A More Detailed Look at Legal Services by Older Americans Act Funded Providers

(Note: For a footnoted version of this article, please download the pdf issue of BIFOCAL Vol. 34, Issue 4.)

Background

Very limited data is available to assess the scope of legal assistance provided to older adults by programs receiving funding from Title III B of the Older Americans Act. Data collection at the national level tells us only the number of provider agreements, the number of in-house providers, the amount of funding, and the number of hours (units) of service. In 2010, the most recent year that data is available, providers reported 971,390 hours of services. No details are reported on the kinds of legal issues or level of service. The limited reporting system was designed to generously comply with lawyer–client confidentiality and legal ethics requirements, while still being part of a unified reporting system.

With this in mind, Commission staff took the initiative last year to request and collect more detailed information in order to provide a snapshot of services in states across the country. To encourage this voluntary provision of data, results are being shared in aggregate only, and state-by-state data has not been retained. While the results below may not reflect a national picture of Older Americans Act legal services, they do provide an interesting snapshot.

Approach

To get a better look at the scope of legal issues and level of services, Commission staff, with assistance from law student researchers from Stetson College of Law in Gulfport, FL, put out a request for additional statewide data in Legal Service Corporation (LSC) Case Service Report format. To encourage volunteer submissions, programs were asked to report on the most recent 12-month period for which they could most easily provide data. Thus, some states reported on the 2011 calendar year, while others reported on a 12-month period that spanned 2011–2012. Because legal needs and clients services can vary regionally within a state, only statewide data has been included, eliminating partial data that might be skewed to the interests of a particular locality. The data collected was from cases that would be reported as Older Americans Act (OAA) services, without regard to actual funding used to serve the client. For some providers, this included every client age 60 and older, others reported cases funded with OAA monies. States report a nearly dollar-for-dollar match on OAA legal services funding, some of this is programs reporting a match of eligible cases, served beyond the scope of available OAA funding. The request, sent out to about 25 states, generated submission of complete statewide data from eight jurisdictions: DC, KS, NE, MI, ND, WY, AK, and NM.

Results

Data was reported as Legal Service Corporation problem codes in the following broad categories: consumer, education, employment, family, juvenile, health, housing, income, individual rights, and miscellaneous (including estates and advance directives). The table below gives an overview of the code breakdown while also highlighting subcategory standouts.

The distribution of issues is largely as would be expected for clients age 60 and older. Nearly 1 in 5 cases was in consumer law; within this, collection cases were about half of the reported cases. This is as expected in the prevailing economic climate. A small number of cases fall into three categories: education, employment, and juvenile, this is as expected based on the target client. In family law, the majority of the cases are split between divorce and guardianships. In health care, Medicaid accounts for just over half of the cases with the remaining cases well distributed among the categories. Housing is dominated by homeownership (not foreclosure) and private landlord tenant issues. Issues in income are evenly spread with the highest numbers being in Social Security, Social Security Disability, and Supplemental Security Income. LSC reporting puts wills and estates and advance directives in the miscellaneous category. The miscellaneous category received one-third of services with 14.61% total services being for wills and estates and 12.72% for advance directives. A surprising 8.52% of cases did not report the legal issue involved. More detail on the data can be found below.

Older Americans Act Legal Services Data Collected in 2012 from DC, KS, NE, MI, ND, WY, AK, and NM in Legal Service Corporation Case Service Report format by Problem or Issue Codes