Budget cut hits region’s legal aid groups

A 14-percent budget cut the federal Legal Services Corp. has D.C.-area legal aid programs scrambling, the Washington Post reported last week.

“Neighborhood Legal Services Program in the District, Legal Services of Northern Virginia and Maryland Legal Aid are consolidating offices and jobs, freezing salaries and more aggressively pursuing private funding and partnerships with law schools to share resources and manpower,” the article said.

“Maryland Legal Aid, the largest civil legal services provider in the region with about 300 employees in 12 offices throughout the state, has not laid off any staff and does not plan to dismiss any staff in 2012, said executive director Wilhelm Joseph, Jr.,” the article continued.

“To compensate for a 15 percent cut ($670,000 less) in LSC funding — paired with a 5 percent cut ($550,000 less) in funding from Maryland Legal Services Corp., the state counterpart to LSC — the nonprofit is looking to replace retiring staff with lower-paid new hires, tighten up travel and other expenses, and intensify fundraising campaigns aimed at law firms, foundations and individual donors.”

To read the article, click here.

Staff reductions hit legal aid programs nationally

The nonprofit programs funded by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) to deliver civil legal assistance to low-income Americans are implementing layoffs and staff reductions because of budget constraints, a survey conducted by LSC found.

According to the survey, LSC-funded programs anticipate laying off 393 employees, including 163 attorneys, in 2012.  The reductions continue a staffing downturn that began about a year ago. In December 2010, LSC-funded programs employed 4,351 attorneys, 1,614 paralegals and 3,094 support staff. During 2011, LSC programs reduced their staffing by 833 positions through layoffs and attrition. They now anticipate a new round of layoffs this year, bringing the staffing loss to 1,226 full-time personnel.

The survey was conducted in late December and early January, and 132 of the 135 nonprofit legal aid programs funded by LSC responded.

Maryland Legal Aid, one of those LSC-funded programs, has not implemented layoffs or closed offices.

To read the entire press release, click here.

More seek Legal Aid in hard times

From yesterday’s Washington Post: As Maryland Legal Aid celebrates its centennial this year, the national housing crisis, which has hit suburban Washington hard, is making the work it does even more vital.

At the same time, the agency, like similar organizations across the country, is grappling with funding cuts that make it harder to help the increasing number of people in need of assistance in civil cases.

For example, Prince George’s, the second-most-populous jurisdiction in the state, has endured more foreclosures than any other in Maryland. And the economic downturn has brought Legal Aid prospective clients that the organization would not have seen 10 years ago.

“I review a lot of the intakes, and we’re getting people from Potomac calling us,” [said Legal Aid supervising attorney Teresa Cooke]. “But these individuals are now actually financially eligible for our services.”

To read the article, click here.

Legal Aid adjusts to funding cuts

Maryland Legal Aid, the state’s primary provider of civil legal help to the poor, will try to avoid reducing its services in the wake of cuts to federal funding, the Montgomery Gazette reported.

Legal Aid will look at “any cost-saving measure short of affecting our capacity to serve clients,” said Shawn Boehringer, the nonprofit’s chief counsel. Last month, Congress cut funding to the Legal Services Corp., a major Legal Aid funder, by $56 million, which will translate into a reduction of more than $650,000 to the Maryland program.

To read the article, click here.

House proposal would cut civil legal aid by $104 million

Funding for the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) would be cut by 26 percent in Fiscal Year 2012 under a proposal announced by the House Appropriations Committee today. The Committee bill proposes a $300 million budget for LSC—rolling back LSC funding to a level not seen since 1999.

Basic field grants, which are currently provided to 136 nonprofit civil legal aid programs across the nation, would be cut to $274.4 million, a 27.5 percent reduction from current funding of $378.6 million.

LSC’s preliminary estimates show that about 235,000 low-income Americans eligible for civil legal assistance at LSC-funded programs would be turned away if the Committee proposal were enacted.

“The proposed cut would prove to be especially damaging to low-income persons whose health and safety are at risk—the elderly, the victims of domestic violence, the disabled, children, veterans and others—by denying them access to justice,” LSC President James J. Sandman said.

“At LSC programs, requests for assistance are increasing. The poverty population eligible for civil legal assistance has grown by 17 percent since 2008, to an all-time high of 63 million Americans. And funding from non-federal sources is decreasing. This is not the time to undercut the fundamental American commitment to equal justice for all,”  Sandman said.

To read the entire press release, click here.

Maryland Legal Aid is a grantee of LSC.

Law Day 2011

A statement from John G. Levi, board chairman of the Legal Services Corporation (a major funder of Maryland Legal Aid):

President Dwight D. Eisenhower celebrated our nation’s commitment to the rule of law in his inaugural 1958 proclamation designating May 1 as Law Day, calling on Americans to “vigilantly guard the great heritage of liberty, justice, and equality under law which our forefathers bequeathed to us.”

Sixteen years later, near the end of the Nixon Administration, Congress passed the Legal Services Corporation Act declaring that “there is a need to provide equal access to the system of justice in our Nation” and “to provide high quality legal assistance to those who would be otherwise unable to afford adequate legal counsel.”

Today, LSC is the nation’s single largest funder of civil legal assistance, and is at the center of access to justice efforts across our country. Through extraordinary public-private partnerships, LSC-funded programs help the elderly, victims of domestic violence, veterans, disabled individuals and others confronting serious civil legal matters.

Much work remains to be done if our nation is to fulfill its promise of equal justice for all Americans. Local legal aid offices are swamped with requests for assistance. State and local courts—especially housing and family courts—are overwhelmed with low-income unrepresented individuals. LSC-funded programs need increased federal and state funding in order to keep our national promise.

As we observe Law Day, we must heed President Eisenhower’s call to never lose sight of our primary responsibility—to uphold our nation’s core values. Our generation has its own responsibility to the next generation to renew and strengthen those values given to it by preceding generations. We can never take our founding values of “liberty, justice and equality under law” for granted.

Congress to cut $15.8 million for legal aid

The fiscal year 2011 budget for the federal  Legal Services Corporation  would be cut by $15.8 million, reducing funds for civil legal assistance to low-income Americans, according to legislation announced today. LSC is a funder of Maryland Legal Aid.

LSC received $420 million in funding for FY 2010, and the funding bill for 2011 would provide $404.2 million, a reduction of 3.8 percent. The legislation, the result of a negotiated agreement between the Congress and the White House to avoid a government shutdown, is scheduled for votes in the House and Senate this week.

“Every dollar provided for civil legal assistance helps low-income individuals gain access to our justice system. We are grateful that funding cuts will not be as deep as initially proposed, and we look forward to working with the Congress on Fiscal Year 2012 funding to provide even greater access to justice for the growing number of low-income Americans in need of civil legal assistance,” LSC Board Chairman John G. Levi said.

Legal Services Corp. board announces pro bono task force

The Legal Services Corporation board of directors is launching a Pro Bono Task Force to develop additional resources to help low-income Americans facing foreclosure, domestic violence and other serious civil legal problems.
The new Task Force was announced yesterday during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on LSC’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget request.

The Task Force will be chaired by LSC Board members Martha Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School, and Harry J.F. Korrell III, a partner in the Seattle office of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP.

“Pro bono and volunteer services are critical to the efforts by LSC-funded programs to meet the civil legal needs of low-income Americans,” LSC Board Chairman John G. Levi said. “The Task Force will explore how LSC-funded programs can better coordinate, use and deploy pro bono. It also will look at what more can be done, on a national level by LSC and the Board, to encourage and expand pro bono.”

“We want to put a spotlight on the importance of additional pro bono and private attorney involvement in LSC programs, and we are grateful that in this effort we have the interest and support of Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia and others on Capitol Hill,” Mr. Levi said.

LSC is a funder of Maryland Legal Aid. For more information, click here.

Justice in Jeopardy

American Bar Association President Stephen Zack blogs in The Hill about pending cuts to the Legal Services Corp.:

The words “equal justice under law” are so fundamental to our culture they’re carved in stone above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court.  But today, the opportunity to access justice in our courts is becoming as much a luxury as a Louis Vuitton bag.

Funding of the justice system is an uneven patchwork that leads to unequal delivery of justice and is highly vulnerable during hard economic times. Legal aid to the poor, already anemic, is threatened with huge new federal cuts. And the justice gap is trickling up to the middle class and small business.

The problems outlined at the first national hearing of the ABA Task Force on the Preservation of the Justice System sounded like a report from a third world country. The state court funding crisis stretches coast to coast. There are courts begging for pens because their office supply budget is so low. Other courts are demanding that filers bring their own paper.

Some are moving so slowly on basic, important matters like child custody, that the child becomes an adult before the case is resolved. The problem affects every region, every size state, and it doesn’t matter if the state is red or blue. Most state courts are funded at less than two percent of the entire state budget. Less than two percent for what the founders insisted be a third, co-equal branch of government.

This is appalling. And access to justice will worsen if Congress slashes its funding of Legal Services Corporation, the go-to provider of civil legal help for poor and working class Americans. Right now, proposals are on the table to cut legal aid for the rest of this year by $70 million. These are people dealing with issues like eviction, domestic violence, and unpaid child support.

Legal aid providers tell us that many of their clients are people they’ve never seen before–the new poor, the newly struggling due to long-term unemployment. Legal aid lawyers stand between these people and total financial and legal disaster. We need Congress to act now and make it clear that legal aid is simply off limits in this economy.

To read the entire article, click here.

Legal Aid featured on Midday with Dan Rodricks

Maryland Legal Aid Chief Counsel Shawn Boehringer was a guest on today’s Midday talk radio show, hosted by Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks on WYPR-FM. The topic was proposed funding cuts to the Legal Services Corporation now pending in Congress.

“We’re seeing triple the number of unemployment cases in most of our offices,” said Boehringer when asked if the number of clients coming to Legal Aid is up. “The proposed cut to LSC would reduce our funding by $774,000, which would pay the salaries of 12 attorneys. And the cut would come at a time when we’ve lost local funding–Baltimore City was $250,000 a year and it’s proposing cutting to zero. And we’ve lost significant amounts in Anne Arundel and Harford counties.”