Jeffrey Jacobson

Wills for Heroes, a program that provides emergency workers with free wills, earned Jeffrey H. Jacobson the State Bar of Arizona Member of the Year Award.
Mr. Jacobson, an attorney with Waterfall Economidis, P.C. in Tucson, says it is “an unbelievable honor to receive this award,” but adds quickly, “The ones who deserve the honor are the people who put their lives on the line for us on a daily basis. The focus of this program is on Arizona’s emergency responders, not on the lawyers.”
This award is given to an attorney who has made extraordinary contributions to the programs and activities of the State Bar in the prior year. To date, volunteer lawyers have completed 950 wills, conducted 25 “wills days” in nine counties; and performed more than 1,300 hours of free legal services.
Last year, Mr. Jacobson began contacting fire, police, corrections and emergency service departments statewide, recruited volunteer attorneys and arranged for sponsorship for the program.
The program uses standard language drawn from a team of legal experts and puts that language into a computer program called HotDocs, a document assembly software.
“We take the answers supplied by the first responders and put them into the HotDoc program,” Mr. Jacobson says. “It takes the variables, merges them and spits out a will in Microsoft Word. It’s phenomenal.”
Mr. Jacobson says he has 30 requests pending from cities as large as Glendale and Chandler for their police and fire departments to entities as small as the Montezuma Rimrock Fire District. The most recent “wills days” have been staged in Prescott for area firefighters and emergency responders; in Pinetop for that community and for Show Low, Lakeside, Heber and Linden; and in Tucson for Southwest Ambulance paramedics and emergency medical technicians, and Rural Metro for emergency workers.
Lawyers, laptops and notaries
“We schedule wills days in the communities,” Mr. Jacobson says. “We show up with lawyers, laptops and notaries. All the first responders have to do is show up. They have a one-hour appointment with a lawyer. They fill out the necessary information, have counseling and questions and answers. The will is printed on a wireless print network, it’s signed and notarized, and they walk out with a will within about an hour.”
Mr. Jacobson says he developed a deep sense of gratitude for law enforcement personnel while working as a prosecutor in the Pima County Attorney’s Office. “It’s a great program, and I felt it was something we needed,” he says.
A similar program was started in South Carolina, and there is another in Georgia. Mr. Jacobson took Wills for Heroes to another level, branding it, marketing it and giving it a slogan: “Protecting those who protect us.”
The 100 Club of Arizona, a volunteer, nonprofit that provides financial assistance to families of public safety officers and firefighters who are seriously injured or killed in the line of duty, contributed laptop computers for the program, Mr. Jacobson says.
The Tucson lawyer was born and reared in Queens, N.Y. He received a bachelor’s degree from Northern Arizona University, a master’s in public administration from Arizona State University, and a law degree from Whittier Law School in Southern California. He moved back to Arizona in 1999 to accept a position as a Pima County prosecutor.
Mr. Jacobson and his wife Rachel have two dogs, Justice and Liberty. He loves to travel and is an avid New York sports fan — the Mets and the Jets, but not the Yankees.