News & Highlights
Bureau Proudly Announces Celebration of Service
Bureau Elects 2008 Board of Directors
Cambridge, MA – The Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, the oldest student-run legal services organization in the country, recently elected its 2008 Board of Directors. Lauren Leahy will serve as President and Anne Lee as Executive Director. Because the Bureau is student-run, its Board members take a front seat in policymaking, administrative tasks, client services and the general management of the firm. Two thousand eight will be no exception. Board members face an exciting and challenging year as the organization develops a long-term strategy to address Boston’s foreclosure crisis, enhances its partnerships with local battered women’s service providers, drafts proposed legislation and engages in on-site assistance programs such as Attorney for a Day in Suffolk Housing Court. “I think that the Bureau is poised for a fantastic, and fascinating, year” says Lauren Leahy, the new President of the organization. “Our students offer so much more than legal advocacy. They bring passion, excitement and serious commitment to client services. I know that 2008 will be a bench-setting year for the organization.”
The Legal Aid Bureau offers free legal services to low-income clients in the Boston and Cambridge areas. Its membership includes over 40 Harvard Law School students, who commit their 2L and 3L years to the organization. Bureau members handle cases involving a diverse range of practice areas including housing, employment, domestic, and public benefits law. Alumni of the Bureau include Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, and renowned constitutional scholars Professors Laurence Tribe and Erwin Chemerinsky.
The 2008 Board of Directors:
Lauren Leahy President
Anne Lee Executive Director
Joel Fifield Vice President for Practice Standards
Sara Lewis Vice President for Membership
Keisha Stokes Secretary/Treasurer
Dave Haller Development Director
Eli Schlam Training Director
Mitch Stromberg Intake Director
Joe Kennedy Outreach Director
Lindsay Breedlove Research & Technology Director
Bureau Members Protest to Save Dorchester Home
Boston.com
wbz.com
Bureau President Lam Ho Receives 13th Annual PSLawNet Pro Bono Publico Award
By Elaine McArdle
Lam Ho ’08 was six years old when he and his family emigrated from Vietnam to the hardscrabble city of Brockton, Mass., where his parents worked on assembly lines and the family ate in soup kitchens and wore hand-me-downs from relatives. The happiest moment of his childhood, Ho says, was at a Christmas dinner for needy children, where he received a train set and a board game, the first toys he ever owned.
Ho’s home was marked by domestic violence. When he was eight years old, his parents divorced and he went to live with his paternal grandparents and extended family, also in Brockton. Over the next 10 years, he rarely saw his mother, who lost her life savings when the marriage broke up and today still works low-paying jobs while supporting Ho’s two half-sisters.
With more than 4,000 students, Brockton High School is the largest high school in New England, and Ho says he was its first openly gay student. In 1997, Ho founded the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, which he continues to mentor today. But his candor about his sexual orientation drew fire. Students threw him into lockers and dumped him into trash cans. Some school administrators disapproved of him, as did Ho’s father and other relatives, even though Ho graduated first in his class, had the highest SAT scores, and won numerous scholarships before heading to Brown University.
It was through these difficult experiences that Ho resolved to dedicate himself to helping people at the lower rungs of society, especially children and battered women.
“In many ways, my greatest power is my struggle,” says Ho. “In many ways, it’s so integral to who I am. For me to be ashamed of it would paralyze me from the work I do.”
Through high school, college, and a Marshall Fellowship at Oxford, Ho founded or worked for a variety of organizations for low-income and other disenfranchised people. At Brown, where he simultaneously earned an undergraduate and a master’s degree, Ho managed several community service organizations while also working at least 35 hours a week in odd jobs to support himself and help out his mother.
At HLS, Ho spends 60 to 90 hours each week on two projects: he is president of the Legal Aid Bureau, and also co-supervisor at Reaching Out About Depression (ROAD), a community organization for low-income women affected by mental health problems. He credits Angela Littwin, his first-year writing instructor, for getting him involved with ROAD, which works on a collaborative model to empower clients to help resolve their own legal and other issues. At HLS, Ho also founded and directs the Giving Tree to solicit Christmas gifts for children in need, a tradition he previously established at Brown and at Oxford. In September, in recognition of his extraordinary commitment to public interest, Ho was named co-recipient of the 13th Annual PSLawNet Pro Bono Publico Award (see sidebar).
Ho, who plans to devote his life to poverty law, impact litigation, and community organizing, always intended to become a civil rights lawyer and chose HLS because of its resources for public service-minded students including the loan-forgiveness program. He also wanted to be near his mother, who still lives in Brockton.
“She’s the reason I do the work I do,” says Ho. “I realize that things like this happen to women like my mother, but if there had been resources or some legal services this wouldn’t have happened. The work I’ve done has exposed me to so much that’s exactly like this or even worse, and many [people] don’t have a voice. I have the opportunity to speak for them.”
Yet his family doesn’t approve of his career choice, he says. “Because my parents are immigrants who were extremely poor and suffered through a lot of economic hardships, their definition of success is making money. They don’t really understand or approve of my desire to work with poor people, especially given my academic success.”
Ho is a semi-finalist for a Skadden Fellowship. If he is named a fellow, he will move to Chicago and establish a community legal clinic for children and families. If not, he’ll apply for legal services or ACLU fellowships. “I’m always going to do poverty law, and children in particular -- because of my childhood.”
Sidebar
When Lam Ho ’08 learned that his beloved grandfather had died suddenly, he caught the next commuter rail from Boston to Brockton, and sat in the train sending emails to HLS colleagues cancelling meetings scheduled for that day. Though Ho rarely weeps -- “I see so much pain in the greater world that my own personal pain doesn’t usually lead me to cry,” he says – his grandfather, Chau Van Ho, was a loving presence in his life, and Ho was very upset. Then his PDA revealed a message that caught him completely off guard. Alexa Shabecoff, assistant dean for public service at the Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising, had sent an email notifying Ho that he’d been selected from among law students nationwide for a prestigious award for pro bono work. In recognition of his dedication as a law student to serving low-income populations, Ho was named co-recipient of the 13th Annual PSLawNet Pro Bono Publico award (The other recipient was Parag Khandhar, a community organizer and advocate at American University Washington College of Law.)
The timing of the notification holds great significance for Ho. “I want to believe it was a goodbye gesture from my grandfather,” he says. Much of what Ho has done in his life – from coming out as a gay man to freely discussing his experience with domestic violence to dedicating his career to poverty law – has met with strong resistance from some in his family. “I hope my grandfather is proud of who I am and the difficult decisions I’ve made, most of which were against my family’s hopes and dreams,” says Ho. “I’d like to believe the award is a sign that his love transcended everything and that he’s proud of the man I’ve chosen to be.”
At the PSLawNet awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., in September, Ho dedicated the award to his grandfather. “My grandfather and this award are so connected,” he says. “So much of what I do is because of my family.
Two Distinguished Alumni Appointed to the Bureau’s Alumni Advisory Board
Helen Cantwell (’95), Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Will Gunn (‘86), President and CEO of Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington, have agreed to sit for three year terms on the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau’s Alumni Advisory Board.
Ms. Cantwell, a former President of the Bureau, graduated cum laude from Harvard Law in 1995. After graduation, Ms. Cantwell worked at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as an Assistant District Attorney, specializing in sex crimes and domestic violence prosecutions. From 1999 to 2000, Ms. Cantwell was a Luce Scholar, receiving a one year fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation to work for a women’s rights organization in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, advising grass roots organizations in various Asian countries on issues concerning discrimination against women and domestic violence law enforcement. Upon her return to the United States in 2000, Ms. Cantwell was appointed an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Criminal Division. Here current work focuses on prosecuting gang related murders and, more recently, securities fraud.
Mr. Gunn, also a former President of the Bureau, graduated cum laude from Harvard Law in 1986. After graduation, Mr. Gunn built a diverse career in the U.S. Air Force, working on all sides of litigation as Chief Circuit Defense Counsel, Staff Judge Advocate, and Instructor at the Air Force Judge Advocate General School. In 1990, Mr. Gunn was selected as a White House Fellow. From 2003 to 2005, Mr. Gunn served as Lead Defense Counsel for the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, supervising the team of over 30 lawyers that defended some of the most unpopular people in the most hostile tribunal in the country. Mr. Gunn is currently President and CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington.
For over 90 years, the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau has educated HLS students who have gone on to lead distinguished careers in academia, public interest, government and the private sector. Members of the Alumni Advisory Board are selected from this pool of exceptional legal professionals and enable a new generation of Bureau students to learn from their myriad talents, interests and achievements. Ms. Cantwell and Mr. Gunn are both exceptional public interest lawyers and will provide invaluable perspectives on legal practice to the Bureau and its members.
The Alumni Advisory Board's mission is to support the growth of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau’s resources, both human and financial, and to ensure that the Bureau remains a leading student-run legal services practice.
Two Bureau Members Win Over $37k for Client
After months of negotiations and trial preparation, Monee Takla and Kristin Small last week finalized a settlement agreement awarding approximately 37k in cash and future rent to their client, the mother of two children and caretaker of a granddaughter.
When Monee and Kristin took the case, their client lived on the first floor in a converted two-family house. The apartment was rife with housing code violations, including lead paint, an illegal basement, a missing window, and structural wall damage. The utilities meters had been rigged by the landlord so that the client paid utility bills for the entire building. Appallingly, the landlord lived just across the yard and could see the conditions every morning from his bedroom window.
Because the landlord seemed perfectly willing to continue ignoring his tenants’ plight, the client finally began withholding monthly rent last July to get his attention. Rather than repairing the conditions, however, the landlord attempted to evict the client. Upon receiving notice of the eviction, the client called the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, where the case quickly caught Monee’s and Kristin’s attention. “From a human standpoint,” they recall, “this was an appalling case. But it was a great case to litigate. All the elements were there: housing code violations, the landlord’s awareness, and a client who was willing to stand up for her right to live in decent housing.”
On the day of the jury trial, but before the jury convened, the judge made a final plea to opposing counsel: “I advise you to settle this matter, because you risk significant liability.” Upon the judge’s “recommendation,” the landlord agreed to a final round of negotiations. The negations began auspiciously for Monee and Kristin, with opposing counsel making the first concession: “alright, you win, you have prepared a perfect case.” By the end of the second day, Monee and Kristin, along with their instructor Elizabeth Nessen had secured for their client $13k in cash and $10.5k in future free rent. The client will no longer pay any electricity for her apartment, she will receive free heat this winter, and the landlord will refund over 2k for past utility bills. Finally, all housing code violations in the department will be promptly repaired.
Harvard Legal Aid Bureau Hires New Family Lawyer
The Board of Directors of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau is pleased to announce the addition of Stephanie Goldenhersh to the Bureau’s clinical staff. Ms. Goldenhersh comes to the Bureau from the Legal Assistance Corporation of Central Massachusetts, where she handled domestic relations litigation for six years. She will be the Bureau’s fourth family supervising attorney, joining Clarissa Bronson, Lee Goldstein, and Verner Moore. She has also worked at Foley, Hoag & Eliot, LLP, where she specialized in environmental litigation. Ms. Goldenhersh received her law degree from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law.
Bureau Member Kia Holfield ('08) Wins $30k in Unpaid Child Support for Client
Kia Holfield (08') recently won $30k for her client, a mother of four children and guardian of two others, who had already filed bankruptcy twice and was in danger of losing her home due to over ten years of unpaid child support.
Moments before her client's annual child support review hearing, Kia discovered that her client's former spouse potentially had inherited his mother's house yet still remained over 10 years behind in child support payments. Kia disclosed the potential new asset--along with the fact that the former spouse had been unemployed for over two years--to a judge in the Middlesex Probate Court, who immediately arrested the former spouse and instructed Kia to investigate the legal ownership of the house in Suffolk Probate Court.
Kia quickly discovered that the former spouse had indeed inherited the house, and that it was appraised at over $225k. Kia returned to Middlesex Probate Court with proof of the inheritance, and Judge Kagan ordered the former spouse to enroll immediately in a job search program and gave him 45 days to pay all child support arrears. If the former spouse does not comply with the order, he faces criminal contempt charges, and his house will be auctioned by a Special Master and its proceeds used to satisfy past and future child support obligations.
Bureau Member Cate Edwards Makes Her Case
Bureau Radically Changes Selection Competition
Harvard Legal Aid Bureau Student Attorneys & Faculty Director Rally for Affordable Housing in Mattapan
Harvard Legal Aid Bureau Hosts Public Interest Potluck
Bureau Elects New Board of Directors
Bureau Serves as Headquarters for the HLS Giving Tree, Which Raises Over 700 Gifts for Children in Need
“Breaking the cycle: Harvard Legal Aid Bureau Helps Client Overcome Domestic Violence”
Harvard Legal Aid Bureau Fights for Tenant Rights
Former Bureau President Deval Patrick Elected Governor of Massachusetts
Legal Aid Bureau Panel Discusses Katrina, Honors Alumni