Baltimore Sun quotes Legal Aid expert

After a mother stabbed her 8-month-old daughter at a social services office, The Sun interviewed Maryland Legal Aid chief attorney Joan Little, who runs the Child Advocacy Unit in Baltimore.

The nonfatal assault on the foster child  raised questions about safety issues “where tense, emotional meetings between parents and their estranged children are routine,” wrote reporter Peter Hermann.

“‘These are difficult situations,’ said Little, an attorney whose staff represents children in welfare and neglect cases. ‘We want to promote family visits. It is so tough when a security situation like this happens.

“‘Normally, everyone would be supporting more contact between children and parents, and not restrained contact.’ The idea, she added, is for the ‘mother-baby visit to be personal enough that it can support the bonding that is supposed to be happening.

“Little, whose attorneys visit the East Biddle Street building at least once a week, said it would be counterproductive for a security guard to attend each meeting,” Hermann wrote. “But she would support it when violence is a part of a parent’s history.

“Little said she feels safe in the building. She said there is a metal detector at the entrance, and she has seen guards going through purses and checking IDs, though not every time.

“‘It’s not like airport security . . . ‘ she said. ‘I don’t feel that it’s a dangerous environment. But certainly we’re dealing with parents who have significant mental health problems, and significant drug problems. On any given day, anything can happen.’”

To read the entire article (behind a pay wall), click here.

Voice of America looks at right to counsel in civil legal cases

A Voice of America story about the right to counsel in civil legal cases–and the lack of that right in the U.S.–focused on Maryland Legal Aid clients.

From the article:

Each year, millions of non-criminal cases in the United States are heard in civil court – cases involving child custody battles, housing evictions and other issues, including the case of Juliana Holmes in Baltimore, Maryland. Holmes’ estranged husband took away their three children when she was living in another state – and she could not afford a lawyer to get them back.

“He just took them out of the state of North Carolina so I moved here to follow my kids,” said Holmes.

Holmes eventually got joint custody of her children with the help of a private organization called Maryland Legal Aid, which provided her with a lawyer at no cost.

Trish Cochran was her attorney. She’s among a growing number of lawyers and judges who think the right to an attorney, for critical civil cases such as these, should be a basic legal right in the United States. Right now, it is not.

“People have a constitutional right to their children; a right to have just some place to live; to have access to the resources that are available. It’s just that people don’t always have the savvy [knowledge] to get the resources that are there for them,” said Cochran.

To read the entire article and watch the video, click here.

Social workers team up with Legal Aid lawyers

When clients come to Maryland Legal Aid, they’re often desperate. In addition to a pressing legal problem, they’re grappling with other issues that drive their lives into a crisis — no money, no housing or no medical care. Sometimes all of the above.

You could say they need a social worker almost as badly as a lawyer.

And you’d be right.

That’s why Legal Aid and the University of Maryland School of Social Work created a program that integrates first-year graduate social work students into the nonprofit law firm’s practice in downtown Baltimore.

“Clients come to us with a host of problems — the presenting legal problem, plus community-based needs,” said Cornelia Bright Gordon, chief attorney of Legal Aid’s administrative law and intake units. “For example, many people have barriers, such as mental health issues, that may interfere with the success of the legal problem. They need access to services to make the legal work stick.

“Since Legal Aid is the law firm of last resort, our clients are in true crisis,” Bright Gordon said. “They come in with threats of immediate eviction, no money or food in the house, and some are desperately ill, with no access to medical services and no insurance.”

The three-year-old project helps stabilize clients and bring their lives back to a state of equilibrium. “It’s a collaborative process between a lawyer and a trained social worker with hands-on, clinical therapeutic experience who is supervising four interns,” she said.

To read the entire Daily Record column, click here.

Foster child’s best interest is “transcedent,” top court rules

The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that the rights of a child are “transcendent” in termination of parental rights cases, ending confusion among judges about whether the rights of the child or the parent are paramount, the Daily Record reported.

The state’s highest court ruled that a lower court erroneously focused on the mother’s parental rights rather than those of her daughter, “who was flourishing in the care of foster parents who want to adopt her,” the article said.

“This case really restated in a resounding way that the standard is the best interest of the child and the court should not be looking through the lens of the parents,” said Joan Little, chief attorney of Legal Aid Bureau Inc.’s child advocacy unit in Baltimore. Little argued the case, In re: Ta’Niya C., before the Court of Appeals.

To read the article, click here.

Pilot self-help program debuts in district court

Anne Arundel County residents are flocking to the Glen Burnie District Court Self-Help Center to get free help to represent themselves in court, the Baltimore Sun reported this morning. “Staffed by members of the Legal Aid Bureau, the pilot program is aimed at the meat-and-potatoes civil cases–small claims, landlord-tenant disputes, creditor-debtor issues and protective orders–that can clog the court system and lead to frustration when people try to handle the cases themselves,” the article said.

“Open since December, the four-person center has assisted more than 1,850 people–the monthly number reached a high of 543 in June, said supervising attorney Sarah Coffey Frush,” the article continued. “The center averaged fewer than 10 daily visitors in the first three months. But as word spread, numbers have climbed.”

The read the report, click here.

Multi-service center for poor to expand in Howard

A center for helping low-income residents of Howard County will expand this summer, the Howard County Times reported yesterday. The North Laurel-Savage Multi-Service Center, which provides a wide range of human service programs, will nearly double the number of clients served when it relocates in July. Maryland Legal Aid is one of the programs that helped about 1,900 families and individuals at the center last year.  “The idea is ‘one-stop shopping’ to streamline services to reduce the number of contacts and visits to various service providers,” said Denise McCain, Legal Aid’s director of program development and compliance.  “The average client has more than one issue and generally needs a multitude of services.” To read the article, click here.

Maryland Legal Aid expands online custody forms interview

Two online tools unveiled by Maryland Legal Aid last year to help a parent seeking custody are now more powerful. Pro se (self-help) litigants can now file answers to complaints, motions for modification of custody and visitation, petitions for contempt, and answers to these types of motions and petitions.

The Child Custody and Visitation Interview is a website that interactively helps clients complete and fill out forms required by the circuit court to begin a custody proceeding—an online “automated custody interview.”

Unveiled last year, now the website is accessible to even more Maryland residents because it contains powerful tools that can by used by both plaintiffs and defendants in custody matters.

“Both parties can file the forms they need to tell the court their side of the story about the custody matter,” said Legal Aid’s Katherine Jones. “The new interactive interview walks the party through the process; answering questions they might have about how to complete the blanks on the forms. Now, no one should feel like the court isn’t listening to them just because they don’t have a lawyer.”

The new interview can be found linked from the Peoples Law Library.

Maryland Legal Aid is among an increasing number of pioneering legal aid organizations, pro bono programs, and courts using online document assembly to increase and improve access to the courts. This growing movement is made possible by the National Document Assembly Project of Pro Bono Net, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing access to justice. The NDAP allows self-represented litigants and pro bono and legal aid attorneys to quickly and easily draft complete legal documents such as requests for orders of protection and answers to eviction complaints, by answering questions via an easy-to-use online interface. This initiative is in use in 26 states and generated 111,000 documents in 2008.

The new online tools were developed by Legal Aid, the Maryland Legal Assistance Network, the Chicago-Kent College of Law Center for Access to Justice & Technology, Capstone Practice Systems, Inc., LexisNexis, and the Legal Services Corporation.

The website can be accessed at http://www.peoples-law.org (in the Family Law section under “Need Help with Maryland Custody Forms?”). A separate advocate-specific website, updated to include the additional forms (as well as the new interview questions needed for those new forms), is available at http://www.mdjustice.org (in the Children and the Law Resource Center; click on New Automated Maryland Custody Forms).

The latest version of Adobe Flash is required to access the Child Custody and Visitation Interview.  Most Maryland public libraries allow printing from public computers for a nominal fee.

For more information, call Katherine J. Jones at 443-604-4729, David Demski at 410-451-2892, or  Joe Surkiewicz 410-951-7683.

MS Patient Gets Reprieve from Nursing Home

Maryland Legal Aid staff attorney Anne Haffner

A nursing home resident with multiple sclerosis and threatened with involuntary discharge because of an outstanding bill will be allowed to stay, Baltimore’s WBAL-TV reported on Friday.  Melanie Conaway’s attorney, Maryland Legal Aid staff attorney Anne Haffner, successfully negotiated an agreement with the facility, Future Care Northpoint in Dundalk.  “We were prepared to go into a hearing and lose the hearing and be faced with a difficult decision about where Mrs. Conaway was going to be living,”  Haffner told WBAL investigative reporter Barry Simms.

But under a last-minute settlement, Conaway will remain at the nursing home.  “She said she was just so happy she would be able to stay and get her medical needs met at this nursing home,” Haffner said in the news segment. “The settlement agreement allows Mrs. Conaway to stay while we pursue a judgment against her ex-husband.”

The whole dispute focused on a $300 a month payment–alimony Conaway is supposed to receive from a divorce settlement in Tennessee. The funds are considered income and must be used for her nursing home stay, Simms reported.

Custody web tool gets ink

The new Child Custody and Visitation Interview website, unveiled last week, was the featured in The Daily Record (“Web tool walks users through forms for custody and visitation,” Sept. 30.). “What it does is walk [the user] through a simple set of questions,” Manager of IT Applications Dave Demski. “We have made it about as simple as it can be, but still useful.”

Read the article here.

Legal Aid unveils new automated custody interview for parents seeking custody

Two new online tools developed by Maryland Legal Aid will make access to justice easier for a parent seeking an initial custody order for his or her children and for attorneys seeking to help clients complete court-required forms for filing an initial custody complaint.

The Child Custody and Visitation Interview is a website that interactively helps clients complete and fill out forms required by the circuit court to begin a custody proceeding—an online “automated custody interview.”

“Imagine you are a mother with two young children,” said Katherine Jones, Legal Aid’s assistant director of IT for law practice. “You just left your husband, and moved in with your mother. Your husband is threatening to take the children from you and move to Florida. What do you do?”

Before: If you make it to the courthouse before it closes, the clerk points you to a forms bank to select the forms you need to complete, sign, and return to the clerk—and there are over 30 documents to choose from.

“You take one of each, and realize that it is going to take a long time to complete all of the forms, writing the same information over and over again on each form,” Jones said. “And do you really need all of those forms? And what do they mean?”

After: With the new, easy-to-use online tool (which can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet and a printer), access to justice is easier for this client, as well as anyone else seeking an initial custody order.

“When a client clicks on the link, an ‘avatar’ of a woman standing on a road leading to a courthouse invites the client to begin the process of seeking custody, visitation, or child support,” Jones said. “Links, denoted by bold orange type, or buttons offering additional information, answer questions a client might have about legal terms, or about what information is being requested as the client proceeds through the interview.”

Because the client is asked a series of questions about the facts of the case, she should be prepared with the full names, addresses, and birthdates of all possible parties to a case, as well as detailed information about her own financial situation before she accesses the website.

“However, if a client completes the interview, answering all of the questions asked, at the end of the interview the client has the option to preview, and then print, the court forms the program has chosen for them based on the information provided,” Jones said. “The client can then sign and take these court-approved forms to the clerk’s office to file to begin her custody case.”

The new website for advocates, Automated Documents Online, allows an attorney to conduct a full interview with any client seeking custody.

The website prompts the attorney to ask for specific information, but allows the attorney to formulate and provide whatever advice or information the client requests as the interview progresses. As specific information is provided on the website, it chooses which documents the client needs to file, and uses the information supplied to fill in the spaces on the appropriate court form.

When the attorney has asked all of the questions from the website interview, the attorney can print out the documents to review with the client, have the client sign the forms where necessary, and send the client with the forms to the clerk’s office to file the forms and begin the court case.

The new online tools were developed by Legal Aid, the Maryland Legal Assistance Network, the Chicago-Kent College of Law Center for Access to Justice & Technology, Capstone Practice Systems, Inc., and the Legal Services Corp. The two websites can be accessed at the Peoples Law Library (in the Family Law section under “Need Help with Maryland Custody Forms?”). The advocate specific site is available at MDJustice.org (in the Children and the Law Resource Center; click on New Automated Maryland Custody Forms).

The latest version of Adobe Flash is required to access the Child Custody and Visitation Interview. Most Maryland public libraries allow printing from public computers for a nominal fee.

For more information, call Katherine J. Jones at 443-604-4729; David Demski at 410-451-2892; or Joe Surkiewicz 410-951-7683.