Posted September 30, 20248:38 am
Inside the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association’s headquarters at One Cleveland Center, a trio of recently minted attorneys is helping an underserved segment of the low-to-moderate income community with legal help at below-market rates.
This isn’t a law firm, per se, but a collection of lawyers who comprise the founding fellows of the Cleveland Legal Collaborative, an innovative program launched this summer designed to provide low-cost legal services to people in and around Greater Cleveland who fall within 200% to 400% of the federal poverty line.
Besides being a resource for the community, the program serves as a business accelerator for solo practitioners who are early in their careers and who have an interest in helping individuals of modest means who may struggle to afford an attorney.
“The (CLC) is a social justice legal incubator designed to serve the justice gap, which is those who make too much to qualify for legal service through legal aid but still can’t afford a market rate attorney to solve their civil legal needs,” said Kari Burns, the CMBA’s chief strategy officer and director of the CLC.
While the program is just getting started, organizers expect it to be grown and refined over time. The hope is to keep it going in perpetuity, though that will require continuous donor support.
“There is such a huge need here in Cleveland,” Burns said. “If we can keep this going and grow the amount of attorneys who are aware of this justice gap and able to help serve it, that will only benefit Cleveland and all of Cuyahoga County.”
As of its July launch, the CLC is staffed by inaugural fellows Abby O’Leary, Joe Javorsky and Tyler Portner.
The program sought fellows who are within one to five years of completing law school and passing the bar exam. O’Leary and Javorsky are both 2024 alums of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, while Portner graduated from the school in 2019.
While each arrives at the LC from different backgrounds, they’re all united by a sense of duty to help others and a hunger to find fulfillment in their careers by doing just that.
“This is really the perfect opportunity to serve the group of people I know I wanted to help and also get a lot of support and resources to start my own firm a lot sooner than I thought I would be able,” O’Leary said.
Targeting the gap
While groups like the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland provide legal services to individuals facing financial hardships, they only serve those making up to 200% of the poverty line, or about $30,000 a year.
But people earning more than that may still struggle to afford an attorney at market rates.
In 2018, the average market rate for an attorney in the state was around $200 to $250 an hour, according to the 2023 Profile of the Legal Profession in Ohio from the Ohio State Bar Association.
Today, Burns said that the average hourly rate today is around $260 and could be as much as $400.
According to the 2022 Justice Gap Study by the nonprofit Legal Services Corp., 90% of low-income Americans received either inadequate legal help with civil legal challenges in 2021 or none at all, while 46% said that they didn’t even seek legal help because of the cost.
The justice gap forms because there is a large segment of the population that makes too much to be helped by nonprofit legal aid groups, which are already stretched thin—legal aid organizations commonly say they turn away about one person who would be eligible for service for each one they help—but not enough to comfortably afford a lawyer at expensive market rates.
This is why programs such as the CLC target individuals making between 200% and 400% of the poverty line, or about $60,000 a year on the upper end of that scale. These people typically are employed and may even own or operate small businesses.
A significant portion of the Cleveland population falls into that income category: nearly 60% of Cleveland households earn less than $50,000, according to census data and the latest American Community Survey.
An analysis by the CMBA itself suggests that just 8% of Cleveland households make more than 400% of the poverty line, which means that some 92% of all of Cleveland proper may be eligible for assistance from the CLC.
In terms of the dynamic between the CLC and legal aid, the former can be viewed as supplementing what the latter already does.
“At (the LASC) we field in excess of 20,000 new applications for service a year, and we only have capacity to help about one of every two people who call,” said Lauren Gilbride, managing attorney of intake and the volunteer lawyers program at the LASC.
“We have to have tough conversations with people who need an attorney but do not qualify for legal aid’s help,” she added. “We are a proud long-time partner with the CMBA and its referral service. And now, the (CLC) provides the community with an additional and important resource: access to attorneys for those who make too much income to qualify for legal aid’s assistance.”
“The (CLC) represents the best of what we can do when we work together to support the legal needs of the community,” said CMBA CEO Chris Schmitt. “We’re connecting those in desperate need of legal assistance with skilled lawyers they can afford so they can get the help they’re entitled to in our system of justice.”
How the collaborative works
The CLC leans, in part, on the existing lawyer referral service operated by the CMBA. But referrals also come in other ways, including from legal aid and even law firms who might point a potential client their way.
As referrals come in, the CLC attorneys work together to decide who takes what or how they might split up the work. O’Leary said they’re already processing between 10 to 20 referrals a week.
They’re all civil matters, but the needs can vary widely. Clients may be looking for help with a bad landlord or writing a will or in need of guidance with some challenge they’re facing as a small business owner. They may prepare documents or give quick legal opinions on what someone should do next in their respective situation.
And sometimes, the lawyers will have to tell someone that there’s no case or legal issue at all.
“A lot of interactions are these phone calls,” O’Leary said. “It’s a lot of talking to people, hearing their problems and helping them feel a little better even if it’s not a case we can take or a case at all.”
CLC clients get a free 30-minute consultation. After that, their rates are roughly $100 an hour. But that’s not set in stone. CLC attorneys are open to even lower rates when necessary and basing fees on a sliding scale.
In the works is a menu of flat fees for basic work, like writing that will. The goal is to post those fees online in the coming months.
For any matters brought to the CLC through the lawyer referral service, the CMBA collects a 15% referral fee. Everything else goes to the attorneys.
But unlike comparable programs in other markets that offer these sorts of solo practitioner incubators and charge attorneys to participate, the CLC pays a stipend of $50,000 to each fellow for their first 12 months.
“The goal is really that you eventually have a book of business to stand on your own, but with office space and referrals provided (by the CMBA),” Burns said, underscoring the program’s role as an incubator for solo practitioners.
The CLC may be the first program of this sort in the country to pay the fellows to participate.
Charging attorneys to participate in such a program is a “horrible model,” said Steven Kaufman, a prominent commercial litigator serving UB Greensfelder in an of counsel role who provided a large gift to get the CLC up and running.
“You want bright, energized, motivated people, but they should be paid fairly for what they do,” Kaufman said. “These are really energized people who are bringing a lot to the table. And clients will pay something that is fair where they come from economically and get a quality product regardless of the size of the economics of that particular engagement.”
“This, to me, is another reason to be proud of Cleveland and Ohio,” Portner said. “I do think this could be a model that other cities rely on or at least look to. But I think it is fitting this is coming out Cleveland, and I think people should be proud it’s coming out of here.”
Building something that lasts
The CLC launched in July because that is the start of the CMBA’s fiscal year, and the initial cohort will be in place for 18 months, or through the end of next year.
Applications are already open for another cohort of fellows who will join the program in January. The goal is to continue adding new groups in a staggered fashion like this so each incoming group can learn from the last.
“We are open for business. Business is booming. And we need more people,” Javorksy said.
Burns estimates the program will cost about $280,000 through its first year, which assumes that second cohort of three attorneys joining in January.
The initial funding for this was raised entirely through donations, including those raised during the CMBA’s Legacy150 campaign last year which celebrated the nonprofit’s 150th anniversary.
The program will be in need of ongoing funding as well as volunteers who can conduct programming to help support and educate the lawyers involved.
Anyone interested in providing support such as this can reach out to Burns at the CMBA.
“The more this program grows, the more help we are going to need,” Kaufman said, noting that he’s already considered a follow-up donation of his own.
“If the program works, and I expect it will, we are going to want to expand it,” he said. “We are going to want more fellows to deal with what will probably be a greater docket than we can handle. And anything someone can do to help support the program itself and its growth could be very meaningful to the bar.”
“The foundation applauds the (CLC) as an innovative and replicable model to help address the significant unmet legal need for Ohioans who compose Ohio’s low-to-moderate income communities, earning too much to qualify for legal aid’s services, but too little to retain private counsel,” said Angela Lloyd, executive director of the Ohio Access to Justice Foundation.
“The collaborative is truly exciting because it simultaneously trains young lawyers, not only in the practice of law, but also in the importance of filling the justice gap and provides transformative legal services that resolve issues, thereby enabling Ohio families to prosper by achieving everything from stable families to reduced debt to secure housing,” she added. “It’s a terrific project.”
Source: Crain's Cleveland Business - Here's how the recently launched Cleveland Legal Collaborative works