Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service, Inc.

Our vision is for a fair legal system that is free of injustice and equitably serves underrepresented Marylanders. MVLS removes barriers to justice through free civil legal help, community engagement, and advocacy for equitable laws.

1) Free Civil Legal Help. Unlike criminal cases, there is no right to counsel in civil cases. For more than 40 years, MVLS has been the leader of pro bono engagement across the state. We connect individuals who would otherwise have to navigate complex legal issues on their own with volunteer attorneys and tax professionals to help them resolve their legal problem. A key differentiator of MVLS’ work is that we focus on full representation, meaning that our clients receive help at every step in the legal process. This results in successful outcomes for our clients.
MVLS focuses on are (1) family law (e.g., divorce, custody, guardianship, adoption, name change), (2) consumer finance (e.g., individual debtors’ rights, bankruptcy), (3) housing (e.g., landlord/tenant disputes, foreclosure & tax sale, deed changes), (4) estate planning/administration, (5) criminal record relief (expungement, shielding, vacatur) and (6) tax controversy.
While our staff remains relatively small, our real impact comes from our volunteers all around the state. As a result, MVLS has a strong focus on volunteer recruitment, engagement and retention through extensive outreach and the provision of trainings, mentorship and malpractice insurance.
2) Community Engagement. Community partners are an essential component of connecting individuals in need of help with MVLS. Far too many Marylanders are struggling without realizing they have a legal issue, or if they do, where to turn. It is trusted and valued neighborhood programs that can help community members identify a legal problem and refer these individuals to MVLS for help. Community partners also help inform and guide MVLS’ work, ensuring that the scope of our services represent the needs of our potential clients. Because of this, all staff members understand the value of developing community partners. We invest significant time to attend community events, share knowledge and experience with community partners, and build trusted partnerships over an extended period of time.
3) Advocacy for Equitable Laws. While legal representation has a profound impact on each individual client, it does not address systemic barriers within the legal system that place far too many Marylanders at risk of housing loss, unemployment, inescapable debt, and other negative outcomes. With expertise developed through our relationships with community partners, our staff are able to identify problematic policies, practices and laws that destabilize and harm communities. Many policies and laws seem neutral on the surface, but in practice have a disproportionate, negative impact on communities of color. With this knowledge, MVLS educates and advocates by highlighting inequities and seeks opportunities to change systems that have a non-neutral impact. MVLS focuses on wealth extraction in Black communities, legacy homeownership, tax sale and foreclosure reform, and criminal record relief to reduce barriers to sustainable employment.

MVLS was founded in 1981 to create a linkage between individuals experiencing financial hardship with volunteer attorneys to address their legal problem. Over the past 40 years, MVLS has grown into a well-respected statewide organization that has deep knowledge and institutional structures in place to recruit and support more than 1,700 volunteers annually.

MVLS has transitioned to become a robust client-facing organization that reduces barriers to justice by being active in the communities that our clients live, and personally connecting with people who need our help. Instead of being another office in downtown Baltimore, community partners and clients know us on a first name basis and can easily reach us for questions and guidance at the many outreach events we host and attend. We acknowledge the history of far too many entities marching into communities overpromising and underdelivering and then disappearing. We build our partnership with the understanding that harm has been done by these practices and by making a different, long term commitment to working together to reduce barriers to justice. Respectful and committed community engagement is an MVLS core value and is undertaken by all staff, with two staff members focused exclusively on outreach and communications.

MVLS has continued to be fully operational throughout the COVID pandemic. Every day, we continue to focus on our mission – providing free civil legal help, building community engagement and advocating for equitable laws.
MVLS has managed to sustain and foster numerous community partnerships despite the challenges of COVID. We have continued our commitment to being adaptable to the needs of communities and made our outreach flexible so that it includes virtual presentations, delivery of printed materials to community sites for distribution, and mostly recently we were able to re-establish in-person events. Most of our community partners are Black-led, and much like the other harms of COVID, Black-led community organizations have been hit hardest in the non-profit arena. We continue to look for opportunities to not just partner with these programs, but also identify ways that we can share our knowledge and resources to support their efforts.
While much more progress is needed when it comes to addressing inequitable laws, MVLS has continued to make substantial improvements in several areas. Two highlights are tax sale and expungement. When MVLS began paying attention to tax sale in 2013, it was a little understood practice flying below the radar for everyone except the homeowners it was harming. At that time, a homeowner could lose their home for as little as $250 in delinquent property tax and $350 in water bills. Over the next eight years, with much advocacy at the local and state level, we have successfully advocated for dramatic improvements including removing water bills from tax sale, increasing the property tax threshold amount, creating credits for homeowners at risk of tax sale, and most recently in Baltimore City where tax sale is most prevalent, serving on a working group formed by the Mayor to consider an entire overhaul of the tax sale system.
In 2015, when a dramatic change occurred in the law, MVLS undertook a substantial commitment to expungement relief. Between 2014 and 2015, MVLS grew from serving 7 clients with expungement needs to serving more than 700. With our deep engagement with workforce development sites, we see firsthand how a criminal record, even when an individual wasn’t found guilty of any crimes, can prevent sustainable employment. Since 2015, we have worked closely with other advocates to make improvements in expungement law to both maintain public safety while removing unnecessary employment barriers. We have helped advocate for dramatic changes in the law that ensure more individuals can leave their past behind them. We also have worked to expand what criminal records can be vacated for human trafficking survivors.