New Era for Legal Aid’s Recipients

The doors are still open, but budget cuts will soon force the Legal Aid Society of Orange County to use a phone hotline to serve most of the local poor seeking free legal help.

Local officials are dramatically changing their operations in response to significant cuts to the federally funded legal aid network and new restrictions on the types of cases that can be accepted.

“It’s the change of an era,” said Robert J. Cohen, executive director of the local Legal Aid group, which handled about 16,000 cases last year--the majority involving female clients--with problems ranging from custody disputes and domestic violence to housing and benefit problems.

Instead of assigning Legal Aid attorneys and paralegals to work directly with the indigent clients, employees will do most of their work by phone, starting May 1.

Callers will receive simple advice or will be referred to clinics where they can learn how to represent themselves in such things as uncontested custody or divorce cases. Legal Aid attorneys will still work directly with some clients on more complicated cases, but many more people will be referred to other local programs that rely largely on the donated time of county lawyers.

On the positive side, Cohen said the hotline will be easier to use for people throughout the county. “But the services that people are getting better access to will be diluted,” he said.

Local groups such as the Public Law Center and Orange County Bar Assn. are working to help fill the gaps, although even when Legal Aid was fully funded, local programs were able to help less than a quarter of the county’s poor, officials say.

“We’re starting to have more and more people wandering in the courthouse not knowing where to go,” said Jennifer Keller, president of the Orange County Bar Assn.

“There is no real substitute for real lawyers helping people,” she continued. “Unless we’re going to create a permanent two-tier system of justice--one for those who have lawyers and one for those who don’t--something is going to have to change.”

After a months-long deadlock, federal legislators and the White House approved a $160-billion compromise budget last week that included a deep cut to the Legal Services Corp., which previously distributed more than $400 million annually to legal programs for the poor nationwide. The new budget leaves the corporation about $278 million.

In anticipation of the cut, the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, which also serves 15 cities in southeastern Los Angeles County, received about $2.4 million earlier this year, down about $1 million from last year. Federal funds make up about 80% of the local organization’s budget.

Conservative supporters of the cuts argued that legal aid funds have been misused in the past for liberal political purposes, such as blocking welfare reform.

Restrictions were also adopted that prevent Legal Aid attorneys from handling cases that include class-action suits challenging government action.

Supporters of the previous system argued the cuts and restrictions would dismantle a Nixon-era program that efficiently serves the nation’s poor, contesting the suggestion that volunteer private lawyers and state and local agencies could do the same job as well.

As the debate raged, the local society lost seven of its 18 staff attorneys and the office stopped accepting lengthy and the potentially restricted cases several months ago.

Employees spent recent weeks preparing and testing the hotline system and training employees and volunteers. Cohen is expecting to receive at least 10 calls an hour and to conduct about 50 clinics a year to train clients to represent themselves.

Some of the more complicated cases received over the hotline will be referred to the Public Law Center in Santa Ana, which has worked with Legal Aid through the years to assign cases to private attorneys willing take cases for free, otherwise known as pro bono work.

Scott Wylie, executive director of the law center, said the group might be able to handle up to 1,400 cases this year, up about 25% from 1994. While the future of Legal Services Corp. has hung in the balance, it has been difficult to plan any further, he said.

“It makes it almost impossible for effective long-term planning, which of course in the end doesn’t hurt me or you, but damages our court system and the indigent people who need to use it,” he said.

The bar association’s long-standing pro bono committee is also helping out, working on several new programs, including a task force to help people represent themselves in family law cases. Such cases traditionally have made up about 40% of the Legal Aid Society’s caseload.

As of May 1, the Legal Aid hotline can be reached by calling (714) 835-8806 or (800) 834-5001. The hotline will operate Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. and on Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.