Mental Health Court Turns Lives Around

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

Joe was a homeless gentleman who kept being picked up for trespassing at Crown Center, where he would sleep in a box on a corner in that area. Joe was not medication compliant and had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He was not engaged with any community-based behavioral health center except to go to Swope Health Services once a week to take a shower.  

A Crisis Intervention Team officer came to court to let the Mental Health Court team know that he felt Joe was decompensating. Outreach at Swope made contact with Joe and after several months of working with him on an intensive level, Joe was admitted to the Mental Health Court program. He graduated and now has stable housing, is medication compliant, has a case manager and has not had police contact since August 2012.

Our staff here at Legal Aid are always looking for the root cause of our clients’ legal problems and for ways we can solve related community problems. One shining example of this work is Mental Health Court in Kansas City.

Many of the defendants in Municipal Court in Kansas City have serious mental health problems that cause them to be homeless and often lead them to violate trespassing and other laws. It used to be that these defendants were in a constant cycle of going in and out of jail, while no one paid any attention to the real cause of the problem. While their mental health problem remained untreated the likelihood of them being able to stay out of jail was remote.

Working with the judges, court administration, prosecutors, mental health providers, the superintendent of the City jail and many others, Legal Aid collaborated to create one of the first Mental Health Court’s in the country. The Court now gives offenders with serious mental health problems the opportunity to go to treatment, rather than going to jail. To graduate from Mental Health Court participants have to stay on their medications, go to regular counseling sessions and not have any new charges filed against them for at least six months. If they graduate, the original charges that brought them into Court are dropped.

The results of the project are fantastic. Today, Mental Health Court has a 56% graduation rate and 89% of the detainees who graduate commit no further violations in the year after their release. Not only does this program improve safety in Kansas City, it also improves the quality of life for the defendants—allowing them to get their mental health issues under control and lead stable lives. Legal Aid has been similarly collaborative for Veterans Treatment Court and Drug Court. 

The Changing Nature of the Legal Profession

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

At the 40th Anniversary of the creation of the Legal Services Corporation, there were lots of speeches by impressive dignitaries. There were also lots of impressive and surprising facts bandied around about the changing nature of the legal profession.

Here are a number of noteworthy facts and statistics that I came away with and which might be of interest to you. I have not done any confirmation of these, but can only tell you that they come from credible sources:

--The cost of litigation is resulting in alternative dispute resolution processes that are outside of the legal system. For example, in 2013, e-Bay resolved 6 million on-line disputes without the assistance of any attorney;

--In 2013, there were 335,000 cases brought in federal court in which the court provided an interpreter for a party or a witness who did not speak English;

--Washington State is considering issuing limited licenses to practice law, that would allow students to graduate from law school in substantially less time if they were only going to focus their practice on a specific type of work (for example, divorces on municipal court cases);

--New York State now allows law students to skip their final term of law school and take the bar exam in February, if they spend their final term working for a not-for-profit organization;

-- Justice Scalia at the conference said: "Access to justice is the most fundamental American ideal."

--The United Kingdom has de-regulated law. They now allow non-lawyers to own law firms;

--According to a 10-year Harvard study, the average new attorney changed jobs roughly 4 times between 2002 and 2012; 

--In half of the cases filed in the 7th Circuit in 2013 at least one party was not represented by counsel;

--In 90% of the divorce cases filed in Connecticut in 2013 at least one party was not represented by counsel;

--In 1978, federal funding for legal aid programs nationally was $205 million. That equates to $747 million in funding in 2014 dollars, when adjusted for inflation. That is more than twice the current level of federal funding for the legal aid programs’ work;

--Discretionary funding in the federal budget (which is where Legal Aid funding comes from) is now about one-third of the budget. In 2024, it’s estimated the discretionary funding will account for only 15% of the budget;

--In 1994, the largest 200 law firms in the country did about 900,000 of pro bono work. In 2013, they did over 5 million hours of pro bono work.

--Attorneys in Texas in 2013 did 2.5 million hours of pro bono work.

LSC's 40th Anniversary Kick-Off Conference

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

For the last three days, I have had the good fortune to be the guest, along with all of the other legal aid program directors, of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) at the 40th anniversary of LSC in Washington, D.C.

Guest speakers included Attorney General Eric Holder, Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who was one of the first presidents of the Legal Service Corporation Board), Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Antonin Scalia, as well as the deans of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Duke law schools. Every living U.S. President sent a congratulatory letter.

From all, the essential underlying message was the same: the work of the legal aid programs is critical to the justice system and to the very success of the country as a whole. As Justice Scalia, of all people, put it: "Access to justice is the most fundamental American ideal."

We were repeatedly thanked profusely for our work, but those thanks really belong to the people who do the work on the front lines every day. So, to everyone who works for the cause-- attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, intake staff, volunteers and even the folks in administration-- please know that at the highest levels of government and the judiciary in our country, your work is known, understood and appreciated.  

And you should also know that, almost uniformly among the speakers we heard, there was a clear recognition that the work of the legal aid programs is grossly underfunded. 

There are a lot of good people at the Legal Services Corporation, the ABA, the Justice Department and the NLADA working hard to translate the appreciation we heard into increased support for our work. 

_________________________

There were lots of amazing facts and statistics bandied about at the conference. Later this week, I hope to get out another post with some of the more memorable ones.

Ed Ford: 50th Anniversary Guest Blogger

Councilman Ed Ford, Kansas City Missouri City Council 

Councilman Ed Ford (circa 1979)

I started working for Legal Aid when I was a third year law student at UMKC (1977-1978), and upon graduation, was hired full-time. The Professional Building, Linwood Multipurpose Building (now the Mohart Center) and the Jackson County Juvenile Court were all places I called home during my Legal Aid tenure. I was a guardian ad litem for abused and neglected children, represented alleged mentally ill folks who were staving off commitment (back in the day before one had to be both mentally ill and dangerous to oneself or others) and worked on education issues of children with disabilities.

It was during these early years at Legal Aid that I was first introduced to City Government and its politics. In 1978, a fellow Legal Aid Attorney, Jerry Riffel, was running for KCMO City Council. Jerry was a long haired liberal leaning candidate who headed up Legal Aid's housing unit. None of us really thought Jerry had a chance as he was running against an “establishment” attorney, with plenty of campaign money and the support of the powerful Citizens' Association. To make it even more of an uphill battle, Jerry was running in-district for the affluent 4th district- the political heart of the city. Jerry and his team of volunteers staged an impressive grass roots campaign that outworked his opponent and ended up winning the Council seat in 1979. “Wow,” I thought. What a great city we lived in when someone like Jerry could get elected.

My final years with Legal Aid were spent at the South Office, where we represented our clients on a variety of issues including many landlord tenant matters. It became apparent that many of the legal issues that confronted our clients were primarily financial in nature. Clients were being evicted not because they were bad tenants but because they didn't have the money to pay the rent.  The South Office is where I first met an energetic minister by the name of Rev. Emmanuel Cleaver II who was advocating for the same folks Legal Aid was representing. 

My opportunity to serve as an elected official began when I was first elected to the KCMO City Council in 1995. I am now starting my 16th and final year (term limits). I have been privileged to serve with four Mayors including Kansas City's first African- American Mayor, Emmanuel Cleaver II, and its first woman Mayor, Kay Barnes.  I am proud of the progress we have made in many areas of Kansas City, especially Downtown and in the Northland. Unfortunately, the problems of poverty, crime and racism continue to hold back progress in other areas, especially the urban core. 

I still believe in Legal Aid and its mission. I continue to be an advocate for Legal Aid funding recognizing its great work in neighborhoods, housing issues and municipal court. If it wasn't for my time at Legal Aid, I don't believe I would have run for City Council. I still practice law with a small firm in Kansas City North and am pleased to be a part of the Volunteer Attorney Project (VAP).

[In celebration of Legal Aid of Western Missouri's 50th anniversary, we will feature guest bloggers. If you have Legal Aid memories or reflections you would like to share in a guest post, please contact Karen Cutliff - kcutliff@lawmo.org.)

GUEST BLOG POST: How It Was for Me

Marcia Walsh - 50th Anniversary Guest Blogger

Marcia Walsh

I graduated from KU law school and started working for the Legal Aid and Defender Society (Legal Aid of Western Missouri) in 1973. Richard Nixon was our President. In March that year the last US troops were going to be withdrawn from Vietnam. 

The War on Poverty, which had begun under President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, continued into 1973.  The programs involved in fighting this war were coordinated by the Office of Economic Opportunity, the OEO, and it was this federal agency that established the guidelines for and awarded federal funds to local legal services groups.  In 1973, President Nixon decided that the OEO ought to be terminated, and with it the Legal Services Corporation.  He appointed Howard Phillips to head the OEO and he directed him to dismantle the entire OEO.  

During 1973 and every year for the next several, Legal Aid’s continued existence seemed to me never to be a sure thing.  We had to scramble so hard for funds from whatever source we could find.  It wasn’t that our legal services weren’t needed by the Kansas City community.  It was that Legal Aid might not have enough money to pay the bills.  I think my memory on this is accurate, 
that at one point we all voted to take pay cuts rather than to lay off any Legal Aid employees.

In 1973, Legal Aid had a north office, a south office, a juvenile office and a central office in Kansas City. I worked in the central office, on the second floor of a building at the corner of 11th and Oak Streets. I remember that Effie Day was already working at Legal Aid, I think in the north office, when I started.  [For months there was a pink notice attached to the door leading from the street to the stairs up to our offices, telling us—and our clients—that the building had been condemned by the City and that no one should enter it under threat of arrest.] 

Executive Director Lloyd Silverman had hired me to work in the Municipal Court Defense Unit. Others in this Unit when I started were Terry Lechner, Mike Dailey, Frank Zetelski and Tom Notestine. Our managing attorney was Bill Dittmeier and you could not have asked for a better boss.  

There were no female prosecutors or judges and I was the first “woman attorney” to appear in Municipal Court on a daily basis and to represent defendants. [I use the phrase “woman attorney” even though I don’t like it.  I agree with Gloria Steinem, who said:  “Whoever has power takes over the noun—and the norm—while the less powerful get an adjective.”]

 In fact, until December, 1973, there was really no municipal courthouse. Instead, Court met in two locations: at the top floor of the police station, where a large elevator opened right into the courtroom. There the “custody defendants,” those people held overnight in custody for inability to post bond, were seated—and sometimes sleeping and snoring—in the open-door elevator, waiting for us to interview them and for the judge to call their cases. The other location was the second floor of the Continental Trailways bus station at 11th and McGee.

It was exciting and interesting work, and fast-paced. We were in court every morning, representing defendants in trials and pleas and probation revocation hearings. We represented clients who had come into our office and about whose cases we knew something in advance of the trial, and we represented defendants whom we met and interviewed for the first time in court that morning. 

There were six Legal Aid attorneys and seven active courtrooms. Every judge expected us to be in his courtroom when any case was called on which Legal Aid had furnished an entry of appearance and also when that particular judge wanted to appoint a Legal Aid attorney to represent a defendant on the spot. We were kept running. And if one of us was sick, or was signed out for a vacation day or week, our Unit called on attorneys from other Legal Aid offices for help. They always came through for us. 

When we returned from morning court, we interviewed clients. Four of us shared one office, about 12 feet by 12 feet. Two big metal desks were crammed back to back into this space. We could interview only one client at a time in that office. The three attorneys not involved in the interview were either still in court or waited elsewhere on the premises so that our client’s privacy could be respected. 

In the afternoon, we typically had fewer clients scheduled in court and there were typically fewer court appointments, so only two of us went to court. The others interviewed clients and did any required research. 

That was Monday through Thursday. Fridays were different. Friday mornings were usually light dockets in court. Two of us did not go to Municipal Court but instead went across the street to Circuit Court to handle the de novo appeals from Municipal Court. Municipal Court had no Friday afternoon docket and we did not interview clients on Friday afternoon. I remember taking long lunches at the Vineyard or at Bryant’s or some other restaurant on Fridays, and talking about cases, and discussing possible defenses and arguing search and seizure issues. On Friday afternoons, we did research, wrote briefs and motions and prepared our cases for the upcoming week. 

I remained at Legal Aid for 10 years, in the Municipal Court Unit for about five years, and then at the juvenile unit, the consumer unit, and the litigation unit. I was then elected by the City Council and the Mayor to be a judge in Municipal Court, becoming the first full-time judge who happened to be a woman at any judicial level in Kansas City. The day I was appointed, a Legal Aid attorney/friend said she thought it was maybe more significant that the Council had chosen a Legal Aid attorney for the judicial position than that they had chosen a woman.

[In celebration of Legal Aid of Western Missouri's 50th anniversary, we will feature guest bloggers. If you have memories of Legal Aid you would like to share in a guest post, please contact Karen Cutliff - kcutliff@lawmo.org.)

Better Late Than Never

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

As of Tuesday this week, Legal Aid is now doing something that we should have done long ago. We are beginning the process of recognizing that any two people who are committed to each other as a family should be treated as a family.

So, effective this week, we have started domestic partners coverage under our health insurance policy. If a staff member lives with and is committed to a partner, that staff member now has the same right to obtain health insurance for that partner as she or he would if the couple were legally married.


The policy applies regardless of whether the partners are of the same or opposite gender. We will be looking at other ways of recognizing domestic partners, including changing our dental insurance and leave policies because couples who are fully committed to each other should receive the same respect and treatment regardless of whether the commitment is to the same or the opposite gender.

Missouri's Justice Gap

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

Last week, I attended an excellent speech by the newest Judge on the Missouri Supreme Court—Judge Paul Wilson.

In his presentation, Judge Wilson noted a staggering fact: nearly 100,000 Missourians this year will be sued or file suit in Missouri courts without representation of counsel. The sad truth is that tens of thousands more low-income Missourians, with serious legal needs will never get to court, because they cannot afford a lawyer. 

In his brief speech, Judge Wilson called on Missouri lawyers to increase their pro bono work for people in need. Here’s a link to the speech:

http://www.lawmo.org/pdf/WilsonSpeech.pdf.

 

It’s short and well worth reading.

Blight Fight Continues

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

Kansas City is on the cutting edge nationally on the issue of how to reduce the number of abandoned properties in the city’s urban core and Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s Economic Development team is playing a key role in that work.

In the last week, there have been two articles in the Kansas City Star discussing Legal Aid’s partnerships with the city, neighborhood associations, law firms, banks and others to turn blighted, abandoned property into high quality, occupied housing. The first dealt with beneficiary deeds that keep money (in the form of home equity) that is desperately needed in the urban core, in the urban core.

The second was on the front page of the Star yesterday morning and dealt with an initiative conceived by the Post-Foreclosure Task Force, which Legal Aid’s Michael Duffy leads and in which the city is a close partner. The idea is to get local banks to provide financing for high quality rehabbers to rehab many more abandoned properties than they are able to do now.  You may have seen this on TV as well.

This is exciting work that can make a gigantic difference in increasing property tax revenues, decreasing crime and, most importantly, improving the quality of life in the city’s urban core.

We have a lot of great partners in this work including, just to name a few—city manager Troy Schulte, Council members Ed Ford and Cindy Circo (and really the entire City Council), John Wood and David Park who lead the city’s efforts to address abandoned and dangerous buildings in the urban core, and neighborhood leaders too many to mention.

In the coming year, I’m hoping that you’ll hear more about the expansion of these excellent projects.

SCOTUS Rulings Bring Us Closer to Justice for All

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

 

If Justice for All means anything, it should mean that the law should treat everyone equally and should not favor or punish a group of people for things that are beyond their reasonable control.

In the last century, our country has made impressive progress towards equality based on gender, race, national origin, religion and disability. Before yesterday, however, federal law openly, blatantly and intentionally discriminated against millions of Americans based solely on their sexual orientation.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court rulings will stop a good deal of that discrimination. And while we still have a long way to go to reach equality on all of the numerous forms of our historic discrimination, I’m excited that our Supreme Court had the wisdom and courage to bring us one step closer to truly having Justice for All.

Legal Aid Steps Up and Shares Resources

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

Pictures and stories of the horrible tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma yesterday bring back vivid memories of the May 2011 tornado that ravaged Joplin, Missouri.

The talented staff in Legal Aid’s Joplin office have learned a lot in the last two years about the recovery process from a tornado and what a legal aid program can do to get a community back on its feet. I have talked with Janice Franklin, the Managing Attorney of the Joplin Office, and we have reached out to Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma to make sure that they get the benefit of everything that we have learned in the last two years.

Resources we are offering include: our comprehensive disaster-relief manual; tips as to legal issues that are most likely to appear immediately after a disaster (rental price gouging being one of them); lists of likely funders for disaster relief work and sample grant applications; suggestions on how to help their staff deal with their own emotional trauma from the storm; and ideas on how to staff up after the storm.

Helping people in need is what we do best and we will make sure that the people of Moore get all the help that we can give them. Many thanks to Janice and her staff for sharing their knowledge.

TMC Medicaid Appeals Project Follow-Up

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

There was a great article in the Kansas City Star this morning about the Medicaid Appeals partnership that Legal Aid of Western Missouri has with Truman Medical Center.

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/04/3848419/alan-bavley-hed-like-to-lose-this.html
 

As the article pointed out, the project has gotten more than 1,000 Truman patients who are permanently and totally disabled access to long-term, proactive medical care. It has also generated more than $11 million in sorely needed revenues for Truman.

 

The article, however, failed to mention the tremendous team that does this work. Effie Day as Project Director and Stacy Schaub as Supervising Attorney of the Public Benefits teams have done excellent work in making sure that when Truman’s patients are wrongly turned down for Medicaid, they have the best possible representation they can have to make sure that they get the benefits they deserve. And the same holds true when the patients come from our other referral partners, including K.C. Free Health, KU Medical Center and St. Luke’s Hospital, as well as when the wrongfully denied client just calls us on the phone.

 

The fact that Legal Aid wins more than 85% of all of the Medicaid Appeals cases is the result of the excellent work of everyone on Legal Aid’s Public Benefits team, including the case handlers: Effie Day; Stacy Schaub; Karen Karnes; Katie Wood; Maura Weber; and, Megan Simpson and our talented paralegals: Tracie Griddine and Kim Morris, along with the team’s legal secretary—Sandy Kincaid.

 

We also could not get the results we get at Truman without the excellent work of the Financial Counseling Center staff, the assistance of the social workers and medical staff at Truman and the support of Lydia Jones and Bill Colby who oversee the project at Truman.

 

It’s a wonderful project and the true credit should go to the front line staff who get the job done.

 

Legal Aid's Fight to Re-purpose West High School

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

31 years ago this month, the Kansas City Missouri School District closed West High School.  Ever since the District closed West, Michael Duffy, who leads Legal Aid’s Economic Development team, has been fighting to either get it re-opened or repurposed.

Thanks in good part to Michael’s work and the work of the many other people and organizations that Michael has partnered with, Kansas City’s West Side has been revitalized and is now a wonderfully vibrant community. Through all this time, however, West High has been a decaying eye sore in the middle of the neighborhood.  Still, Michael has never given up the fight to get West High redeveloped.

Five years ago, Michael and Westside Housing Organization (WHO) approached the District with an acquisition and financing proposal that would have redeveloped the building as a mixed use apartment complex with low-income and market rate apartments.  A similar project that Michael helped create nine years ago at Villa Del Sol on the West Side is a national model for urban core redevelopment.  The District, however, turned down the Michael’s West High School redevelopment proposal three times.

Finally, last night, with the building in much worse condition than it was five years ago, the District preliminarily accepted a new, similar plan that Michael and WHO put together.  Again, the project would be mixed use revitalization of the buildings and will require Michael and WHO to assemble roughly $40 million in funding to make it work.

I am confident, that they are up to the task.  The result will be one of the biggest improvements in the urban core of Kansas City in a long time.  Congratulations to Michael, his partners at WHO and to everyone else who has worked on this project.

An Alternative to Pay Day Loans

Gregg Lombardi-Executive Director

I am pleased to announce that, as a result of the work of volunteer attorneys at three major law firms, low-income Kansas Citians now have an alternative to Pay Day loans.

For many years Pay Day loans have been the scourge of low income neighborhoods.  The average interest rate on these short term loans is 450% APR.  Although the default rate on these loans is about 6% and they are obscenely profitable, traditional major banks have, to date, not offered competitive alternatives and efforts to find a legislative solution to the problem in Missouri have failed.

About two years ago, CCO, a local community organizing group, started working to create a competitive alternative to Pay Day loans.  Legal Aid joined the effort about 18 months ago.  Our Volunteer Attorney Project has recruited talented volunteer attorneys including Adam LaBoda from Spencer Fane Britt & Browne, Kyle McCurry from Stinson Morrison Hecker and Tom Schenkelberg of Polsinelli Shughart to work on the project. Kyle initially provided pro bono representation in support of the project generally and subsequently represented Central Bank, which will actually be making the loans.

Other partners in the project include the FDIC, Commerce Bank, United Way and numerous other community stakeholders.

As a result of the attorneys' work, a new not-for-profit-- Fair Community Corporation-- has been formed, complex banking regulations have been navigated, funds raised and FCC is now taking applications for loans.  The loans will be at 36% APR and will come with the opportunity for financial education to allow the borrowers to gain access to even lower interest loans.  A set of referring agencies will be referring qualified, low-income borrowers to the project for loans.  For now at least, borrowers will have to go through a referring agency. 

If the project is as successful, as we think it will be, it is likely to be a powerful tool in driving Pay Day lenders out of Kansas City and may well be replicated elsewhere.

The project is also an excellent demonstration of what talented pro bono attorneys working through VAP can accomplish.  We are tremendously grateful for the excellent work that Adam, Kyle and Tom have done on this project.