Civil legal aid attorney Molly Rockett sees New Yorkers when they are at their lowest ebb. Some are dealing with crushing debt. Some are fleeing violent partners. Others are losing their homes. Some are facing all three.
Rockett is a staff attorney who specializes in housing for the nonprofit Manhattan Legal Services, which is part of Legal Services NYC, an organization that provides free civil legal representation. Since the state lifted an eviction moratorium in 2022, she’s seen a flood of housing cases, and according to her, there are not nearly enough lawyers to meet demand.
“Burnout has been off the charts,” she says. “You’re seeing horrible tragedies happen to people who are losing their homes. Combined with the chronic underfunding for a lot of legal aid attorneys, it feels like we’re trying to mop up the ocean.”
The problem is not unique to the Big Apple. As the 2023 ABA Profile of the Legal Profession reveals, civil legal aid lawyers are in short supply across the United States.
According to the 142-page report, even though there are 1.3 million lawyers in the U.S., nationwide there are still only 10,000 paid civil legal aid lawyers, or about three for every 10,000 people in poverty. Lawyers like Rockett may be overwhelmed with cases, but there are 7.2 paid legal aid lawyers per 10,000 people in poverty in New York, more than any other state, according to the ABA’s report. Meanwhile, Mississippi and South Carolina sit at the bottom of the pile with just a little over 1.1 paid lawyers per 10,000 people in poverty.
Ronald S. Flagg says the situation is dire. He is president of the Legal Services Corp., a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit founded in 1974 after President Richard M. Nixon signed the law creating the group. It is the largest funder of civil legal services for low-income people in the country.
A report Flagg’s group published in 2022 found that low-income Americans had little or no help with 92% of their civil legal needs. Flagg says the consequences can be life-altering for people fighting to keep veterans benefits or health care, dealing with domestic violence and divorce, or staving off foreclosure or eviction.
“The crisis is even worse in rural areas, where the availability of civil legal aid is more difficult to provide just because of the geography,” he says.
Where the lawyers aren't
The Profile of the Legal Profession draws on data from Flagg’s group, which provided the ABA with a list of every organization it funds. In addition, the researchers contacted a list of 800 organizations providing legal aid services that came from other sources, including the National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham University School of Law and the ABA Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defense, counting every paid civil legal aid lawyer in the United States they could find.
The findings reveal a lot about the current state of civil legal aid in the U.S. To illustrate, the report found that in Carson City, Nevada, a city of approximately 60,000 people, there is just one legal aid lawyer. Statewide, there is a 12.6% poverty rate and 2.8 legal aid lawyers for every 10,000 people living in poverty.
The only civil legal aid lawyer in Carson City is Alexandra Rawlings, according to the ABA. She is the directing attorney of farmworker and Indian law projects at Nevada Legal Services. She works mostly in the tribal courts—and sometimes in the state and federal courts—handling claims when a parent is alleged to be unable or unfit to look after a child, as well as eviction, adult guardianship and debt cases.
After college, Rawlings worked as a paralegal and decided to pursue a law degree, enrolling in Harvard Law School. Other students at the school weren’t exactly clamoring to work in civil legal aid, she observes.
But Rawlings, who is Native Hawaiian, says she was drawn to the work because of her frustrations with the court system after filing a domestic violence protection order against a former partner. She adds that when she was growing up, she was acutely aware of how the system was stacked against Indigenous people.
“It was frustrating being one of those people that was impacted by the legal system [and] seeing people that I cared about negatively impacted but not being in a position to change it,” Rawlings says.
There are many challenges facing lawyers like Rawlings. But one thing she’s noticed is how long some people wait before they seek help. They may have already received a summons and have a court hearing coming up in a matter of hours or days when they come, she says.
Rawlings says part of the problem is that people don’t know how the legal system works or how to even get started. They’re “just hoping that if they ignore it, it’ll go away,” she says.
Jeniece Jones, executive director of the Public Justice Center, a statewide Maryland civil legal service provider, spoke at an ABA webinar in November to mark the release of the Profile of the Legal Profession.
She said some clients she works with have had bad experiences with the courts or justice system.
“Folks get a lot of paperwork—a third, fourth, fifth notice—and they’re not even sure what they’re looking at,” Jones said. “They’re not sure who it’s safe to show it to. Are they going to be able to get child care to go to the court to talk to someone about it? Are they going to get time off from their job without having to take a loss of income to address it?”
Going it alone can be overwhelming, as Lorraine Rembert can attest. Rembert was a Legal Services NYC client who lives in an affordable housing development called St. Philip’s on the Park in New York City.
Before the organization took on her case, Rembert had to navigate the court system by herself after her subsidy on her apartment was canceled because of an alleged failure to recertify for Section 8 subsidized housing qualification, according to her lawyer, Steven Heller.
When the building managers started to charge her full market rent, Rembert couldn’t pay and faced a nonpayment case in housing court. She represented herself before connecting with Legal Services NYC in fall 2018.
“I hated entering into the court because I felt that I was going to hear bad news. It just was scary. A lot of times, I just cried. I didn’t know if I was going to lose my apartment after being here for so many years,” she says.
The case was eventually settled for $17,000, Rembert’s subsidy was reinstated and the settlement was satisfied through a rent arrears grant from New York City, Heller says.
“I had no job. I had no income,” Rembert says. “Without legal help, I wouldn’t be [in the apartment] now.”
On top of that, there can be geographical challenges. Someone seeking help may have to travel for hours and miles to find the nearest legal aid lawyer, and the obstacles are sometimes insurmountable.
According to the ABA report, luring lawyers to small towns and rural counties is a perennial problem. In metropolitan areas, there is an average of 3.5 paid civil legal aid lawyers for every 100,000 people. There are only 1.6 paid civil legal aid attorneys for every 100,000 people in nonmetropolitan areas.
Amanda Caldwell is the managing attorney of the Yuma office of Community Legal Services of Arizona. She is the only paid civil legal aid lawyer in Yuma, a farming community in southwest Arizona in the Sonoran Desert, about three hours west of Phoenix and three hours east of San Diego. Although Yuma is home to two military bases and has a population of almost 100,000 people, she says it’s been a challenge finding lawyers to move there.
As of late January, her office hadn’t been able to fill one job in six months. The other position has been open for more than a year.
“It’s tougher to recruit attorneys to live in an area that they may not be familiar with,” she says. “The salaries that we’re able to offer are limited. That can have an impact on hiring.”
Indeed, the profile suggests legal aid lawyers are among the lowest-paid attorneys in the U.S. Entry-level legal aid lawyers earned a median salary of $57,500 a year in 2022, according to a National Association for Law Placement survey cited in the report.
The median salary for those who have worked in legal aid for between 11 and 15 years is $78,500 per year. That’s half the average nationwide salary for lawyers. They earned $163,770 (excluding law firm partner and shareholder profits) on average in 2022, says the report, citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Even if a lawyer does take a position at a legal aid organization, the reality of everyday living makes retaining them a challenge. In major metropolitan areas like New York City, where the cost of living is so high, continuing to work in legal aid can be akin to a pipe dream.
“When you have a law degree and you have a family [and] you have student loans, the financial pressure on you can make it impossible to stay in a job like legal aid,” Rockett says. “Compensating legal aid attorneys commensurate with the critical services that we provide is going to lead to more retention.”