Alyssa Perez & CLEAT Website

So as you know Alyssa Perez has this issue hanging over her head that has taken her off the bench until there is an opinion from the County Attorney's Office given to the Council of Judges on a possible conflict of interest.

At issue is Perez being an attorney for CLEAT, an attorney in private practice taking indigent defense cases, and being a part-time fill-in jail magistrate.

So I have been getting a lot of feed back from the courthouse about this issue - and still have yet to hear from a single person who thinks its no big deal - and several have mentioned that the have never heard of a CLEAT lawyer also taking cases.

Well there might very well be a reason they have never heard of that. If you look at the CLEAT website they tout some interesting things about their attorneys.

You can click this link to read the entire page, but they pretty clearly state that CLEAT lawyers only work for members.

"CLEAT attorneys specialize in working only for Texas law enforcement personnel."

Note the use of the word, "only".

And they are pretty emphatic about it too.

"When our members need help, we don’t want them to go to the back of the line waiting for an attorney to bail out a crack dealer or finish up a divorce case."

So its unclear if they know that Perez is taking other cases or if they even have a problem with it at all. It may not be an issue for them at all, but if it isn't an issue for them - them they might want to remove a few things on their website. 

Most notably lines like this:

"The founders of CLEAT wanted lawyers working just for Texas officers and that has been the extraordinary model of success for more than 40 years."