Harvard Law's "No One Leaves" Group Makes House Calls To Help Tenants Fight Off Foreclosure Evictions

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Harvard University Gazette reports:

• On a bright May afternoon, two third-year Harvard Law School students set out on one of their regular visits to Dorchester and Mattapan. They are a slightly odd couple: Nick Hartigan, an intense, fast-talking 225-pound former running back, and David Haller, a laid-back native of Arkansas, with a slow Southern drawl. But they have been drawn together on a mission of hope. For the past nine months, the students have been driving through Boston neighborhoods in a car bought on Craigslist, offering to use their legal skills to help families stay in their homes and fight foreclosure.

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• The pair are part of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau,(1) a student-operated organization created in 1913 to provide legal services and representation to those unable to afford it. One of the bureau’s four areas of specialization is housing law. As part of Hartigan and Haller’s weekly work with the bureau, they attend housing court, and each has several clients that they represent in a variety of housing court claims. And not long ago, the two came up with an effective, hands-on way to help more tenants in jeopardy —the students knock on one door at a time and explain to tenants their legal rights.

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• They named their program “No One Leaves.” The process is simple: Each week, banks are required to list the properties being foreclosed upon in the Boston-based business paper Banker & Tradesman. The pair, with help from their technology expert and graduating Law School student Tony Borich, take the listings from the paper, create a spreadsheet, enter it into Google maps, divide up the properties among their volunteer corps, and start making house calls.

For more, see Law School students lend a legal hand (Door-to-door canvassers protect vulnerable tenants).

Go here for more on the law students at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau urging tenants in foreclosed homes to fight back against careless/reckless mortgage companies seeking illegal evictions.

(1) According to their website, The Bureau is a student-run organization composed of approximately 40 second and third-year student-attorneys, and 7 staff attorneys. Practicing under the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Rule 3:03, they provide free legal services in civil (non-criminal) matters to low-income people in order to ensure equal access to justice and to remove legal barriers to economic opportunity (see also Student Practitioners).