Legal Service Champions: Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto

CLSEPA is a longtime partner of Paladin that provides transformative legal services to thousands of low-income clients in the Bay Area each year. Joana Galvan, Pro Bono Coordinator, spoke with me about the organization’s vital work in immigration, housing, and criminal records clearance, as well as how Paladin has helped CLSEPA connect with new law firm partners to obtain representation for clients in need.

What you should know about CLSEPA:

CLSEPA has three main programs: Economic Advancement, Immigration, and Housing. We pay a lot of attention to the needs of our community and how we can bridge gaps in legal service.

We’re seeing a lot of need in housing, since the [eviction] moratorium ended last year. We partner with the local courts to staff their Mandatory Settlement Conference Clinics; these are tenants who are having habitability issues, or are fighting to stay in their homes. We show up to Zoom court, are assigned a case, meet our client, discuss their legal goals, and then work with them to file a settlement agreement. Pro bono attorneys help negotiate those talks, and we provide all of the training you need.

The people you are defending are people from our community, and we give you the tools to help them.

Our immigration clinics are very popular, we’re already scheduled into next year. At these clinics, we help the clients fill out their asylum applications pro se. When an asylum seeker comes to the United States, they only have one year to file their application, so we try to prepare the application packets as well as we can. Unfortunately, sometimes asylum seekers do have to represent themselves in immigration court, so we want to make it as easy as possible, and have them leave the clinic with all the “know your rights” information that they will need to proceed.

Our Economic Advancement program helps our clients expunge their criminal records, with the help of pro bono attorneys. It’s divided into two parts: rap sheet [record of arrest/charges] review, and drafting the declaration. We’ve had a lot of staff who are not attorneys participate in the rap sheet review. We give our volunteers the tools and resources — training, sample materials — to read a rap sheet and know whether the charges are able to be expunged.

We’re going to be starting a new clinic for consumer debt, which has been a big need in our community ever since the pandemic; a lot of people dipped into their savings, used credit cards. We’re trying to give people tools to know what’s fair or not fair, and defend them against consumer fraud.

How Paladin helps support our program:

​We’ve had an increase in individual cases for full representation, and this is one of the ways we use Paladin.

Recently, we were able to clear our entire docket of cases via Paladin.

We had 8 clients sitting on our docket for most of 2020 and 2021. We received phone calls every day from them, asking “Has anyone been interested in my case?” It wasn’t until we developed the partnership with Paladin that we were able to share the opportunities more broadly. We connected with firms we hadn’t worked with before who were interested in our cases. I’m really proud of the work we’ve been doing to broaden our reach and make sure the firms know about the work we’re doing. We’ve been able to clear our docket completely and now we’re ready to work with a new group of clients.

What I want pro bono attorneys to know:

We offer a lot of training, and aside from that, we always have a supervising attorney for guidance, mentorship, and questions. We also offer shadowing for the housing clinic.

Going into a courtroom, even if it’s virtual, can be a little bit intimidating if you’ve never been in front of a judge before. So being able to shadow, attend the training, talk to someone who has done the project before — it’s really beneficial to our pro bono attorneys and keeps them coming back.

What’s next for CLSEPA: We’re anticipating a big surge of new U-Visa, SIJS, and asylum cases coming through our consultation clinics, which we’ll post on Paladin.

Thank you to Joana and the entire CLSEPA team for their incredible work in the East Palo Alto community. Learn more here.