President's Page
| Jurisdiction | Alabama,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 71 No. 1 Pg. 0009 |
| Pages | 0009 |
| Publication year | 2010 |
"Thank You, Legal Services!"
Estimates show that about 25 percent of Alabama's population, or about 1 million people, live in poverty. In the current economic climate, it is likely that these numbers will grow. Research indicates low-income Alabama households experience more than 700,000 legal problems per year. Common civil problems include consumer and family law issues, as well as issues involving housing, health, public benefits and elder law.
Legal Services Alabama (LSA) is the most important resource available to address these needs. LSA is a statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to providing access to justice and quality civil legal aid. It operates 10 offices throughout the state, in Anniston, Birmingham, Dothan, Florence, Huntsville, Mobile, Montgomery, Opelika, Selma, and Tuscaloosa. It serves legal needs in all 67 counties in Alabama. LSA helps people by providing representation on critical legal matters in judicial and administrative forums, and by providing free legal counsel, community education and mediation services.
The Alabama State Bar has partnered with LSA in our "Mortgage Foreclosure Program." This program was started in 2008 with grants from the Access to Justice Commission and the Alabama Civil Justice Foundation. The program provides a toll-free hotline for people facing home foreclosure and provides them a free lawyer who works at LSA. The Mortgage Foreclosure Hotline (877-393-2333) is promoted throughout the state with public service announcements on television that are sponsored by the Alabama State Bar.
So far, the hotline has helped more than 3,600 callers. We opened over 3,000 mortgage cases and have completed over 2,300 of those cases. In addition to helping clients, the success of this program creates positive publicity for our bar, which provides these much-needed services.
The partnership with LSA worked so well that we decided to adopt this same model to help with domestic violence cases. We received another grant from the Access to Justice Commission to hire a lawyer to be housed at Legal Services. When we receive domestic violence calls to the Alabama State Bar Volunteer Lawyers Program (VLP), we attempt to place these clients with one of our volunteer lawyers. If we cannot find a volunteer lawyer to help, we send them to the Legal Services lawyer who was hired with this grant. This has worked well and allows us to help a lot of...
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