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About
CLS
•Who
we are
•Our geographical service area
•Range of CLS's assistance to clients
•Priorities
•Distribution of cases
•Case Examples
•Board of Directors
Who
we are.
Connecticut Legal Services is a private, non-profit, civil law
firm dedicated to helping low-income families and individuals
obtain justice.
The bulk of our work consists of providing civil law representation
and counseling to thousands of low-income families and individuals
each year.
We help our clients use the law to meet
basic life needs.
Our geographical
service area.
CLS serves all of Connecticut except the greater Hartford and
New Haven areas. We operate out of six full-service offices, five
satellite offices, and one administrative office.
To see how the 122 towns that
we cover are distributed among our full-service offices please follow
these links: map of legal services coverage areas in Connecticut, and the map of legal services elder law coverage areas in Connecticut.
Range
of CLS's assistance to clients.
Our lawyers are experts in a wide range of poverty law practice
areas: housing and homelessness; public benefits and employment;
domestic violence and other family law matters; health law including
Medicaid, Medicare, and nursing home matters; education and juvenile
law; consumer law; and mental retardation and disability law.
We offer our clients a full range of legal representation and counseling
services.
Priorities.
Although we serve thousands of individual clients
and their families each year, the need within our service population
for legal aid far outstrips our current resources.
CLS’s case selection priorities
focus our resources on helping indigent clients meet basic life needs,
for example:
- A job, or a means of
support when they are incapable of working or cannot find a job
- Avoiding or escaping homelessness,
and obtaining decent, safe, and affordable housing safety from
domestic violence and other forms of abuse
- A stable, integrated family
- Medical and behavioral
health care
- A good education, especially
for children with disabilities
- Autonomy and dignity,
especially for persons who are elderly or coping with disabilities
- Protection against consumer
scams, especially those that target the elderly and disabled, and
- Avoiding or overcoming
harmful discrimination based, e.g., on race, ethnicity, disability,
or source of income.
We seek to maximize the impact of our efforts by undertaking cases
and projects that cost-effectively benefit large numbers of needy people.
We provide community education programs to clients and social services
agencies to help our clients know when they need a lawyer, how to avoid
legal pitfalls, and how to solve or deal with some kinds of legal problems
on their own.
Distribution
of cases.
Distribution
of 8,058 Cases Handled In Fiscal Year 2006-2007 (new
cases opened plus old cases carried over from 2007). |
Housing
and homelessness
|
|
24%
|
Consumer (mostly for elderly)
|
|
24%
|
Domestic
violence, divorce, child support and other family matters
|
|
18%
|
Social
Security |
|
9% |
Public
benefits and employment
|
|
10%
|
Health
law (including Medicaid, Medicare, and nursing home matters)
|
|
5%
|
Education
and juvenile law
|
|
4%
|
Other
cases
|
|
4%
|
Mental
retardation and disability
|
|
2%
|
|
Case Examples.
Following are two case summaries that show how CLS
makes real differences in our clients’ lives.
Connecticut Department
of Social Services (DSS) and the Social Security Administration
misjudge the severity of a child’s disability.
Carol is divorced with two children, one of whom, seven-year-old Gerald, suffers
from severe behavioral health problems. Carol asked CLS for help because she
was out of money and facing homelessness.
Difficulties had piled up on Carol. She had been unable to work full-time because she had been unable to find a childcare provider willing to take on a child as difficult as Gerald. DSS had not exempted her, as the mother of a disabled child, from being terminated from time-limited cash assistance. The Social Security Administration had refused to provide her family with benefits based on Gerald’s disability. And her landlord was evicting her for non-payment of rent
We were, thankfully, able to
help Carol find a way out of all this trouble.
- Arguing that Gerald’s
special needs posed a barrier to employment for Carol, we persuaded
a DSS hearing officer to instruct the agency to provide Carol’s
family with six months of additional temporary family assistance.
- Marshalling evidence of
the severity of Gerald’s health problems, we successfully
appealed the Social Security Administration’s denial of disability
benefits for him and his family.
- Having gotten Carol regular
income, we were able to negotiate an agreement with the attorney
for Carol’s landlord that allowed her to pay off her rental
debt and restore her tenancy.
Carol is now working in a part-time
job during school hours and is deeply relieved that her family is
no longer threatened by hunger and homelessness.
Landlord refuses security
deposit guarantee.
Diana and her 3-year-old child, Eve, were forced to seek refuge in a homeless
shelter when Eve was diagnosed as having lead poisoning and their apartment
was found to be seriously contaminated.
Within a week, Diana, who does not own a car, found a new apartment
close to her 25 hour a week job. But because she did not have enough
cash to pay the required security deposit, she applied for and was
granted a Connecticut Department of Social Services security deposit
guarantee. When the landlord refused to accept this guarantee, which
was in practical effect as good as cash, the homeless shelter referred
Diana to CLS.
Diana’s CLS lawyer failed at first to persuade her landlord’s
lawyer that his client was in violation of the Connecticut law that
prohibits landlords in some circumstances from discriminating against
tenants because of their source of income. The CLS lawyer then filed
a complaint on Diana’s behalf to the Connecticut Human Rights
and Opportunities Commission. The landlord relented and offered Diana
the apartment and a $5,000 settlement. Both Diana and Eve are doing
well in their new apartment. |
