Legal Services Corporation: Now More Than Ever
By William H. Hoch

Some of you may recall the presidential election slogan, “Nixon. Now More Than Ever.” The same can be said about a critical agency formed during the Nixon administration in 1974: the Legal Services Corporation (LSC). Established in 1974 with bipartisan congressional support and the endorsement of the Nixon administration, LSC was intended to meet a tremendous need to make effective legal services available to Americans otherwise unable to afford such services. Today, LSC is needed now more than ever as the need for legal services for poor Americans has never been greater. According to recent studies, over 80 percent of the civil legal needs of the poor are not being met. LSC is a fundamentally sound and conservative program, one that facilitates the peaceful resolution of disputes and reinforces respect for the rule of law.

LSC was created to ensure that all Americans have access to a lawyer and the justice system for civil legal issues regardless of their ability to pay. The LSC provides direct grants to independent local legal services programs chosen through a system of competition. LSC currently funds approximately 170 local programs serving every county in the United States and its territories. These local LSC offices provide direct services to more than 1 million constituents who struggle to get by on incomes below or near the poverty line. LSC clients include the working poor, veterans, family farmers and people with disabilities. However, LSC funding comes under repeated attacks in Congress.

• In fact, if Congress discontinued funding for LSC, then Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma (LASO) would lose 52 percent of its current funding. This would mean:
• LASO would be unable to serve 10,000 low-income Oklahomans, based on 2007 statistics (19,000 Oklahomans received legal services from LASO in 2007).
• LASO would help 22,000 fewer family members and almost 10,000 fewer children based upon 2007 statistics.
• In 2007, 53 percent of LASO’s total case closures involved family law and domestic violence (10,000) - 5,200 of those cases/clients would go underserved or unserved.
• Over 1,100 of LASO’s 2,100 cases involving housing assistance would potentially receive no legal assistance. These include homeless families, families whose landlords use improper means to evict and those very low income or disabled clients who may lose housing assistance due to bureaucratic error, among others reasons.
• More likely than not, LASO would be forced to close most, if not all, of its satellite offices to the point that only Oklahoma City, Tulsa and the intake hotline would be assured of continuing. Meaningful services to Oklahoma’s rural poor would be jeopardized by such funding cuts.
• Many beneficiaries of LSC funding are formerly middle-class, who have become poor because of age, disaster, unemployment, illness or the breakup of a family. Historically, more than two-thirds of legal aid clients have been women, most of them mothers with young children. Interestingly, mothers with young children also make up the single fastest growing population group among America’s homeless.

In these tough economic times, LSC needs our help - now more than ever.

Mr. Hoch practices at Crowe and Dunlevy in Oklahoma City and is an OBA Access to Justice Committee member.