Law Students Spending Their Summer Vacation Helping Renters Beat Back Foreclosure Evictions

In Fall River, Massachusetts, The Herald News reports:

• A small group of area law students is circulating throughout this city and elsewhere in the SouthCoast to help tenants learn their rights and avoid evicted under harsh terms because landlords didn’t pay the bills and the banks came knocking at their doors. “Only the court can evict you after a foreclosure,” said Kelly Rafferty, one of six Roger Williams University School of Law students involved in a new summer program organized through South Coastal Counties Legal Services, headquartered on Bedford Street.(1)

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• The law students have been combing legal ads and housing court records to determine where foreclosures are happening in Fall River, Taunton, Brockton and New Bedford to notify residents. [...] With the dreaded foreclosure increasingly swallowing up landlords, tenants and entire neighborhoods alike throughout the country, South Coastal lawyers, student interns and volunteers are using tools and skills to battle back.

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• In additional to canvassing neighborhoods hard hit by foreclosures in the target cities each Monday, they hold free clinics in the city legal service offices each Thursday and Friday from 10 a.m. to noon. Their advice includes turning down the “keys for cash” program that banks use to offer token money and empty their foreclosed buildings. “We always ask the tenant what they want,” Rafferty said. For some, it’s more time, for others it’s funds to pay the next rent and deposit.

For more, see KNOW YOUR RIGHTS: Law students help tenants protect themselves.

(1) See the "No One Leaves" campaign conducted by another group of Massachusetts law students helping renters beat back foreclosure evictions.