What Lawyers Do

The Boston Globe published a short article today about how there is a growing trend of self-representation in the courts — no doubt brought about not only by high lawyers’ fees but also the faltering economy.

Notably, it’s happening in cases that have significant consequences such as divorces, child custody, evictions and bankruptcies.

This brings to mind the movement in some states such as New York for a “civil-Gideon” law guaranteeing legal representation in important civil cases, such as for tenants facing eviction proceedings.

I recall working as a legal aid attorney in Worcester, Mass., fresh out of law school, and routinely seeing unrepresented tenants get raw deals because they were unaware of their rights. (I only did housing work so can’t speak with experience about family law or other areas of law).

If, for instance, they were subject to a non-payment of rent case, they might have had bad conditions in the apartment or a security deposit violation or illegal lease clause that could have offset the amount of rent owed. But they didn’t know that they needed to complete an Answer in order to assert counterclaims. Hell, they didn’t even know that they could assert counterclaims.

The point isn’t that tenants are victims or that they are more often in the right than landlords. Rather, it is that in these very important cases with so much at stake — for besides food, nothing else is more essential in life than shelter (again, I’m only speaking specifically about evictions here) — many tenants are operating in the dark against a more powerful and knowledgeable adversary, and at the end of the day landlords fully assert their rights while tenants’ go out the window. There should be balance. There should be fairness.

In today’s economic climate, the chances that government will throw money at lawyers to provide representation for poor people in civil cases are slim to none; as we’ve seen, that money goes to bankers first. But the idea of civil-Gideon laws should not go gently into the night. It used to strike me as a shame when I would see landlords at housing court with lawyers, and in contrast, the vast majority of tenants, often with children standing next to them or cradled in their arms, would stand around without one.