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 Housing and homelessness   24% Consumer (mostly for elderly)   24% Domestic violence, divorce, child support and other family matters   17% Social Security   9% Public benefits and employment   9% 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.

DISCLAIMER    ©2008 CONNECTICUT LEGAL SERVICES, INC