulted in over $50,000 being returned to nine servicemembers and the judgment of $22,500 in civil penalties against a local Bay-Area Property Management Company for violating the SCRA.