Family Legal Care

Family Legal Care increases access to justice for New York families and children. We provide parents, grandparents and other caregivers with legal information and advice, community education, and compassionate guidance. Through our Helpline, Legal Consultations, Community Outreach and Legal Education, Legal Resource Guides, and Digital Justice Initiative, we create tools and resources to help litigants understand their rights and more easily navigate complex New York Family Law topics.

Family Legal Care’s mission is to increase access to justice in New York State Family Court. We combine legal guidance, easy-to-access technology, and compassionate support to help unrepresented parents and caregivers self-advocate on critical family law issues, while working on reform that improves the system for everyone.
We are the only legal services organization dedicated solely to empowering parents and caregivers to represent themselves in New York Family Court. Unlike other legal services organizations, we do not restrict services by income level, case type, or client demographics. Our services are always free.

Our model of providing limited-scope legal representation is unique: we have found that when we help pro se litigants get started on the right track, and provide additional support as needed throughout their case, they are able to achieve positive outcomes for their families without full representation. In this way, we maximize the number of clients we can serve, both broadening and deepening our impact.

Our programs, all available in Spanish, include:

Legal Consultations: Unrepresented litigants meet with a Family Legal Care staff attorney for about an hour to receive in-depth advice and support in preparing a case. Many clients return for follow-up meetings.
Family Law Information Helplines: Our bilingual Telephone, Email and Live-Chat Helplines are the primary point of entry for parents who need our support and guidance, and a central artery through which clients can access our more in-depth services.

Pro Bono Program: Using one-of-a-kind videoconferencing and document-sharing technology, our legal consultation platform enables clients to consult with pro bono attorneys from their mobile device, no matter where they are. Our Pro Bono Program reduces the need for long-distance trips to the courthouse and mitigates expensive burdens like taking time off from work and securing childcare.

Legal Resource Guides: Family Legal Care offers over 60 unique guides in 9 languages. These original publications cover a range of family law issues and are available on our website.

Legal Education and Community Outreach: We work with community partners to present virtual legal clinics in English and Spanish. We prioritize outreach to key constituent groups with specific needs, including: veterans and active military service-members; Spanish-speaking and immigrant families; previously incarcerated and incarcerated parents; and survivors of domestic violence.

Digital Justice: We are pioneers at leveraging the power of technology to increase access to justice. Our Family Law Navigator builds a tailored report on an individual’s particular situation and can be a helpful starting point for people beginning to address their family law issue. Our Guided Court Forms make it possible for litigants to complete and upload essential court documents from any web-connected device.

One of Family Legal Care’s guiding principles is to provide compassionate care so litigants feel heard, understood, and confident in their ability to advocate for their families in Court. Over our more than 26 years of service we have learned the unique needs of specific groups, and prioritize outreach to key constituencies accordingly, including: survivors of domestic violence; Spanish-speaking/immigrant families; veterans/active military service-members; and currently or previously incarcerated parents. In many cases, individuals fall into more than one of these constituencies.

Our close relationship with the Family Court provides us a significant amount of access to senior jurists and administrators who value the insight and feedback we provide. As Family Legal Care is the only organization in the Family Court that exclusively works with pro se litigants, we are uniquely positioned to draw attention to the day-to-day issues that cause problems for pro se litigants and advocate for change from within the system. Multiple Family Legal Care staff members actively serve on numerous committees at the City and State levels that are engaging in policy change or reform initiatives. We are often the only participant at the table that represents pro se litigants’ interests.

All program employees, interns and volunteers, including volunteer attorneys, undergo extensive and ongoing training at Family Legal Care to ensure that we are providing the best information and advice to our clients. This includes a substantive family law training curriculum and a large component on the difference between legal information and legal advice. Training at the start of employment with Family Legal Care also includes courtroom observations and shadowing experienced employees. We train Staff Attorneys on the ethical issues/rules of professional conduct governing an attorney-client relationship and the practical applications of those issues. We cover: competence, scope of representation, privilege and confidentiality, and conflicts of interest. We also provide instruction on how to clearly explain to clients what our engagement letter means and how limited-scope representation works.

Family Legal Care is a data-driven organization, and the largest driver of organizational priority-setting is the needs of our clients. The data we collect from clients who use our programs informs us where the highest need is and thus where resources should be allocated. For example, information collected during phone calls with our Helpline determines the additional training our staff receives. In spring 2020, there was a higher rate of calls about orders of protection, reflecting the rise in domestic violence cases correlated with stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic. In response, we provided Helpline staff with additional trainings on domestic violence from experts at our community service partners, and a refresher on how the Family Court handles orders of protection.

Each year Family Legal Care serves over 25,000 parents and grandparents throughout New York State. York State.

In 2022, we changed our name to Family Legal Care to better capture the breadth of our services and the compassion that has been central to our work since our founding. We also launched a redesigned website that is easier for clients and potential new supporters to navigate. We overhauled the design of our Legal Resource Guides to make them more dynamic and accessible. We created Guided Court forms, which help users fill out complex legal forms on their mobile devices by answering a few easy-to-understand questions in plain language. We opened our second Tech Hub, located within a couple blocks of the Queens Family Courthouse.

Other key accomplishments in 2022 include:

Our staff attorneys and Pro Bono Program completed over 3,000 legal consultations. We served over 16,500 individuals on our bilingual Family Law Helplines.

We reached 484 participants in their communities through our Family Law Education and Community Outreach program.

Approximately 135,000 people used our Legal Resource Guides to answer their family law questions, and 2,200 used one of our Digital Justice tools to learn more about their family law situation and fill out important documents related to their case.

We helped 279 parents and caregivers attend their virtual hearing or complete Court documents at our Brooklyn and Queens Tech Hubs.

Data from our work was included in a report by the Fund for Modern Courts and New York City Bar Association. The Impact of COVID-19 on the New York City Family Court: Recommendations on Improving Access to Justice for All Litigants found that “Family Court was ill-equipped to respond quickly, consistently, fairly and comprehensively to the needs of all litigants” as a result of long-standing “deep inequities in that historically under-resourced court.” Family Legal Care clients were interviewed by News4 reporter Melissa Russo for her piece on the Family Court.

In the year to come, we look forward to bolstering our digital justice tools, including creating additional Guided Court forms that make documents litigants need for their case more accessible and easier to fill out without extra equipment or software. We will also expand the number of topics covered by our Family Law Navigator, translate informational reports into Spanish, and create videos on family law concepts to provide helpful context for litigants with low literacy levels.

We will also examine how we can improve the technology in our Program Bono Program to effectively scale up the number of consultations we are completing. We will also open a third Tech Hub location in the Bronx. Above all, we will continue to provide the essential legal advice and information that unrepresented litigants in Family Court need to self-advocate for positive outcomes in their cases.