Legal service providers in Queens say they have no, or limited, capacity to take on clients facing eviction this month.
The news comes as tenant advocates urge the courts to slow case calendaring. They say a lawyer shortage, combined with mounting caseloads, is undermining the city's Right to Counsel law, intended to ensure representation for renters who earn 200% of the federal poverty guideline or less, or $55,500 for a family of four.
"We are disappointed that [the Office of Court Administration] will not engage with all stakeholders to address the post-pandemic surge in demand, and instead is calendaring cases in such a way to deny tenants legal representation," said Adriene Holder, attorney-in-charge of the civil practice at the Legal Aid Society. "Simply put, this will gut New York's historic Right to Counsel initiative."
For context, most of the roughly 60 cases calendered for counsel assignment on a given day in Queens are eligible for free representation, according to Claire Gavin, a Queens tenant lawyer and member of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, the Legal Aid Society's staff union.
Providers' current availability "wouldn't even get you through a week," she told Law360 on Tuesday.
Beth Goldman, president and attorney-in-charge of the New York Legal Assistance Group, said by phone Tuesday that she and other providers had to decline cases this month after it became clear that city and court officials were not going to collaborate with them on a solution.
"We thought that [the city] and the court system might actually be working with us based on our conversations, and then nothing happened," Goldman said. "We could no longer say to staff, 'Help is on the way.'"
On March 28, the state's Office of Court Administration released guidance in response to providers' concerns. It laid out a process for judges and their staff to collect information from tenants who pass through intake without counsel, setting a three-week deadline for the city to match that person with an attorney who can handle their case.
But circumstances in Queens appear to undermine the plan, made in collaboration with New York City's Office of Civil Justice, which is tasked with administering the city's Right to Counsel program.
"The existing network of providers has already exceeded its capacity across the board, so that's not really a viable solution in any way," Marika Dias, director of the Safety Net Project at the Urban Justice Center and a member of the steering committee of the New York City Right to Counsel Coalition, told Law360 on Tuesday.
In a separate statement, the coalition, made up of tenant groups and service providers who advocated for the 2017 law's passage, demanded that the courts lift the three-week adjournment rule, which they say will "expedite eviction cases."
The Office of Court Administration should "only move the cases where tenants are represented forward and adjourn all the rest," the coalition wrote.
But courts spokesperson Lucian Chalfen did not entertain that possibility in an emailed statement to Law360 on Tuesday.
"We have repeatedly said that these Right to Counsel providers' inability to manage their operations should not adversely impact our ability to run the court," Chalfen wrote. "We are focused on returning to normalized operations, for the benefit of all litigants, as quickly and efficiently as possible."
Reached Tuesday, the Office of Civil Justice said it is working with its network of providers to identify attorneys who may be able to take on new clients in Queens this month. It did not provide a written statement.
The more time a tenant spends without counsel, attorneys say, the less bargaining power they are likely to have, and the more stress they are likely to experience. According to Dias, "Every court appearance they have is a point at which they could forgo critical rights or enter into a disadvantageous stipulation with their landlord."
New eviction filings are still below pre-pandemic levels. There have been 21,294 cases filed in New York City this year through April 4, according to a database maintained by the state court system. By contrast, more than 53,500 eviction cases were filed in the five boroughs in the first three months of 2019.
Yet advocates have pointed to a confluence of factors driving up caseloads, including the expiration in January of a pandemic-era law that stayed most eviction cases. Service providers say they are also facing staffing shortages, even as the Right to Counsel program expands citywide.
In March, the Office of Court Administration said the issue of legal service providers declining to take on eviction cases was concentrated in the Bronx, and specifically with provider Legal Services NYC.
On Monday, Legal Services NYC spokesperson Seth Hoy said the organization also had to limit its intake in Queens last month.
Of the eviction cases filed this year in New York City, Queens has seen the third-highest volume — 4,252, compared with more than 5,100 in Brooklyn and more than 7,100 in the Bronx.
Rohit Chandan, a tenant lawyer in Queens and member of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, told Law360 on Tuesday that the announcement regarding case intake for April came as a surprise.
"On Thursday, my supervisor told us to sign up for intake," he said. "We're still trying to figure it out."
Legal Aid management and the heads of other service providers must advocate rigorously to slow the pace at which new eviction cases are calendared, Chandan added.
In the meantime, he said, "I cannot get a proper day of work done with motion writing or doing settlements because it's basically putting out one fire at a time."
--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.
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