Pleading Their Case
Retha Wilson’s feeble heart nearly gave out when she learned of the paper sticking out of the mailbox at her Watts apartment.
It was a 30-day notice demanding that she move out. The 55-year-old former nurse’s aide--who has high blood pressure, suffers from a heart condition and is legally blind--pleaded with her public housing manager to let her stay. Yes, her grandson had been detained by police the week before, but he was released without charges filed against him. Yes, his name was on her lease. “But I didn’t do anything wrong,” she recalled saying.
The Los Angeles Housing Authority turned a deaf ear.
“I needed help, but I didn’t have the money to pay a lawyer,” Wilson said. She went to the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, and a paralegal there negotiated on her behalf. The Housing Authority dropped its eviction case against her. “If it wasn’t for Legal Aid, I wouldn’t have my apartment,” she said. “I’d be in the street.”
Every day, an untold number of low-income people like Wilson in the Los Angeles area run into legal problems that bring them to the edge of disaster. What sometimes saves them--short of a miracle--are the free legal service organizations that counsel and represent them.
After being hard hit by federal budget cuts a few years ago, these groups are making a modest comeback. Some are hiring more staff, and many are trying to stretch their scarce dollars. But they’re still underfunded and understaffed, their leaders say, and the poor remain woefully underserved.
Across Los Angeles, some of the largest and smallest legal service groups say their funding has improved this year. San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services, which was down to 13 attorneys in the mid-1990s, now has 20. The Los Angeles Housing Law Project, which has only two attorneys, both volunteers, is expecting at least one to become a paid staffer soon.
Even the Legal Aid Foundation, which laid off one-third of its staff during the worst of the budget crunch, is hoping to add a lawyer or two to its 35-attorney roster. “The situation now is not the crisis cutback situation [of] a few years ago,” said the foundation’s executive director, Bruce Iwasaki.
In 1996, a GOP-led Congress hostile to legal aid slashed its funding 30%. Because Congress had been the largest single source of money for legal services in California, the cutbacks caused layoffs at organizations across the state. This year, Congress increased its funding of legal services 6%.
“People are hopeful that the worst is over,” said Laurie Zelon, a partner at Morrison & Foerster who chairs the California Access to Justice Commission. “We’re in an environment where we can build, rather than scramble.”
But the modest growth is still inadequate to meet the overwhelming demand for legal services, advocates say. Congressional funding of legal aid in 1999--$300 million--is exactly the same as in 1980, not adjusted for inflation. But since 1980, the number of poor people has grown almost 22%, according to the latest Census Bureau figures.
“If you quadrupled our staff and quadrupled the number of clients we serve, we still wouldn’t be able to meet the need,” said David Lash, executive director of Bet Tzedek Legal Services, which has 22 lawyers.
Daniel Grunfeld, president and chief executive officer of the Public Counsel Law Center, said his paid staff of 18 attorneys and volunteer network of more than 2,000 lawyers, paralegals and law students are inundated with work. “One of the toughest things about what we do is turning away people we can’t take,” he said.
Staff attorney Suzanne Blau vividly remembers one client, a middle-aged woman from Eastern Europe, who was seeking political asylum. She had fled to the United States to escape persecution over her sexual orientation.
For a month Public Counsel tried to find available staff or volunteers, but no one had time to help her. The woman was despondent when she left, Blau said. No one knows what happened to her.
In 1997, Public Counsel received more than 800 cases in which the client seemed to have valid legal claims, but its staff and volunteers had the time to take only about 350 of them, Grunfeld said.
U.S. Lags Behind Other Major Nations
Emblazoned across the front of the Supreme Court building are the hallowed words upon which the U.S. legal system is founded: “Equal Justice Under Law.”
To try to live up to that ideal, the government guarantees legal representation for the poor in criminal matters by providing public defenders. But unlike many other countries, such as England, Germany, France, Australia, Spain and Greece, the United States does not give its poor the right to state-funded legal representation in civil matters.
The United States also lags behind other nations in the money it spends on legal services for the needy. According to a 1996 report by the State Bar of California, France and Germany spend twice as much per poor person as the U.S.; England spends eight times as much on its poor.
“We do not stack up well in terms of federal support for legal services, compared to other Western democracies,” said John McKay, president of Legal Services Corp., the nonprofit organization set up by Congress to distribute its funding to programs nationwide.
Research by UCLA law professor Gary Blasi suggests that having a lawyer--or not having one--can have a dramatic impact on the outcome of cases. Last year, Blasi’s class analyzed a sampling of 151 eviction cases filed in Los Angeles Municipal Court in 1997 and early 1998.
“Tenants who were represented by attorneys won about half the time,” Blasi said. “Not a single tenant who represented themselves succeeded.”
Sometimes, having a lawyer is critical even if the case never goes to trial because it gives poor people more clout in negotiations.
The Housing Authority would not listen to Retha Wilson, the Watts grandmother, when she went to the agency on her own, but relented after Legal Aid paralegal Linda Williams, a second-year law student, appeared on Wilson’s behalf.
It is not known how many poor people in California never get the legal aid they need. Almost a decade ago, a nationwide study by the American Bar Assn. estimated that four out of five low-income people with legal problems were not being served. Today the need could be even greater, advocates say.
In 1980, California had 630 attorneys working full time to serve the poor, according to the state bar. Today there are about 550, even though the number of poor has grown. Put another way, there is now one attorney for every 10,000 poor Californians, compared to one attorney for every 210 people in the rest of the state population, according to the California Access to Justice Commission.
California also happens to be one of 16 states that does not provide any state funding for legal services to its poor.
Rewards and Struggles of Helping Others
Patricia Goldsmith belongs to the corps of 550. An attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles for many years, she left a few years ago to pursue a more lucrative private practice. But the rewards of helping others, she said, drew her back last year to the foundation, where she is now directing attorney for housing law.
Most mornings, she is in the waiting room at the Pico-Union office, lecturing a packed room of worried-looking people--most of them black or Latino, all of them poor--on the process of unlawful detainers, the most common device by which landlords evict tenants.
She pounds in the rules of evidence, which can make or break a case in court. “You cannot bring a letter from a friend! It doesn’t matter if it’s notarized or written in your friend’s blood, if you swear on the Bible, the Talmud or the Koran. It’s hearsay! You have to bring your friend with you to court.”
Later, a staff member meets privately with each client and provides counseling, and on occasion, representation in court.
But before the staff can do that, the front desk screens clients for eligibility. The client’s annual income must be no more than 125% of the poverty line set by the federal government, which means not more than $10,063 for a single person or $20,563 for a family of four. The client must also not be an illegal immigrant.
The latter requirement--imposed by Congress since 1996 on any group that receives funding from the Legal Services Corp.--is particularly disturbing to many in the legal community. Congressional funding comes with other strings attached: No class-action lawsuits. No collecting attorneys’ fees. No challenges to welfare reform laws. No political lobbying, even if the legislation directly affects legal services for the poor.
Critics call the restrictions draconian.
“Imagine if a corporate lawyer for a big company were told by the government, ‘We’ll allow you to do some things, but not other things to serve your client.’ That wouldn’t sit well with private attorneys,” said Steve Nissen, executive director of the state bar. “But that’s what [legal services] lawyers have to do.”
To be free of Congress’ restrictions, some groups are refusing to accept funding from the Legal Services Corp. Bet Tzedek used to take the agency’s money, but a few years ago its board decided not to apply for those funds anymore, Lash said.
Two Legal Aid Foundation attorneys last year founded the Los Angeles Housing Law Center, which accepts no Legal Services Corp. funds so that it can serve all people regardless of citizenship status. “You can’t exclude a sizable portion of the community from [legal] protection,” said Executive Director Rob Field.
‘The Stories We Hear Are Horrendous’
The civil legal areas that most affect the poor include housing, family law, health care, government benefits, immigration, employment and consumer fraud, advocates say.
Michele Milner, a Bet Tzedek attorney, might deal with several of those issues on any given day in her visits to senior centers. On a recent morning at a Wilmington center, Milner advised a 61-year-old man who might have been wrongfully terminated from his factory job and improperly denied reimbursement by his health insurance company. A legal resident, he also wanted to know how he could become a citizen and bring his wife here from Mexico.
Across the county on the same day, attorneys and volunteers for San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services were trying to help victims of domestic violence.
A woman who asked that her name not be used sought help after her husband, who had abused her for years, bound her with duct tape one day and threatened to kill her.
After obtaining a restraining order against her husband, staff attorney Harvey Silberman, who is also an adjunct professor at USC Law School, persuaded her to move to a shelter for battered women. He also helped her obtain custody of her three children.
Taking that first step to get legal help was what “started changing my whole life,” said the woman, who added that she could not have afforded a private lawyer. “I highly believe that if I hadn’t [received legal aid] . . . I’d be dead.”
The 1996 state bar report estimated that it would take $250 million to $300 million annually, in 1993 dollars, to provide adequate legal services to California’s poor. In 1997, the most recent year for which statistics are available, spending in California on such services totaled about $98 million, the state bar says.
Of that, about $29 million came from the Legal Services Corp. About $10 million came from the interest earned on money that lawyers sometimes hold in a pooled trust account for clients. The remainder came from foundations, individuals, local governments and other federal agencies.
Though legal aid funding is up slightly this year, its outlook remains uncertain. Federal funding depends on the vagaries of congressional politics, and trust account interest can fluctuate wildly year to year.
To help make up for the funding gap, groups are taking steps to become more efficient. They are doing more client screening over the phone to save time and joining to negotiate cheaper rates for online library services. They are also stepping up efforts to raise private funds and recruit volunteers.
The profession encourages lawyers to do pro bono--free--work for the poor. But only a small percentage of California’s lawyers donate any time. In 1996, only about 15% of them did pro bono work, according to the American Bar Assn.
Those lawyers who do donate their time, along with non-lawyer volunteers, play a vital role in providing legal services in the Los Angeles area. At Bet Tzedek, Lash estimates that volunteers provide about half of his organization’s direct legal services. The three domestic violence clinics of the San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services, which helped more than 5,000 victims last year, are run entirely by volunteers, said Executive Director Neal Dudovitz.
But working with volunteers is not easy, advocates say. They require training that consumes staff resources, and retaining them is a constant challenge.
“There’s a lot of burnout,” said Judith Segall, a volunteer attorney for the San Fernando Valley Neighborhood group.
Many volunteers can’t seem to stomach the work. “The stories we hear are horrendous,” Segall said. “You see [clients] coming in with welts around their neck. You see them with bruises all over.”
In addition, some complicated areas of poverty law, such as government benefits, require expertise that attorneys doing occasional pro bono work just don’t have.
Bet Tzedek attorney Milner often finds herself navigating the intricacies of government rules and patiently dealing with bureaucracies to help her elderly clients. She has met sickly seniors who lacked money to buy fresh food, others so poor they lived without heat. “Helping them obtain even a few hundred dollars a month in Social Security income is a drastic improvement to their lives,” she said.
Improving lives and ensuring that all people are equally served under the law are what legal services to the poor are all about, advocates say.
“Making the system of justice available and accessible for the poor is part of what makes our government work,” Dudovitz said. “If we close the doors to them, we’ll all suffer for it.”
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