CLAO: 'Trying to Convince People that They Have Rights'

AN EVICTION notice comes in the mail to a Cambridge mother with four young children. She doesn't think that there is anything she can do to stop it. But the notice looks like a legal paper, and something tells her she should go to a lawyer. She doesn't have any money, but maybe she remembers hearing one of her friends talk about a group of lawyers in the neighborhood who work for free.

She walks into the Community Legal Assistance Office (CLAO), not sure of what anyone can do for her. A law student discusses her problem and suggests several actions she can legally take.

Paul Newman '63. chief CLAO staff attorney, describes CLAO's job as "trying to convince these people that they have rights." CLAO is a neighborhood law office at 235 Broadway opened by the Harvard Law School. Six full-time attorneys and about 100 law students provide free legal aid for Cambridge residents whose income falls below a set limit. The office is funded by an OEO grant with a ten per cent contribution from the Law School.

CLAO works with people who have never used the law for protection, people who have been on the adverse end of the legal chain in such encounters as evictions, repossessions, and police arrests. Consequently, CLAO uses several tactics to show its clients that they can use the law to help themselves. Probably the most effective of these is simply talking. "Sometimes you sit around and have coffee... and get the word across to them that we're doing things." Newman said. "You show them that they have the right to fight."

This can mean showing a tenant that he can fight his landlord's attempts to evict him. Or it can mean telling a welfare recipient that a social worker has no right to search his home. A great deal of talk is often required simply to uncover the problems, since CLAO clients frequently do not realize their legal rights.

Howard Cohen, a second year law student, conducts long interviews with his clients. "The one thing they don't get from any other service is time," Cohen said.

"Sometimes you uncover a problem that wasn't there before. That's where the clients come in with one problem and have another problem solved that was on their mind but they hadn't realized," he explained. "You know, somebody comes in who has been a landlord-tenant problem. You find that she also has a welfare problem and then you help her out on your own initiative."

One measure of the success of this method is the number of clients who are happy enough with the service to return. "A lot of my clients have called back and brought other problems in and asked for me." Cohen said. During the first half of last year 24 per cent of CLAO's cases were from former clients.

But the individual cases are often boring and frustrating for the law students: boring because they are the same routine cases and frustrating because the real problem is that the whole legal system needs reform.

About 40 per cent of CLAO's cases are in family law. Most of these are routine divorces and are handled by law students. Good interviewing sometimes turns up other problems. but the students still admit that most of the divorce cases are boring and are one of the reasons why students leave CLAO. "Particularly the Harvard Law students sort of think in grander terms and get upset about doing the very mundane work." Cohen said.

ONE WAY to get away from the case-by-case routine is to spend time on legislative reform and on test cases. Van Lanckton, the director of CLAO, acknowledges the importance of individual service, but says that legislative reform is more significant. "Rather than simply guiding one individual through the legal maze, we try to change the system and make it more fair." Lanckton said.

However, there is disagreement at CLAO about this point. "This day by day plodding along is greatly underrated." Newman says. "In a way I see law reform as a cop-out. You're going to the courts where the problems are often not the worst."

Decisions on test ???

CLAO's practice. CLAO clients include tenant unions, consumer groups, the Cambridge Tenants' Senate, and a chapter of the Welfare Rigths Organization.

Determining if the impetus for organization should come from CLAO or the group involved is a touching issue. Traditionally, lawyers are not supposed to seek out business. However, as Newman points out, "The rules are really relaxed when you're not doing it for money."

Lanckton resolves the issue simply by saying. "The knowledge that CLAO is there helps the community organize itself." Although this means that law students do not go knocking on doors. Newman feels that CLAO is still able to get the word out to the community. "We believe that it's our job to reach out." he said. "When we do perceive a problem we are eager to bring it to the attention of our clientele." available to the community to use us to achieve their own purposes. ????ton said. Newman says that the poverty lawyer must tell the community that "whatever they want you to do you'll do, as long as it's ????"

This may mean that the lawyer must support the group even when he thinks it has made an ??????? decision. As Newman explained, "It might not be what the community needs, but it's what it thinks it needs. Sometimes lawyers come in and want to change the neigh-both sell in their own social image." He calls this attitude "condescending as hell."

CLAO could, for example, solve the problem of dull routine by refusing to take divorce cases and then diverting its resources to more interesting social concerns. But it seems obvious that the community wants lawyers to handle divorces, and this is thebest way for CLAO to conform to its clients' priorities.

As A law school legal aid project, CLAO is particularly susceptible to the charge of using the community solely for its own research and educational purposes. Former director Ferren rejects this notion and says that there is no conflict between CLAO's service to the community and its education of students. CLAO was founded, Ferren said, on the concept that "only through legal service do we have a way of learning what the legal problems are."

CLAO still comes under attack from another local group-the private lawyers. The reactions of the local bravery, but some lawyers "resent us cause they think we take business away from them." Newman says. In addition. Newman said, the law students appear as a threat because they are not members of the bar, yet they often do a better job than the established lawyers.

Director Lanckton answers these clergies by pointing out that CLAO, with its income limits for clients, only takes charity cases who would be unable to pay a lawyer's fee anyway. Newman says that CLAO thus "salves the conscience of a lot of private attorneys." CLAO refers cases which are ineligible under its financial guidelines to private lawyers. Newman also points out that in getting people to "think in terms of legal problems." CLAO is bound to generate business for the local bar.

In another move to make sure that it continues to represent the community's interests, CLAO began to form a policy-making community board this past fall. The CLAO board is unusual in that 17 of its 29 members will be community representatives, giving the community a clear majority. The other 12 members will be from the local bar and from the law school student body and faculty.

The law school faculty still retains a committee on CLAO which is formally responsible for the CLAO grant. Ferren, who heads the committee, was one of the persons responsible for creating the community board. It was "just not right" for CLAO formally to make the decisions about the community, he said, "If a university law school is in any way going to get involved in a service venture you simply want to cut the community in formally."

Toward the Community

The formation of the community board seems to indicate an increasing movement of CLAO away from its Harvard connections toward the community. It has been difficult, especially recently, for CLAO to define its relationship to Harvard. It seems symbolic that since CLAO's creation in 1966 the director's office has been located at the law school, not at the CLAO offices. This spring Lanckton plans to move his office to the main CLAO location.

However, there are still other factors which will continue to keep the tie to Harvard strong as long as CLAO is manned to such a large extent by law students. One example of this is the current attempt to secure course credit for students working at CLAO and faculty status for the CLAO staff attorneys.

Student worker Cohen is one of the few against giving course credit for work at CLAO, since doing so would reduce the freedom of students working at CLAO. They would then have formal requirements to meet, and the law school faculty would have to approve any changes. "CLAO in a way was one of the first big breaks in the law school's armor the first time that an activity really got out of the law school and survived on its own with very little help." Cohen said.

"Sure the support was there and the funding comes through Harvard Law School, but it really existed very much on its own. It tries very hard to disestablish itself from the law school. What they're trying to do now in the law school is really co-opting us.... You want the whole system to tumble. You don't want to build it up."

THE MOST difficult aspect of CLAO's connection to Harvard appears when clients ask CLAO to represent them in cases against Harvard. Ferren says that CLAO has no set policy on these cases, but that it has represented a number of cases whose interests are adverse to the university.

While most clients seem unaware of CLAO's connection to Harvard, the staff does reveal the relation to clients involved in cases against Harvard. CLAO often suggests that these clients take their cases to Cambridge Legal Services (CLS), but CLAO will still represent them if the lawyers feel they can do a fair job. "We don't feel we're Harvard axmen and that we owe anything to Harvard, even though our salaries come from Harvard," Newman said.

CLAO lawyers have handled landlord-tenant disputes, potentially the biggest source of conflict, against the Hunneman Co., Harvard's realtor. Last summer CLAO defended the man accused of stealing the Gutenberg Bible from Widener Library.

Presently Wally Sherwood, a CLAO lawyer, is defending members of OBU in the hearings on the injunction obtained by Harvard in December after OBU occupied University Hall. CLAO agreed to represent OBU, Lanckton said, when its members called the night before the hearing and did not have a lawyer. Lanckton explained that CLAO is not really funded to serve Harvard students, but that it will usually represent those students who are financially eligible.

Lanckton suggested that although Harvard has widely diverse interests, anything that CLAO does for the community is in Harvard's interest. "It's our feeling that CLAO is probably the most important interface between Harvard and the community," he said,

However, Lanckton did qualify this statement. "I don't feel any threat of being co-opted by Harvard having some purpose in the community and using CLAO to further it." he said. He pointed out that many CLAO clients are unaware of the connection to Harvard and therefore cannot credit CLAO's service to Harvard.

The Wilson Report on "The University and the City" includes CLAO in an appendix on "Harvard's efforts in urban affairs," although the report does state that CLAO is a project under the law school faculty.

Ferren says of it. "It is ironic that when the heat comes on a university it is easy to point out to the community all of the projects which happen to be going for the benefit of the local community when those projects have only happened because a few individuals in the different schools wanted them."

Next fail as CLAO enters its fifthyear and switches from a research to an operational grant it will achieve an increased permanence in the Cambridge community. At this time the staff will have to resolve some of the major problems now facing CLAO.

As the community board begins to function during the next year, its powers will become more clearly defined. If the board indeed assumes the policy-making power, then the professional staff will have to resign this function. It remains to be seen if the board and the staff will continue to agree on the nature of CLAO's service and if there is a disagreement what will happen.

It seems likely that Harvard's relations with Cambridge may become increasingly tense during the '70's. Especially as tenants become more conscious of their rights future encounters with Harvard seem probable. It has been suggested that this will all come to a head if Harvard tries to tear down apartments for the Kennedy Library.

Meanwhile, CLAO will undoubtedly be asked to represent Cambridge residents against Harvard. As the cases become more vital to Harvard's interests, CLAO will have to define its relation to Harvard more carefully.

The CLAO staff has thus far been able to avoid committing itself to any set proportion of individual cases and law reform work, due to CLAO's generous financial and personnel resources. However, if the CLAO caseload continues to grow or the resources are cut back, the staff may have to commit itself increasingly to one of the two alternatives.

Even without either of these changes the CLAO staff may find itself going increasingly in one of these directions. Lanckton observed that "the students are much more savvy now than they were three years ago," which he then defined as a greater sensitivity to law reform issues.

In discussions of the merits of individual service versus law reform a pattern seems to emerge. While the students seem to enjoy the contact with individual clients, they talk of the need to solve legal problems on a larger scale instead of spending time on individual cases. "As far as the law school is concerned a lot of students are much more radical than CLAO," Cohen said. "They think that helping people day by day is really placating."

It is staff attorney Newman who speaks of the need to handle individual cases. "You just need the day to day hawking and policing to do it," he says.

Newman admits that in a sense his position is conservative, not radical, and that the process is slow. But he says, "You have to have some kind of underlying faith in the legal system to want to change it."