Western New York Law Center, Inc. - 1

Western New York Law Center, Inc.

Overview of Achievements, 2016-2017 The primary target population for our legal work is low-

income people in Unit 7 and parts of Unit 6. The primary target population for our technology work is legal services advocates in New York State. In the last lOLA fiscal year, cases handled by the Western New York Law Center ("Law Center") benefited 4,361 people, and our technology work benefited lOLA-funded organizations statewide. We obtained $4,284,993 in dollar savings to clients, and our representation allowed our clients to avoid $58,182 in payments each month over the time covered by this report.

The Law Center, partnering with private attorney volunteers, successfully staffed our CLARO project. Thirty volunteer attorneys and law students contributed 896 volunteer hours to the project, and the students argued cases in court under our student practice order. The project set aside $924,000 in debt for low-income consumers. In addition to their providing hours to the project, both volunteer attorneys and law students have been exposed to the importance of low income people getting court representation.

We filed and litigated a number of important cases. White v. Fein, Such & Crane is a statewide class action filed against a law firm that represents many banks and servicers across the state. The case challenges fees that are improperly assessed against homeowners facing foreclosures. We are continuing to monitor the settlement of a class action case in Federal court against the Niagara County Department of Social Services for not processing public assistance applications in a timely way. We also filed Chipego v. Five Star Bank, a multistate class action challenging illegal automobile repossessions from consumers.

We also received a Skadden Fellow, the first in Western New York in over a decade, to begin a Small Business Center to work with small businesses to help them with small business transactions.

We continue to maintain legal email lists for advocates in New York State and to maintain with other groups the Online Resource Center, an online brief and video bank. Our websites had 8,164,411 pages of materials downloaded in the reporting period, and our press outreach explaining our legal programs and legal rights reached 3,745,115 people.

This Provider At a Glance

Population Served: General Low Income Population

Area Served: Western Region of New York StateTotal Funding: $1,650,225Total IOLA Grant: $350,000Staffing - Full Time Equivalents

Total Staff: 23.54 Lawyers: 11.15 Paralegals: 9.64 Other Staff: 2.75

Types of Services ProvidedDirect Civil Legal Representation

Brief Services l

Extended Services l

Hotlines and Other Phone-Based Services

Technology and Other Innovations l

Community Legal Education l

Pro Se Assistance l

Collaborations With Other Service Providers l

Major Cases or Other Advocacy Projects l

Service Area:Western Region of

New York State

Western New York Law Center, Inc. - 2

Consumer60%

Housing31%

Miscellaneous8%

Other1%

Outcomes… 4,361 Individuals Benefited from 2,042 Closed Direct Civil Legal Cases

J erry B.'s home, which he has owned for over thirteen years, was in foreclosure due to unemployment. The issue was compounded by the passing of his wife after a long battle with cancer. Jerry went into a deep depression and

was not able to work. His dual-income household was reduced to a single-income household, with social security benefits being the sole source of income. He tried negotiating a loan modification with the lender, but was not successful. After his case was placed in a mandatory settlement conference, he retained our office and one of our attorneys negotiated an affordable loan modification on his behalf. Jerry did not lose his home to foreclosure.

A few months after the birth of their first child, "J" and "C", went to a local car dealership and test drove a vehicle. They were misled into signing a contract for a different vehicle. They were not allowed to cancel the contract and

were subsequently sued when they refused to pay for the vehicle. Since they were unable to afford an attorney, they both went to Buffalo City Court and filled out a generic check box answer. They checked boxes indicating that they disputed the debt and the amount. Months afterwards, the attorneys for the finance company submitted a motion for summary judgment. "J" and "C" both attended court that day, but the Plaintiff's motion for summary judgment was granted. This judgment prevented the couple from purchasing a home.

The Western New York Law Center took this case, and prepared the appeal. Upon receipt of the appeal papers, the attorneys representing the finance company agreed to vacate the existing Buffalo City Court judgment, and to discontinue the Buffalo City Court action with prejudice. This family is now applying for financing so that they can purchase their first home.

Examples...

Outcomes for Clients

Breakdown of Cases by Legal Problem Area

Extended Representation Outcomes

•

Brief Representation Benefits

•

•

•

1,913 People benefited from extended representation

456 People benefited by referral to other sources of help

1,699 People benefited from legal advice and counsel

293 People benefited from non-litigation advocacy services

*Total includes back awards and total monthly benefits, estimated over 6 months (unemployment compensation), 12 months

(equitable distribution of assets, affirmative judgments and other benefits), 36 months (other federal benefits), 108 months

(child support), 120 months (Social Security, SSI and spousal support).

People Cases

Total 4,361 2,042

Consumer 2,858 1,228

Housing 1,300 644

Miscellaneous 174 156

Other 29 14

Dollar Benefits Achievedfor Clients* - Total $62,146

• Affirmative Judgments: $22,146

• Other Benefits: $40,000

Western New York Law Center, Inc. - 3

Consumer60%

Housing31%

Miscellaneous8%

Other1%

Other Services Technology and Other Innovations

We partner with students at Columbia Law School on projects for our consumer clinics. This last semester, we began the development of an online intake portal for our CLARO visitors.

We continue to develop automated pleadings for our consumer clinics to generate lengthy pleadings based upon answers to questions. Volunteers fill out questionnaires on our MacBook laptops and generate tailored pleadings for visitors. The prompts in the questions help volunteers who are not completely familiar with the law to complete pleadings, and allow pick lists for addresses so that papers to opposing attorneys are addressed correctly and not returned for incorrect service.

We also use our private cloud, run on our internal server, to connect to the cases we handle in the consumer clinic. Papers are scanned to the case management system and the scanned copies are available to volunteers who need to pull up past cases when we hold a clinic off-site. We put our form pleadings on the cloud as well so that the MacBooks can be quickly updated.

Legal Services Other Than Direct Legal Representation

In addition to our legal representation, the Law Center does outreach in the community to educate and reach out to low-income people who need help with foreclosures, public assistance and consumer matters. We want to reach people before their legal situation spins out of control and advise them on how to avoid protracted litigation, and also reach people who cannot afford an attorney but need representation in civil matters. During the reporting period, our outreach through presentations, radio, TV and newspaper articles reached an audience of 3,745,115 (using circulation figures from the publications). In our outreach, we directed people to our office and to our online resources for information. Our CLARO website, www.clarobuffalo.org, has self-help materials for consumers, and our Facebook page and office website have videos for people facing foreclosure issues. We also held community events in city neighborhoods and provided legal assistance at the events. Additionally, in cooperation with the Erie County Clerk’s office, we are allowed access to County records and we do outreach to all residential homeowners in Erie County who receive lis pendens notices, This allows us to provide information to people at an early moment in the foreclosure process so that people can receive immediate help with loan modifications from housing counselors or receive legal representation from the Law Center.

Collaborations With Other Service Providers

The most significant collaborations we are involved in are the Buffalo Niagara Community Reinvestment Coalition; the Coordinated Refugee/Asylee Legal Services Program; the Foreclosure Prevention Project; and the

Online Resource Center. The Buffalo Niagara Community Reinvestment Coalition is a coalition led by the Law Center and made up of community groups in Buffalo and Niagara Falls. The Foreclosure Prevention Project is a collaboration between the Law Center, the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo and the Center for Elder Law and Justice. This collaboration allows us to coordinate efforts and avoid duplication of effort. We have a common intake line and staff from all agencies meet weekly to discuss ongoing cases and to assign new cases, and urgent matters are assigned immediately. CLARO is a walk-in clinic conducted at Buffalo City Court and at the Buffalo Federation of Neighborhood Centers BFNC Hope Center) in the evening. In the last year, we have expanded to hold sessions at the Arab-American Community Center for Economic and Social Services and at clinics hosted by the local Worker’s Center. It is a joint effort between the Law Center, the private bar, the courts, and community organizations. We coordinate with all of the lOLA-funded organizations in our area on the Coordinated Refugee/Asylee Legal Services Program. The project serves Buffalo's large refugee community and the Law Center goes out in the community to meet with refugees and provide services through our consumer and foreclosure programs. We offer credit programs for people who want to learn about the banking system and about avoidance of consumer scams, and offer legal representation for people who have problems with creditors. The Online Resource Center is collaboration between the Law Center, the Empire Justice Center, the Legal Aid Society in NYC and NYLAG. Many other individual advocates also contribute pleadings and information to the resource center, and law students contribute and receive credit towards their 50 hour requirements of pro bono service.

Backup or Support Services

Our case management system is used by 31 agencies in New York State and was updated 34 times during the year to comply with requests from funders. The system allows grant reporting for all of the major grants in the state and has built in networking capabilities.

The Law Center helps legal services offices statewide use technology in a cost effective manner to better serve their clients in this time of diminishing resources. We partner with Empire Justice Center to host and administer

Total: 5,662,186 People

3,752,486 People

Web Usage: 1,909,700 People

Number of People Benefited by Legal

Services Other Than Direct Legal

Representation…

Community Legal Education

and Pro Se Assistance:

Western New York Law Center, Inc. - 4

Other Services, continued

the Online Resource Center, http://onlineresources.wnylc.net/. This is a site directed to legal services advocates, and advocates in social services agencies who help low income people in New York State. We have 4568 registered users. The site contains a store of over 6.550 fair hearing decisions and cases that are indexed and searchable by advocates handling cases involving Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, public assistance, disability and DV cases. The site also contains HRA directives back to 2002. Those materials are not available elsewhere on line, and each directive is digested. Additionally, the site contains online video trainings, http://onlineresources.wnylc.net/online_training.asp?index=Trainings. We delivered 1,654, 579 pages of materials to advocates through this site.

We provide email addresses to lOLA grantees, and even for mailboxes not on our server, we provide spam and virus protection for organizations. By centrally managing email, we ensure that users are protected from email viruses. This saves organizations administrative and software costs. We also hosted over seventy e-mail discussion groups for advocates on our website, with over 9000 subscribers. These discussion groups knit lOLA-funded advocates together and form a "virtual community" where advocates discuss client legal issues. In addition, as part of our lOLA grant, we also took calls for technical assistance from grantees, and advised offices about technology purchases.

Through our webcasting project, we provide over 60 trainings online and most of them are offered for CLE credit. We streamed over 287 hours of training to the desks of advocates in NYS in 2016-17. Many groups of advocates watch the trainings together; so the impact is larger than the number of hours delivered. The target population for these initiatives is legal services advocates in New York State.

Major Cases or Other Advocacy Projects

Buffalo Niagara Community Reinvestment Coalition The Law Center convenes this coalition and the project

involves close cooperation with bank officials. Both Key

Bank and Northwest Bank (https://tinyurl.com/h6rfqxk) have pledged to work with our coalition to invest in low to moderate income communities (as defined in Federal regulations) in Buffalo and Niagara Falls and to identify and evaluate community development loan and investment projects that meet community need and maximize impact on communities of need. They have both committed to language access services in their bank branches, to the placement of loan officers in branches in low to moderate income communities, and to the hiring of bilingual staff in branches. They have also agreed to pilot a minimum loan amount policy to permit smaller mortgage options in areas where home prices are lower, such as Buffalo’s East Side. These vital services will assist countless low- to moderate- income community members in building wealth.

Pro Bono Volunteer Involvement

16 different attorneys, 18 law students, and 5 other volunteers worked with our organization during the reporting period. The volunteer attorneys gave 623 volunteer hours to clients. Volunteer attorneys help draft court pleadings at each CLARO session. During the reporting period, over $924,000 in consumer judgments were vacated or recovered through CLARO (reflected in the number on Tab E, line 37 of the spreadsheet). We use AmeriCorps, Catholic Charities and Cornell High Road Fellows in our office. They work on mortgage foreclosure analysis and do client screening in the office and for our court-based intake and our CLARO program under the supervision of attorneys.

Sources of Funding

Total $1,650,225

IOLA Grant $350,000

State Funding $1,205,380

Foundations $73,825

Income from publications $10,901

Other $10,119

• Attorneys: 16 Volunteers 623 Hours

• Law Students: 18 Volunteers 413 Hours

• Other Volunteers: 5 Volunteers 412 Hours

• Dollar Value of Attorney Services*: $155,750

*estimated at $250 per hour

During 2016-2017, the following volunteers provided

services in our program:

Pro Bono Statistics

IOLA Grant21%

State Funding73%

Foundations4%

Income from publications

1%

Other1%