Matthew T. Valencic, a co-founder of HALT and its executive director from 1978 to 1984, died April 24 from injuries received when he was struck by a vendor truck in New York City. He was 38.

Valencic was completing his third year of study as an Ackman School in Law and Social Responsibility at Columbia University.

It was Valencic’s leadership, dedication and ideas that served as the driving force behind HALT’s earliest successes.

"I began working at HALT in September 1978, with no guarantee of success, or even of being paid," he told an interviewer for the 1983 fifth-anniversary edition of HALT’s quarterly publication.

"Paul Hasse, a Rhodes Scholar I had known at Oxford, had spent the summer working at HALT but had to return to England to finish his degree. I arrived in Washington one day, Paul left the next. At HALT’s one-room office there was only a desk and a phone. I started with that."

Valencic worked alone until early 1979, relying on "high hopes, promising signs" and "a good deal of encouragement from people who heard about what I was trying to do."

"The first six months...were financially bleak, but as my personal commitment deepened from reading and working on issues, I came to believe in early 1979 that HALT could and must be made to work, whatever the odds seemed at the time."

He did all the early research and writing, including Shopping for a Lawyer, HALT’s prototype Citizens’ Legal Manual (later expanded to Using a Lawyer). He was also HALT’s lone lobbyist and media spokesperson, estimating that in the first year he did about one radio talk show a week, several newspaper interviews and "a sprinkling" of television spots.

After he appeared as a guest on the Phil Donahue Show in 1981 and again in 1983, HALT membership rapidly grew, as did its activities, its self-help materials, its reform agenda and its financial stability. Valencic, however, continued to challenge the organization.

"HALT must be prepared to exert a considerable amount of resolve and effort when the stakes are high for lawyers," he said in 1983. "There is no one else able or willing to make this kind of effort...HALT’s members, if properly informed and organized, can supply the grassroots support necessary to pass...legal reform proposals that otherwise would languish in lawyer-dominated legislatures for years."

First among new issues he said HALT should take on, Valencic listed the need to end the bar’s monopoly over legal services.

"The organized bar’s practice of prosecuting the "unauthorized practice of law" is one of the major things that HALT should challenge," he noted in 1983. That challenge is today central to HALT’s reform agenda.

Ever visionary, he once noted: "People seeking legal services should be able to dial a number where a lawyer who sits by a word processor calls the appropriate form up on the screen, fills out the information and mails the form to the client with filing instructions. That’s one alternative who’s day should be just around the corner."

Five years later, it now appears to be.

As part of a major 1984 reorganization, Valencic continued to serve on HALT’s Board of Directors but became a travelling consultant, representing HALT at seminars and conferences and doing media tours in Florida, Texas, Arizona and California.

At a special 1985 ceremony at the U.S. Supreme Court, co-hosted by then Chief Justice Warren Burger, he was among 50 legal reformers honored for their contributions to the alternative dispute resolution movement.

A native of Wakeman, Ohio, he was a 1973 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. After graduation, he studied three years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, England, earning an M.A. degree in English language and literature.

After leaving HALT, Valencic briefly served as a speechwriter for Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste, then earned a Masters’ in public affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government before enrolling at Columbia.

Last summer, he studied 10 weeks in the Phillippines under a Columbia University Law School human rights fellowship. Shortly after his return, he announced his engagement to be married to Dr. Rebecca del Carmen of Washington, D.C., a research fellow in the Unit on Parent and Infant Studies at the National Institute of Health. Their wedding plans had not yet been announced when he died.

In addition to his fiancé, Valencic is survived by his parents, Mathias and Marge Valencic, of Wakeman, Ohio; a sister, Mrs. Dottie Cousino, of Lake City, Fla., and two nieces.