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As the second year of my Equal Justice Works fellowship began this fall, I made a vow to soak up every opportunity and experience the organization offered me.  I felt a blossoming confidence in myself as an attorney, and a desire to continue to actively hone my skills.  This reinvigorated enthusiasm led me to sign up for the National Institute of Trial Advocacy (NITA) training which was being held right before Equal Justice Works Leadership Development Training (LDT) started.  I was impressed with myself for taking a risk in participating in NITA—though a complete extrovert, I was not very confident in my formal trial advocacy skills.  My position as an attorney at the Center for Children’s Advocacy, in Bridgeport, CT, does not usually entail employing these skills, though I knew that the NITA training would only improve my ability to advocate for my clients’ special education, school discipline, mental health, and other legal rights.  Basically, the thought of the NITA training was completely petrifying to me and that usually means it is something worthwhile to challenge myself to do!

By the time LDT started, I was ready to breathe a huge sigh of relief!  Now I could participate when I wanted, without trepidation or accompanying heart palpitations.

The welcoming session kicked things off perfectly—we had three energetic and passionate young alumni who were all in leadership roles within their respective organizations.  I was especially moved by Tirien Steinbach and her gentle yet determined approach to her work as Executive Director of East Bay Community Law Center in Berkeley, CA. Tirien said that lawyers are dismissive of optimists in the field, viewing them as simple-minded or too idealistic.  She talked about how as a young attorney, anger hindered her work, and only since letting go of that anger has she been truly successful in her advocacy efforts.

Tirien’s experience especially resonated with me because I have always been known as a positive-thinking person, and felt alienated in the legal profession because of it.  Hearing Tirien’s validation of my natural disposition helped me gain more confidence in myself and my lawyering style.

The next day, we had our choice of a variety of interesting sessions, from substantive legal information, to lawyering skills, to marketing and fundraising.  The most memorable session for me was Thom Allena’s Advocacy that Moves Others from Passivity to Creative Engagement:  The Power of Symbols, Images, Stories and Narratives of Place.  The session helped each of us tap into our own stories and those of our clients.  It helped me reignite a creative part of me that I have let wither away since finishing my Creative Writing major in college, and reminded me to be more deliberate about listening to my clients’ voices.

The other most important session for me, as I knew it would be, was our issue-area group.  During these small gatherings, we had a chance to connect with similarly-situated fellows, brainstorm for creative solutions to issues that had been plaguing our practice, and share our shared frustrations and successes.  Working at a small but wonderful legal organization in Hartford and Bridgeport, CT, meant that I had few opportunities to get to know other public interest attorneys.  The building of solidarity amongst the fellows throughout NITA and LDT, by sharing our collective knowledge and experience, is one of the most valuable experiences that Equal Justice Works has offered me.

The wonderful organizers of LDT clearly put a great amount of thought and effort into developing the schedule, choosing session presenters, and creating opportunities for fellowship.   The challenging NITA training (at once terrifying and rewarding!) set the tone for LDT as a collaborative, energizing, and unifying experience for all fellows.  I feel especially thankful for LDT as a second-year fellow, readying myself to embrace the new challenge of joining a legal staff as a more inspired, connected, and reflective attorney because of Equal Justice Works.

Anna is in her second year as an AmeriCorps Legal Fellow, originally funded through CNCS (www.cns.gov) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). She is also one of the Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Fellow Class Representatives for 2010-2011. Last year, AmeriCorps Legal Fellows, including Anna, served families facing foreclosure and saved almost 1,100 homes.

Watch Anna’s appearance here.

Happy Holidays from the Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps team! We are looking forward to an even better 2011 thanks to the great work of Fellows like Anna.

-Marty

Approximately 3.5 million Americans are homeless each year; more than 1 million are children[1]. The common presumption is that people become homeless because of issues such as chronic alcoholism, drug abuse or worse, negligence. This is often not the case. Many people become homeless due to tragic life occurrences, such as job loss, domestic violence, divorce, health issues and family disputes.

Picture courtesy of Getty Images

Access to legal services can and often is a viable solution to keeping individuals in their homes and helping people get off the street. A number of Equal Justice Works Fellows currently are helping clients who are on the brink of homelessness or who are already homeless and in need of shelter.

Equal Justice Works Alum, Kriste Draper is working to end homelessness for youth in San Diego, California. Kriste established the Homeless Youth Outreach Project (HYOP), hosted by the Children’s Advocacy Institute. Through outreach clinics, HYOP provides legal services to homeless youth, focusing on education and health care. HYOP takes a holistic approach to helping these youth, providing hot meals, bus passes and other necessities in addition to legal aid.

Kriste believes that legal aid separates itself from social work, but lawyers can do a lot to educate the public about the issues the homeless face. Recently, Kriste worked with a young boy from Puerto Rico whom we’ll refer to as Ricardo. Ricardo lived in Puerto Rico with his grandmother.  Because of severe epileptic seizures, the grandmother sent Ricardo to San Diego with the hope that he would be able to get the medical attention he needed.  With no resources or family living in the area, Ricardo arrived to San Diego homeless. While living on the streets, Ricardo made attempts to see a neurologist, but because he was homeless and he did not have a medi-Cal insurance card, he was denied medical attention. Even though Ricardo is a U.S. citizen, making him eligible for Social Security Insurance (SSI) and Medicare, he was denied on all counts because he lacked proper identification and documentation of his illness. His seizures grew worse and he began suffering from hallucinations.

Ricardo eventually found his way to HYOP, where he met with Kriste. She was able to acquire copies of his medical documents showing his history with epilepsy. She successfully appealed his SSI denial.  Today, Kriste happily reports that with health insurance, Ricardo is now regularly seeing a neurologist and psychologist for his epilepsy and hallucinations. He is now living in his own apartment. She acknowledges that Ricardo would not have gotten the help he needed without having an attorney to help him navigate through the legal process.

Kriste is competing for a $50,000 Pepsi Refresh grant that would allow HYOP to expand programming and provide emergency shelter and address basic needs, such as providing food and transportation, for homeless children in San Diego. To vote for Kriste’s Pepsi Refresh grant please click here. Voting ends on December 31, 2010.

Equal Justice Works has impressed upon me the importance of continually seeking to increase the access to justice for all.  What I am taking from my limited exposure to the legal system is the need for and number of people involved in executing the judicial process.

As part of my Equal Justice Works internship, I have the opportunity to go out and experience how others advocate for equal justice. In the spirit of finding equal justice in action, I visited the Supreme Court.  Like the judicial system, hearing the Supreme Court is a long process, with bumps I wasn’t anticipating.  Eventually, however, I witnessed justice in its highest form.

A crisp, cold morning full of promise, I make my way to Union Station and blaze toward the halls of justice.  I arrive, a little flushed, at 8:45 a.m. knowing arguments are at 10 a.m. The line stretches down the steps and curls to the right, “Curses. What an unfortunate state of events” I mutter.  Equal access to justice means I have to wait, and Equal Justice Works helped me to realize the process is designed so that as many people as possible will get their glimpse of justice.

My hopes of witnessing the battleground of justice were dashed by the court only allowing the first 50 people to sit in.

Alicia vs. "the line monster"

My new line-mate (who had helped create and file one of the amicus briefs for this case) and I could not get into the second session at 11 either, so we went on the 3 minute line together to charge into the halls of Supreme Court Justice in three minute intervals, getting in line again, and snatching up what we could of the argument from the back of the room.

I witnessed a case of gender discrimination wrapped in questions of citizenship: Flores-Villar, Ruben v.  United States.  A fight for the legality to keep the current laws about a child born abroad; an unwed woman confers on her child automatic citizenship regardless of age versus the unwed father, even if legitimacy is claimed and proved. Fathers must reside in the US for five years, two of which must be over the age of 14. The session focused on equal protection with significant reference to whether keeping different laws for men and women was facially legitimate.  What the court meant by facially legitimate, I have since learned, is “As long as Congress has a “facially legitimate and bona fide reason” for enacting a discriminatory rule, the rule shall not be overturned as unconstitutional”.  So in the interest of protecting the US from possible complications, the Court may uphold a discriminatory practice.

During this experience I learned that justice must be worded just right, especially if you are setting precedent.  After the court sessions, I explored the rest of the Supreme Court. A CSPAN documentary being shown on the Supreme Court explained the tortoise and hare in the building’s pediment as an allegory of the justice system.  Justice, much like the tortoise is slow, deliberate and will triumph.  Eventually, everyone gets a chance to hear the highest court in the country weigh the merits of a case.

If you want to leverage the federal support of the CCRAA to create or improve a law school based Loan Repayment Assistance Program consider this.  In their article Coordinating Law School Loan Repayment Assistance Programs with New Federal Loan Repayment and Forgiveness Legislation, Professor Philip G. Schrag and Assistant Dean for Financial Aid Charles Pruett of Georgetown University Law Center offer a road map for those interested in coordinating law school LRAP benefits with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Income-Based Repayment Programs established by the College Cost Reduction and Access Act. The authors review the increased debt burden for law graduates and the efforts of law schools to create Loan Repayment Assistance Programs, and identify policy issues for law schools to consider in light of the federal programs.  The authors also created a companion calculator that schools may use to project the costs of new or revised LRAP programs.

The passage of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act (CCRAA) should encourage law schools to evaluate their current LRAPs, consider design changes to ensure that LRAP benefits compliment Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Income-Based Repayment benefits, and recognize the importance of a continued commitment to preserving or enhancing LRAP funding.

-Heather

PERVERSE incentives and dysfunctional corporate bureaucracies within the country’s largest banks have devastated the lives of Washingtonians. Often, foreclosure hurts the investors who own the loans as well as the homeowners. As an attorney working on the front lines of the foreclosure crisis, I see the damage caused by the mortgage mess every day.

Take, as an example, an elderly couple I worked with recently. I will call them Harold and Edith. Harold took out a loan on his house to pay medical bills when his brother fell ill. His brother later passed away and Harold fell behind on the payments as he was no longer receiving help from his brother.

Harold and Edith diligently worked with their bank to obtain a loan modification, providing new sets of documents more than a dozen times. Eventually, the bank approved Harold and Edith for a modification under the federal government’s modification program. Unfortunately, their success was short-lived. Harold and Edith found out the following week that the bank had failed to stop the foreclosure sale.

In this case, the investor, the company that owns Harold’s loan, would have been better off had the servicing bank stopped the foreclosure sale. Harold and Edith receive Social Security, so they would have been likely to continue making their modified loan payments for years to come. Instead, the investor now owns a foreclosed home and will not be able to recover the loan principal after the foreclosure fees and realtor’s commission are paid.

There are around 6,000 new foreclosure filings in Washington state every month. Many of these filings happen in cases like this one, where the investor would be better off working with the homeowner rather than foreclosing. However, the servicing banks collect fees from servicing delinquent loans and from the foreclosure process. This means that the incentives of the servicing banks often run counter to the goals of the investors holding the loans and the goals of the homeowners.

Thirty years ago, borrowers would go to their bank, apply for a loan, and then work with the loan officer directly if they had trouble paying their mortgage. Today, because the bank servicing the loan is usually separate from the investor holding the loan, borrowers are unable to communicate with a bank that is acting in the investor’s interest.

Millions of homeowners owe more money than their home is worth. Many homeowners, like Harold and Edith, can make payments that will benefit the investor more than foreclosure would. However, modifying the loan in a way that benefits both the borrower and the investor would require the servicing bank to give up the fees they receive for servicing a delinquent loan. It would also require the servicing bank to spend time and resources reviewing and verifying income records and other documents. This is the step banks often failed to complete when the loan was first made.

The current incentive structure hurts homeowners, their communities, investors and the economy as a whole. In Harold and Edith’s case, I have threatened to file a lawsuit if the bank does not undo the foreclosure sale. The threat of a lawsuit may be enough to convince all the parties involved to reverse the damage caused by the servicing bank’s foreclosure. Unfortunately, many other homeowners in foreclosure will not be able to find an attorney willing to file a lawsuit on their behalf.

For the mortgage market to start functioning properly again, mortgage investors will need to ensure that the servicing banks act in their interest and banks will need to hold a greater percentage of the loans they originate and service in their own portfolio. However, until this happens, states attorneys general, legal-aid lawyers and private attorneys must protect homeowners’ interests by forcing banks to follow the foreclosure laws and abide by their agreements with the federal government.

These actions protect not only the homeowners and their communities, but they often result in a better outcome for the investor and the economy as a whole.

Four years ago, I applied to law school with the hope of someday having a career that would allow me to advocate for clients with psychiatric disabilities. The Equal Justice Works fellowship, along with my sponsors Pfizer Inc. and Sidley Austin LLP, are making my dream a reality.  In September 2010, after graduating law school and spending the summer studying for the Bar, I became a lawyer at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago (LAF).  My project focuses on direct representation of clients who face eviction or loss of their housing subsidy for reasons that stem from a disability.

Before starting my project, I expected the biggest challenges my clients and I would face would come from obstinate landlords who had their minds set on evicting my clients, rather than accommodating them as the Fair Housing Act requires.  To be sure, I have encountered such landlords; however, many of my clients have landlords who have been patient with us while we’ve wrestled with obstacles from unexpected sources, including the housing authorities that administer the housing subsidies that many of my clients receive, and our clients’ own medical providers.

In my first weeks representing low-income clients with disabilities, I saw firsthand that neutral housing authority policies have the potential to negatively impact my clients’ abilities to maintain their housing.   Prior to joining LAF, I did not realize how easy it can be for a client to lose the housing subsidy that keeps a roof over her head.  On paper, housing authorities have good intentions for ensuring access to people with disabilities, but, in practice, they have many rigid rules and short, inflexible deadlines that form unintended barriers to people with learning disabilities, mobility issues, or unexpected medical emergencies.  A part of my job has been to make the housing authorities’ policies yield to the needs of our clients, in order to neutralize the negative impact that these policies have on clients with disabilities.

Additionally, a large part of my project is working with medical and mental health service providers to determine how service providers and lawyers can best work together to help our clients obtain the reasonable accommodations they need to stay in their housing.  In LAF’s experience, service providers have been hesitant to work with lawyers.  Service providers face many competing demands for their time, and, therefore, the fear of being summoned to court can make providers reluctant to deal with lawyers.  Upon beginning my project, I have experienced unresponsive service providers, but, overwhelmingly, my interactions with medical and mental health service providers have been constructive.  During my first month at LAF, I met a dynamic group of social workers who work at legal service organizations like LAF, and, from there, I have made key partners at service providers across Chicago.  I am optimistic that I will be able to work with these allies in the medical community to create a model for how service providers and lawyers can partner to benefit our clients.

I am fortunate to have a job that I love and clients I believe in.  I am excited to join my clients in combating the barriers they experience in asserting their independence.

The data reflect continued hiring reductions and freezes.  Less than one quarter of responding civil legal services organizations, public defender offices, and nonprofit legal organizations reported hiring any new graduates.  Less than half of Federal government and local prosecutor offices hired new grads.  Also, about half of the responding public interest employers hired no new experienced attorneys during 2010.  Paid summer positions remain scarce, but at least public interest employers have not reduced the number of unpaid summer positions.

The report also details public interest employer’s hiring expectations for the immediate future and provides employer advice for job applicants competing in today’s market.

-Heather