LEGAL SERVICES NYC

LSNYC's goals are to abolish poverty in NYC; and to achieve equal opportunity, and racial, social, and economic justice for all New Yorkers.

Our strategies for making this happen involve advocacy on a number of levels.

We advocate for low-income individuals who are facing catastrophe. Our work is accomplished through specialized practice units -- such as housing, immigration, and LGBTQ -- that deliver expert, high-quality and sophisticated legal services. An example is providing legal representation for a low-income family to prevent them from having to take refuge in a homeless shelter because their landlord is forcing them out of a building in a gentrifying area.

We address the systemic injustices that bring individual clients to us in the first place. This work often involves impact litigation that forces companies and government to make policy changes. In one case, we sued to ensure that employees were given unemployment benefits, In another, our litigation resulted in a city government agency being forced to change its policies regarding translation and interpretation services for tenants of government housing who do not speak English.

We educate people. Through our Justice Learning Center we educate attorneys, paralegals, and and others. We educate the general public in the communities we serve -- at our offices in all five boroughs of NYC and through partner CBOs. We also meet with tenant organizations and groups with special needs. We conduct "Know Your Rights" classes and training sessions on particular legal issues low-income people may be facing. We have clinics and tabling events in courts and other locations where potential clients and low-income people who need legal advice congregate.

We focus efforts on the following program areas:

--Preventing Homelessness and Preserving Housing: Our Housing Rights Project and Foreclosure Prevention programs prevent eviction, save homes, and preserve thousands of subsidized and rent-regulated units each year.

--Economic Empowerment and Income Security: We fight for income security for New York City's most economically disadvantaged families by advocating for unemployment insurance reform, tackling consumer scams, and helping those in need obtain critical state and federal benefits.

--Securing Access to Education and Healthcare: We ensure access to a high-quality education for all students, particularly those who are low-income and may have special needs. We protect students' right to an education by stopping inappropriate school disciplinary actions and challenging the policies behind them. Our health care advocacy helps vulnerable New Yorkers, including veterans and people with HIV, gain and keep public health insurance benefits and meet basic needs.

--Keeping Families and Communities Safe: We work tirelessly to secure safe environments and financial stability for survivors of domestic violence. We stabilize at-risk families by providing legal services and obtaining support services for them, including adjusting immigration status to put immigrant domestic violence survivors on the path to citizenship.

LSNYC is the largest provider of civil legal services in the country. Our 550 staff members help more than 110,000 people annually, and the effects of our work benefit many more.

Our staff work in our 17 full-time borough-based offices and dozens of part-time offices and community-based intake sites in low-income neighborhoods throughout the City. Each borough office is coordinated by a Project Director.

LSNYC’s Board of Directors includes 17 attorney members appointed by bar associations, 12 client-eligible members appointed by community groups and 4 at-large members. In addition, we have local borough boards and a pro bono associates board.

Our staff attorneys include many of the most experienced poverty lawyers in the City. We conduct program-wide legal work coordination, support, training, and oversight. Paralegals and social workers make our legal work more effective and efficient. We coordinate services across practice areas for especially vulnerable populations: our Veterans Justice Project, LGBTQ units and HIV/AIDS practices are examples.

All of our offices and all of our practice areas work closely with other legal providers, law schools, bar associations, courts, community- and client-run organizations, and government and social service agencies. The legal needs of low-income people are complex and challenging, and LSNYC makes a much greater impact when we coordinate with others to leverage resources.

We expand our reach by integrating a vibrant pro bono program into our work. We utilize law firms, corporations, law schools, and individual volunteers to serve clients and advance our mission. Pro bono volunteers help in three key ways: co-counseling on large cases; taking on special projects like research and brief writing; and direct representation of individual clients.

LSNYC operates the Justice Learning Center, the largest and most comprehensive poverty law Continuing Legal Education program in the country, to support the high-quality representation of all low-income New Yorkers. We generally present more than 150 in-person classes annually, which are attended by about 3,500 participants, including LSNYC staff, public interest attorneys and pro bono attorneys. Our faculty includes trainers from every major legal services program in NYC, the private bar, and many law schools including NYU, Columbia and CUNY. One of our primary collaborators is the Practising Law Institute (PLI). Our classes cover substantive law, practice skills, and ethics with a goal of preparing attorneys to provide the best possible civil legal services to low-income individuals. We are now moving rapidly into the arena of eLearning so that our educational content is more easily and rapidly accessible.

We are legal “first responders” when disasters disrupt the lives of low-income New Yorkers. Following Hurricane Sandy, for example, on the our advocates deployed by the dozens into affected communities to provide humanitarian and legal assistance.

Accomplishments:
In the 50 years since our founding, we have helped millions of New Yorkers and won numerous landmark cases that have made NYC a more livable place for low-income people. In 2018, our staff helped more than 110,000 low-income New Yorkers, worked with 2,000 pro bono volunteers who helped 5,200 people, secured $51,336,886 in cash benefits for clients, and saved NYC taxpayers $145,000,000.

Below are just a few examples of landmark achievements over the years since our founding:

- 1970: Goldberg v. Kelly -- SCOTUS articulated due process standards for termination of government benefits.
- 1980: Dopico v. Goldschmidt -- forced New York City to provide accessible public transportation to people with disabilities, including the kneeling buses we see today.
Late 1980s: partnered with City and advocates to create eviction prevention programs, keeping hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in their homes and laying the foundation for the Right to Counsel program.
- 1988: New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning v. Koch--led to new lead paint laws and a dramatic reduction in lead poisoning in NYC.
- Gonzalez v. MTA--required NYC and State to comply with Americans with Disabilities Act in its administration of Access-A-Ride.
- 2017 Padilla Torres v. City of New York -- challenged NYPD's refusal to provide language services for survivors of domestic violence, leading to improved language access practices.
- 2018: Martinez v. Lexington Gardens Associates--required landlord to provide a reasonable accommodation to a tenant with a disability, setting precedent in accessing accommodations for hundreds of other tenants.

What's next:
Expansion of our economic justice work is a focus in the coming years. We propose to represent more low-wage workers in a range of matters--including wage theft and employment discrimination--that the private bar is unable or unwilling to take due to inadequate attorneys’ fees. We also propose to continue and expand our Community Economic Development (CED) work.

Changes in immigration policy at the federal level have resulted in tremendous increases in the numbers of people coming to our offices seeking legal assistance and guidance. Our work includes helping people to secure naturalization, work authorization, adjustment of status, and renewal of green cards. We represent immigrants in asylum and removal cases. In addition, LSNYC continues to assist immigrant crime victims and battered immigrants escape abuse, obtain safety, and achieve self-sufficiency through U- and T-visa applications and Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) self-petitions and battered spouse waivers. Recently, Legal Services Corporation (LSC) regulations were expanded to allow for the representation of immigrants who suffered abuse outside the United States. This change allows us to represent unaccompanied minor children in applying for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, asylum, and for other forms of immigration relief.