Over the past few years, the value of \u201cbespoke\u201d or personalized legal services has been challenged.\u00a0 My experiences over the last few months suggest that there is a real place for these individualized services and that projects that ask people to navigate the legal system with little help from an attorney can be dehumanizing and ineffective.<\/p>\n
Although my survey of clients is not systematic, I have had the chance through recent representation and consultation to talk with clients who were\u00a0represented by systematized practices or through court sponsored programs.\u00a0 It is clear that many are lost in court sponsored programs\u2014the most common unhappiness that clients frequently share with me has come from clients who go through landlord\/tenant court and are told that they can handle their eviction defenses through settlement programs, programs that invariably lead to their eviction, whether they have defenses or not.<\/p>\n
More problematic, however, are clients who have sampled systematized law firms that purport to represent them and do a bad job.\u00a0 My discussions have been with clients who have sought help in SSI and Social Security Disability cases similar to the ones we handle at the Temple Legal Aid Office. \u00a0\u00a0Repeatedly, clients are unhappy with the\u00a0systematized, one-size-fits-all legal services of these firms and do not feel like they have had their day in court without a connection to their attorney.\u00a0 Sometimes, it is just dehumanizing, whether a client wins or loses.\u00a0 More troubling, however, are clients who get bad representation from \u00a0attorneys who either are\u00a0bad at using mechanized services or who assume that by doing so they do\u00a0not have to develop a real relationship with their clients.\u00a0 An example of this is a client who described going to a small firm where the legal work had been parsed out to paralegals. \u00a0At that firm, attorneys only spoke to clients in the waiting room before hearings.\u00a0 The client told me about his hearing, where he felt both his attorney and the judge did not understand him and reported that he did not remember his attorney doing anything to learn about how he was different from any other claimant or actually saying anything at the hearing.\u00a0 A worse example was a client who came to see me because she had gone to a national Social Security and SSI Disability agency she had contacted that was systematizing her claim. \u00a0She was concerned she had not heard from them for a year.\u00a0 It took me several days to get through to the person she was told was her contact at the agency.\u00a0 When I did, I learned \u00a0that this client was right and her case had been lost in the shuffle\u2014due to her trying to contact them over the last several months, someone had actually looked at her case a few months before to discover that an appeal had not been filed that she thought they had filed.\u00a0 They filed a new claim at that time but without talking with the client.\u00a0 Even worse, they did so without collecting the information they needed to help her, in her case including that she had metastasized cancer, about which I informed them and gave them necessary paperwork.<\/p>\n
Even when clients lose their cases, there is a value to bespoke legal services.\u00a0 One client said that to me explicitly.\u00a0 We had represented her after she had been represented by a systematized law firm.\u00a0 Although that firm and our office had both lost her case, she told me that she was much happier with us than her previous attorney as we actually talked to her. \u00a0She said she felt that she had her day in\u00a0court and that we had tried.<\/p>\n
It is true that computer programs can create documents and paralegals can fill them in if people need help. However, it is not necessarily true that this leads to representation close to the quality that can come from bespoke legal services.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the past few years, the value of \u201cbespoke\u201d or personalized legal services has been challenged.\u00a0 My experiences over the last few months suggest that…<\/p>\n