Turned Away: A Snapshot of New York's Justice Gap

March 10, 2010

Author: Kristin Brown Lilley

In order to get a snapshot of the extent to which legal aid organizations are unable to meet the growing demand for services, programs collected turn away data between March and May of 2009.

During that two month period, legal services organizations outside New York City were unable to help 13,612 people who came to their doors seeking assistance.  Extrapolated over the course of the year, at least 81,672 people outside New York City recognized that they had a legal problem and contacted a civil legal services organization only to find that the organization did not have adequate funding to help them.  Research tells us that many more do not realize they have a legal need and even if they do, they do not take the next step to contact a legal services provider for help.

In addition, approximately half of the legal services providers collected data on people who they were able to help, but who had additional legal needs that could not be addressed at that time.  These individuals are characterized as “unable to serve fully.”  For example, someone might seek and receive help with a pending eviction, but the underlying cause for the eviction, inappropriate denial of unemployment benefits, is a separate legal issue that cannot be addressed.  During the same two month period, at least 3,263 additional individuals were left with legal problems that providers were unable to help solve.  Annualized, this means almost 20,000 additional people did not receive the full legal assistance they needed. 

In collecting the turn away data, programs were asked to identify the areas in which they were most often unable to provide assistance.  The top problem areas were (in order from highest to lowest):

1. Family (adoption, custody, divorce, domestic violence, support) estimated at 24,126 individuals annually;
2. Miscellaneous (wills, estates, power of attorney, criminal) estimated at 19,350  individuals annually;
3. Housing (landlord-tenant, mobile home, public housing, not foreclosure) estimated at 10,842 individuals annually;
4. Consumer (includes bankruptcy, debt collection, consumer credit, not foreclosure) estimated at  8,982 individuals annually;
5. Income (Unemployment Insurance, welfare, veteran’s benefits, food stamps) estimated at 5,802 individuals annually.

Comparison to 2005

In 2005 federally funded Legal Services Corporation (LSC) providers collected similar turn away data for the LSC Justice Gap report.

LSC funded programs outside New York City were forced to turn away 6,972 people during the two month snapshot in 2005 (estimated at 41,832 people over the course of the year).  In 2009, during the same two month period, the same providers turned away over 9,220 people or 55,332 over the course of the year – resulting in an almost 30% increase in unmet need.

Statewide in 2005, New York’s seven federally funded programs turned away an estimated 80,000 people seeking legal assistance on an annualized basis.  By 2009, just looking at the data from all the legal services programs outside New York City, providers were turning away over 81,670 people; more than all the federally funded programs combined turned away in 2005.

While this snapshot cannot fully quantify the universe of civil legal need in New York State, it clearly shows that the demand for legal services is intense and on the rise.  The only way the state’s network of civil legal services providers will be able to respond to this need is if additional funds are made available.