Far more needed to fully fund civil legal services, court officials say
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Chief Judge Rowan Wilson led a panel of the court’s top judges to learn more about the state of civil legal services last week. Photo via NYSBA
By Jacob Kaye
Top court officials throughout the state gathered in Albany last week to hear from attorneys, judges and everyday New Yorkers about the state of civil legal services in New York.
Chief Judge Rowan Wilson led the panel, featuring Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas, Presiding Justices Hector LaSalle, Dianne Renwick and Gerald Whalen, Appellate Division Justice Christine Clark and New York State Bar Association President Richard Lewis, tasked with assessing the needs of the civil legal services industry in the state.
Taken together, the testimonies of around a dozen people painted a picture of a resource-strapped system in need of major improvements.
The tenor of the testimony given during the hearing likely was not new to Wilson, who was leading the annual hearing for the first time last week after being appointed to serve in the top judicial role earlier this year.
Wilson previously served as a member of the court system’s Access to Justice Commision, which hosts the annual hearing.
The chief judge said that through the years, he came to believe that New York’s commitment to civil legal services is unmatched by any other state, but that doesn't mean more needs to be done.
“I can report that no other state comes close to New York's commitment [but] I can also report that New York’s commitment falls far short of any conceivable measure of need,” Wilson said at the start of the hearing.
According to the commission, the court system and state need to provide an additional $1 billion annually to civil legal service attorneys providing representation to clients in eviction, consumer debt, child support and disability benefits cases.
“Various studies document the magnitude of the need and the tremendous deficit faced by unrepresented litigants, and the social consequences that result when better outcomes are available to represented litigants are unavailable to unrepresented litigants,” the chief judge said.
Those giving testimony said that civil legal services are being unmet in various courts throughout the state. Tenants facing eviction are struggling to find representation through the city’s Right to Shelter program, which has largely been unable to meet the demands seen in the city’s Housing Courts. Children and indigent clients in Family Courts are similarly finding it difficult to be connected with attorneys as 18-B panels struggle with attorney retention.
Though issues can be seen throughout the state, Albany County Supervising Family Court Judge Richard Rivera said during the hearing that the Capital Region in particular is “in desperate need of lawyers in Family Court.”
After two decades without a raise and several lawsuits brought against the state, 18-B attorneys finally saw a raise this year, which was built into the state’s budget. Rivera celebrated the raises, which vary for attorneys working in New York City and those working outside of it, but added that the raise and a cost of living increase need to be written into law.
The chief judge told Rivera that “Judge Zayas and I agree that Family Court is our priority,” repeating a commitment the top judge and the chief administrative judge have made since taking office earlier this year.
At the center of the four-hour hearing was testimony from a number of New Yorkers who benefited from representation from a civil legal services provider.
Among them was Vernell Robinson, the vice president of the Board of Residents’ Council at Carleton Manor, a New York City Housing Authority complex in Arverne.
In 2021, residents at the Queens NYCHA complex lost their access to heat and hot water, just as the weather began to cool.
“It became unbearable,” Robinson told the panel.
The issue persisted for months. Despite demands made by the residents to fix the issues, NYCHA didn’t act.
In December 2021, two months after the outages began, Robinson and over 100 other residents in Carleton Manor attempted to sue NYCHA in Queens Housing Court. However, the court’s clerk rejected their filing.
“Before we had a lawyer, the court didn't help us at all,” Robinson said.
Eventually, their case was taken up by an attorney from Legal Services NYC. As the case was making its way through Queens Housing Court, NYCHA began to restore service to a majority of the units in the complex. But a number of units remained with hot water.
“After months of negotiations, countless court appearances, press and a contempt motion…regarding the conditions in the apartments, NYCHA finally made renovations and agreed, thanks to our amazing lawyer, to a 25 percent rent abatement,” Robinson said.
“We're extremely happy with the results of our case,” she added. “You might have no idea what it's like to be unable to take a hot shower for months at a time, but it's really hard and degrading. We would not have been able to live in decency without our attorney and other legal services staff.”
