Three years ago, Charlene Julce’s family faced eviction from their home in Malden, and a legal aid lawyer helped them fight off foreclosure. Today, Julce told state legislators that there aren't enough legal aid lawyers to help thousands of others in the same situation she found herself in.
“We never could have afforded a lawyer,” Julce said, whose family fell on hard times when her mother was diagnosed with heart disease and diabetes and had to stop working. As a result, the family fell behind on their $3,400 monthly mortgage.
"We were lucky,” Julce said.
But Julce said people shouldn’t have to be lucky to get help. She’ll speak at the annual Walk to the Hill, where hundreds of lawyers from across the state descend on Beacon Hill to lobby for underserved residents.
This year attorneys plan to tell lawmakers that thousands of the state's most vulnerable residents are being evicted or having their homes foreclosed because they can't afford a lawyer. Funding for legal aid has declined drastically in the last few years, and lawyers say the state isn't doing enough to fill the gap in services.
Like many states, Massachusetts pays for legal aid by collecting the interest earned on money that attorneys hold temporarily for their clients. At any given time that usually amounts to about a billion dollars -- so the interest used to add up to a lot: in 2008, about $17 million dollars. But with interest rates being so low for so long, that same source of funding will bring in an estimated $2.8 million in fiscal 2014, according to Lonnie Powers of the Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation.
"Consequently we've lost almost 40 percent of the legal aid lawyers in Massachusetts,” he said.
Powers said lawyers now turn away more than half of the low-income people who come to them for help with civil cases like foreclosures, evictions, unpaid unemployment benefits, denial of health care coverage, or student expulsions from school. Without legal representation, he said people are much more likely to lose cases.
"Until you need a lawyer and can't get one, you don't realize how devastating it is to have to go to court by yourself when even lawyers are a little intimidated to represent themselves,” Powers said.
Powers' organization, private bar associations and state Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Roderick L. Ireland are asking the state for a $17 million dollar appropriation in the budget for fiscal 2014 to shore up funding for legal aid. Gov. Deval Patrick's proposal recommends the legislature approve $14 million.
Powers said even with that amount, legal aid centers will still have to lay off staff.
"It is a foundation principal of this country that we have a right to be treated fairly not just by the government but by our fellow citizens,” he said. “And if any time we let that right be diluted and people believe that's an illusion and they're not going to be treated fairly, we lose something that is extremely valuable to all of us."
Powers said taxpayers will also lose money: when low income people get the legal help they need, they avoid situations like homelessness that, according to Powers, end up costing the state millions of dollars.