By Dede Benissan, EJA Fellow Summer 2024

I have fond memories of my first year of law school. The amount of reading thrown at us was certainly challenging, but it was fun knowing that I was doing what I had dreamed of for the longest time. I remember learning about legal concepts such as the breach of implied warranty of habitability in Property, motions in Civil Procedure, and damages calculation in Contracts. However, none of it made practical sense until I served as a Student Counsel with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (HLAB) during the summer of 2024.

From drafting and filing motions to dismiss and stipulations for continuance and communicating with opposing counsel to reviewing settlement agreements, drafting a Reasonable Accommodation request, interviewing clients and helping them with housing applications for financial assistance and Section 8 recertification, my practical legal experience with HLAB has been nothing short of amazing. Not only have I gained insight into courtroom dynamics, but I have also developed my client advocacy and legal research and writing skills. 

HLAB is a distinctive civil legal aid organization. It is run by students under clinical supervision of licensed attorneys and functions based on the Sword and Shield Model, a model developed between HLAB and City Life Vida Urbana (CLVU), a tenant advocacy organization in Jamaican Plain, MA. The Sword represents a range of activist measures undertaken by CLVU to fight against evictions and greedy landlords. Such measures include equipping tenant leaders to advocate for themselves and other tenants, organizing public protests and writing public demand letters. The Shield represents the power of the law in action through legal aid services.

In this article, I reflect on my experience serving as Summer Student Counsel with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, lessons learned during the process, the role of legal aid organizations today, and how Chicago’s housing advocates could do things differently to strengthen tenants’ rights.  

The Sword and the Shield in Action

An evening at City Life Vida Urbana is an evening filled with excitement, power and positive energy. It is impossible to come to CLVU and not come out inspired and renewed with purpose. The people you meet there are from all walks of life. From community organizers and lawyers to graduate students and the average Joe, working to keep food on their table. There you also meet tenant leaders, tenants who previously faced eviction but who had received help from CVLU and came back to empower other tenants. 

Despite the different labels that society places on these individuals, everyone is united by one goal: keeping tenants in their homes. In fact, every newcomer is baptized into CLVU by pledging to help keep tenants in their homes while holding a physical sword. This pledge ends with a simple but powerful slogan that still reverberates in my mind “Cuando luchamos, ganamos,” meaning “When we fight, we win.”

That is where I and other Student Attorneys from the HLAB’s Housing Practice Group gathered on Tuesday evenings to provide brief legal services under clinical supervision. While we are helping mostly tenants who have an upcoming court event, a group of lawyers are providing training to tenants who received a Notice to Quit (NTQ). During these trainings, tenants are educated on their rights and reminded that at no point in time can they be evicted without due process and a court order. Some evenings are busier than others, but there is no limit on the number of tenants who show up, and there is always a positive energy in the room, as everyone is actively doing something to help. 

Most times, Student Counsel or Clinical Supervisors are able to provide practical legal advice to tenants. On one occasion, for instance, a colleague and I wrote a Reasonable Accommodation (RA) request letter for a client with a disability who couldn’t afford to pay his rent on time because he had lost his job. Our RA letter helped him preserve his housing until he found another job. At other times, however, tenants come to CLVU at the last minute, such as when a judgement for possession has already been issued against them. While lawyers and Student Counsel may be limited in how far we help them through the legal process, CLVU can often deploy its sword to support these tenants via public protests and letters to elected officials. 

Continuing Advocacy with the Shield

Beyond providing brief legal services to tenants at CLVU, I also appreciated working with clients to whom HLAB provides full legal representation. Working with such clients while managing a caseload of 7 clients was much more intense but also educationally rewarding. I was able to develop my client interviewing skills, communicate with opposing counsel, draft motions and stipulation agreements and help clients with housing applications.  

One of the clients that I worked with had been living in an apartment with several bad conditions, including mouse infestation, drafty windows, and a defective heating system for years. Despite the management company receiving notice of such conditions, they had failed to make appropriate repairs. Upon taking over this client’s case, I investigated the bad conditions, ensured that the tenant had appropriately withheld rent, and conducted legal research to determine which State Sanitary Code violations constitute a breach of implied warranty of habitability. I also drafted a proposed theory of the case, discussing a range of counterclaims on which the client could likely prevail in court. The claims included a breach of quiet enjoyment, breach of implied warranty of habitability, utility violations, retaliation, and a violation of the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Statute. After working with my Clinical Supervisor to calculate the client’s damages which amounted to over 25k, we worked to propose a settlement offer to the landlord. 

Sometimes, HLAB also provides clients with limited assistance representation in Housing Court through the Lawyer for the Day (LFD) Program. Unlike many courts, the Eastern Housing Court, through its LFD program, allows legal clinics and legal aid organizations to provide brief legal services to unrepresented tenants in court. I enjoyed being in court and helping tenants, many of whom had motion hearings or Tier-1 events. A Tier-1 Event, which is the first court event in the eviction process, is designed to help tenants and landlords mediate their disputes and find potential outcomes outside of trial. Tenants in these situations are often unsure of what to say or do before the judge or during mediation. On a typical Thursday morning, I would listen to clients’ stories, provide clients with the next legal steps, accompany them to mediation, or negotiate with opposing counsel to settle the case under more favorable terms to the tenant. 

One of the clients that I worked with through the LFD program was in court because a judgement for possession had been issued against his mother in an eviction case for non-payment and a motion for execution of judgement had been granted by the judge. After discussing with opposing counsel, we successfully obtained a stipulation agreement vacating the motion for execution and extending by several weeks the due date for the rent arrears. This positive outcome helped the client’s mother avoid eviction and preserve her housing.  

Lessons Learned

I came to HLAB with little knowledge about housing law and tenants’ advocacy. The experience that I gained and the lessons that I learned along the way are all thanks to my Clinical Supervisors, absolute trailblazers, whose dedication both in court and the community is deeply inspiring. Now onto the lessons learned!

• The Complexity of the Legal System

After a few weeks on the job, all I could say to myself was “Oh my God, there are so many motions!” As someone who is interested in litigation, it is fun, but as a newcomer, I can’t help but think of all the steps a tenant must go through to maintain their housing, something that is a basic human right. We have received free land from God but have capitalized on those lands and excluded the most vulnerable. Engaging in the legal process becomes a battle of forms in which the less educated clients easily lose themselves in and end up without a place. This begs the question of how can we make the legal process accessible to tenants and fair to unrepresented tenants?

• The Art of Negotiation

Every skilled lawyer knows what information to disclose, when, and whether they are even under the legal duty to disclose that information. The type of information you disclose and at what time you disclose it can increase or decrease your leverage in negotiations. I’ve had the pleasure to learn such skills during mock sessions and put it into practice in housing court.

• Opposing Counsel is not always an enemy 

Our adversarial system often pushes us, law students, to think that communication with opposing counsel is always adversarial and should sound like “you must provide this to my client, or I’ll immediately sue you and recover damages.” However, through my time at HLAB and the patience of my Clinical Supervisor, I came to understand that communication with opposing counsel is more often a strategic negotiation than an angry discussion stamped with lots of unbearable demands. The truth is that sometimes, landlords are willing to make changes to reported conditions, and that must be taken into consideration when communicating with their attorney.

• Knowing your clients and be ready to switch gears at any moment

Whether you like it or not, you are likely to engage with diverse types of clients during your legal career. At HLAB, I’ve had the opportunity to get a glimpse of what it feels like navigating between different clients: 

• Clients who are nice:they may be overwhelmed by problems, but still respect you and know that you are there to help them
• Clients who fail to communicate:they often fail to communicate relevant information on time, fail to respond to calls or text messages, and can impair your ability to effectively help them. 
• Clients who are blatantly disrespectful: they can be insulting and demeaning in their comments and can make you wonder if they really need your help. I had one of those clients, and he was disrespectful all throughout the conversation and even called me “f**king r**tarded.”
• Clients experiencing mental health challenges:they still respect you but can be unpredictable, and you have to kind of walk on eggshells with them. 
• Clients without boundaries: the ones who will contact you at any time of the night; and the ones who will want to involve a lawyer in almost every aspect of their lives. 

Navigating between all these types of clients was certainly challenging but getting our social worker involved at times helped navigate difficult conversations. Sometimes, however, the intervention of a social worker can worsen the situation. Clients can feel that their privacy is being invaded and that they can’t trust another person on the team. This situation often forces the advocate to find other creative ways of communicating with the client. In all of this, I’ve learned that sometimes, you will just have to say no, establish boundaries, be firm with clients, and remind them of the scope of your work.

The Case for More Community Lawyering 

In the City of Chicago

In our complex society, where economic and social injustices abound, I see legal aid organizations more as band-aid organizations than organizations dedicated to treating the deep root causes of a problem. I do not mean this to diminish the impact of these life-saving organizations. At the core of their mission, legal aid organizations seek to provide legal assistance to people unable to afford legal counsel. So, from a different perspective, it’s not their role to treat the root causes of issues. Take for instance, the lack of affordable housing, which greatly contributes to the eviction crisis. Legal aid attorneys are there to help tenants keep their housing, but sometimes, there is just no affordable housing, which is the real problem. 

During my time at HLAB, I worked with a low-income and elderly client. Before I took over the case, HLAB had helped Mr. X secure a settlement agreement with the landlord. Per the terms of the agreement, the landlord had agreed to forgo of Mr. X’s rent arrearage of over 15k, in exchange for Mr. X simply vacating the apartment by a certain date. This seemed like a success! Normally, it would be. However, when I took over the case, we exhausted all possible means trying to find affordable housing for the client. Mr. X ended up vacating the apartment but resigned himself to living in his car, as he had no family members willing to help and didn’t want to consider shelters. This story goes back to the point I made earlier that legal aid organizations are limited in how far they can help clients. 

Following the expiration of the federal eviction moratorium on August 26, 2021, there is no question that post-COVID-19 eviction filings increased nationwide with some cities exceeding 75% of their historical average. In Cook County, IL where the moratorium ended on October 3, 2021, over 6,000 eviction filings had been filed by April 2022, and over 1,000 eviction orders granted. However, the sad reality is that many of the Chicago tenants at risk of eviction cannot afford legal representation. In 2016, a report from The Reader determined that only 12% of more than 19,300 tenants in Chicago, IL were represented in eviction court, compared to 83% of landlords who were represented. Where do we go from here, in a city where the annual rate of a one-bedroom has seen nearly an 18% increase, the third largest in the country? 

In 2022, the city of Chicago injected $8 million into a 3-year Right to Counsel (RTC) Pilot Program launched the same year. RTC was tasked with providing low-income tenants facing eviction with free ongoing legal representation. However, within the first 14 months of the program, only about a 1,000 households had received legal assistance through the program, which is “a fraction of the nearly 20,000 eviction cases filed” in Chicago in 2022. This reality echoes the words of Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez that the ‘[Right to counsel] is a policy that, on its own, is not a silver bullet.’ I believe that investing in community-based law offices and the creation and funding of organizations based on the Sword and Shield model would make a difference in the number of tenants preserving their housing. 

In 2014, former HLAB President, Lam Ho, founded the Community Activism Law Alliance, better known today as Beyond Legal Aid in Chicago, based on that model. BLA “unites lawyers and activists in a collaborative pursuit for justice by leveraging legal services to benefit the most marginalized communities and individuals.” Today, BLA holds 13 community law offices across the city and partners with activist organizations across Illinois to provide “case support, legal education, and workshop programs.” More investment and funding into these types of programs would allow for more partnerships between tenant advocacy organizations and legal aid organizations to flourish. Not only will this approach help tenants resolve their eviction cases more effectively, but it will also help build community power and education. More funding could also help legal aid organizations establish advice desks in eviction court to support tenants who show up in court at the last minute. 

The RTC Pilot Program and the likes of Beyond Legal Aid certainly have their value. However, let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture. Beyond the eviction crisis, the real problem remains a lack of affordable housing and public housingand until the city of Chicago takes concrete steps, such as the completion of the now delayed CHA’s 10-year Transformation Plan to build more affordable housing, we will see little change in the number of tenants preserving their housing in Chicago.