{"id":129813,"date":"2017-09-26T08:24:24","date_gmt":"2017-09-26T12:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=129813"},"modified":"2017-09-27T15:15:44","modified_gmt":"2017-09-27T19:15:44","slug":"incubator-lawyers-making-legal-help-affordable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2017\/09\/incubator-lawyers-making-legal-help-affordable\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Incubator’ Lawyers Making Legal Help Affordable"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Judy Bakowski moved to Arizona, she kept trying to transfer ownership of her house in Connecticut to her daughter. They even drew up a quitclaim deed and had it notarized, but they kept running into a tangle of red tape.<\/p>\n

Deeply frustrated, Bakowski called the\u00a0Connecticut Community Law Center<\/a>\u00a0at UConn School of Law. Within a few weeks, attorney Lynn Perry had worked through the legal issues, and the house in East Granby belonged to Bakowski\u2019s daughter, Trayci Hogaboom.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took a load off my mother\u2019s shoulders, more than I can tell you,\u201d Hogaboom says. \u201cLynn just took it over.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

We see an enormous need for legal assistance at a reasonable cost, particularly among the substantial number of people who don\u2019t qualify for legal aid but can\u2019t afford standard legal fees. — Mark Schreier<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Housing problems, mostly eviction and foreclosure, have comprised about a quarter of the referrals to the lawyers at the Connecticut Community Law Center in its first several months of operation. In another case, attorney Santolo Odierna negotiated an agreement to avert foreclosure on a client\u2019s house. He also obtained a court order within hours of a call from a client who was scheduled to be evicted that same evening; the court gave her three weeks\u2019 reprieve and she was able to find new housing for her family.<\/p>\n

The center, one of only two legal \u201cincubators\u201d in the state, began training lawyers in March and the lawyers started accepting clients in April. The center helps recent law school graduates establish solo practices, providing office space in the law school\u2019s William F. Starr Hall and offering mentors, training, legal research resources, and other forms of support. Five lawyers have opened practices there to serve low- and moderate-income individuals and families \u2013 those whose incomes fall within three times the federal poverty level.<\/p>\n

The need is dire. A\u00a02008 study<\/a>\u00a0by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at UConn found that 71 percent of low-income households surveyed had experienced legal problems in the previous year, but only about a quarter received legal help of any kind. Experts believe that gap has widened in recent years.<\/p>\n

Housing is not the only need. Family issues \u2013 divorce, custody, child support, and alimony \u2013 account for about a third of the center\u2019s referrals, according to Mark Schreier, the center\u2019s inaugural director. The attorneys are also handling consumer debt problems, tax issues, and probate cases, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe see an enormous need for legal assistance at a reasonable cost, particularly among the substantial number of people who don\u2019t qualify for legal aid but can\u2019t afford standard legal fees,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople confronting potentially life-altering legal issues in the courts should not be alone, and the CCLC helps give more people a voice in such situations.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Odierna, providing that voice requires him to be creative about how he serves clients and how he bills them. He often limits the scope of his services by taking on a single aspect of a problem \u2013 writing a letter or making a court appearance, for example \u2013 instead of managing the entire case. He also works with relatively small retainers, and arranges payment plans when necessary.<\/p>\n

Serving low- and moderate-income clients is exactly what Odierna, a 2016 UConn Law graduate, set out to do after working at the law school\u2019s Tax Clinic as a student. \u201cI knew this need was here. That\u2019s part of the reason I wanted to be here,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

After 24 months in the incubator environment, the center\u2019s lawyers are expected to move their practices out into the community, spreading the seeds of innovation to make justice more affordable for more people.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘We see an enormous need for legal assistance at a reasonable cost, particularly among people who don\u2019t qualify for legal aid but can\u2019t afford standard legal fees.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":129288,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1715,1857,92],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1856],"class_list":["post-129813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-impact","category-law","category-uconn-hartford"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 09:38:41","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129813"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129815,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129813\/revisions\/129815"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/129288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129813"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=129813"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=129813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}