For most people, the term “legal aid” brings to mind non-profits offering free services to low-income people facing eviction, divorce and other crises.
But a glance at the white pages or a Google search brings up a slew of “legal aid” and “legal services” businesses that are happy to take your money. Many of them don’t even have lawyers on staff.
Now, a lawsuit filed last month by the two largest established legal aid groups in Los Angeles marks the first attempt to enforce a state law that went into effect last January and bans the term “legal aid” or “any confusingly similar name” by organizations that charge money for such services.
The law allows non-profit legal aid groups to sue to enforce the law, and almost immediately after it took effect, lawyers working for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County began identifying local firms they claimed were in violation of the law. They sent more than a dozen cease-and-desist letters to operators from Century City to Downey with names like White House Legal Aid, Vakil’s Legal Aid Center or just plain Legal Aid. Almost everyone contacted agreed to shut down or stop using the name, the organizations said.
The single filed lawsuit was prompted when one of the identified business owners, Sovella Gardner, didn’t respond. The lawsuit alleges that Gardner does business using names such as Legal Aid, Legal Aide, Legal Aid a Low Income Service, Father’s Rights Hotline Legal Services and Legal Assistance Hotline, and charges for services that customers may have assumed would be free.
Toby Rothschild, the Legal Aid Foundation’s general counsel, said his organization had received about a dozen complaints in the past year about Gardner, usually from people who believed they had been dealing with his organization. He further alleged that she was not an attorney. Gardner’s name did not appear in a search of the State Bar of California’s website.
“If you call 411, sometimes they send you to her instead of us,” he said. “The other way she gets a lot of her business is by wandering the halls of a courthouse, outside the filing window. When she sees someone who looks a little lost, she’ll offer to help and charge them a significant amount to do nothing.”
Attempts to reach Gardner for this story were unsuccessful. Several numbers listed for her businesses were disconnected.
Old problem, new solution
Gardner is just one example of a side industry of mostly nonattorneys who have profited off the legal aid name for decades, according to Rothschild.
State Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-West Hollywood, who sponsored the bill, said he encountered the problem when he was director of Bet Tzedek Legal Services, a local Jewish legal aid group, in the 1980s.
“This has been a prevalent issue for at least the past 30 years,” he said. “There are some exceptional and high-quality free legal services programs, and others who would try to prey on people at the moment when they’re most vulnerable. This draws a clear, bright line in the state law.”
But attorney Eugene Ahtirski, who was asked by the Legal Aid Foundation to stop advertising his law firm as a “legal aid alternative,” said that the law also ropes in legitimate low-cost businesses.
Ahtirski had already stopped using the name when contacted by the Legal Aid Foundation’s attorneys. But he said it was unfair to paint every business that uses the term as a scam artist.
“The law’s somewhat overbroad and does affect legitimate businesses,” he said. “In this day and age, with the economy and state cutbacks, legal aid cannot honestly get to all the people that need help, nor the types of services people need help with. This law makes it impossible for a legitimate business owner to fulfill that need.”
Julia R. Wilson, executive director of the Legal Aid Association of California, said that there are two types of businesses using the legal aid name: brick-and-mortar businesses that get into phone books and maintain a long-term presence, and scam artists that set up and disappear within a few months, and then start the cycle again.
In the past, non-profit legal aid groups often had to wait and see if clients were ripped off before filing suit on grounds of fraud.
The brick-and-mortar businesses proved easier to target with such lawsuits. In 2003, the Legal Aid Foundation successfully sued to shut down the California Law Clinic, which advertised itself as “Legal Aid Crenshaw” and “Legal Aid South Broadway” – places where the foundation had offices, making it easier for callers seeking advice to be misdirected by information operators to the wrong group. At the time of the suit, Rothschild counted more than 50 listings for “legal aid” in the white pages, most of them for-profit businesses.
The temporary businesses have proved harder to regulate. Champions of the law hope it will make it easier to go after them as soon as they’re found.
“It was hard to find ways for people to come and complain,” said Neal Dudovitz, executive director of Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County. “That’s another reason this is a great remedy. It gives us opportunities to shut down these organizations before anybody is harmed.”
The Legal Aid Foundation and the Neighborhood Legal Services were among a number of legal aid organizations that pushed for the new regulation. The provision was a small piece of a much larger bill, AB 590, which established a pilot program that guarantees counsel to low-income people in certain civil court proceedings.
The two organizations have already found new for-profit legal aid groups since the initial round of cease-and-desist letters this spring. They pledged to keep pressing on with legal action, and hope the Gardner lawsuit sends a message.
“I’m a realist about the likelihood of stopping all of it,” Dudovitz said, “but I think we can make it significantly less likely for people to continue to be hurt by these kinds of organizations.”
