Legal Aid ACT history

The National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA), organized in 1911 as the National Alliance of Legal Aid Societies, served as a catalyst for the emerging development of the American civil legal aid system.

The first organization of its kind in the West, Legal Aid at Work launched in 1916 as the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco with funding from local attorneys and support from Archbishop Edward J. Hanna, Phoebe A. Hearst, and the state’s Commission of Immigration and Housing.

Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949 established the United Kingdom’s first state-funded legal aid system.

As part of the 1960’s-era war on poverty, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was established.

Following these OEO guidelines, hundreds of legal service programs obtained federal grants from the OEO. Major changes in the legal circumstances of low-income people throughout the country were now being observed. It was not until 1964, when the United States government finally supported “Equal Justice Under Law” by providing federal funding for civil legal assistance to low-income people.

The federal Legal Services Program began in the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1965.

Henry Freedman on Please help the NEJL with photo identification from 1968 Conference on Welfare Law in NYC, part 1

President Nixon, who took office in January 1969, sent a special message to Congress in February, saying that “the blight of poverty requires priority attention” and asking Congress to extend appropriations for OEO.

The president made the memo public in February 1971 and in May sent a special message to Congress proposing establishment of the Legal Services Corporation.

The legislative effort to establish LSC was pursued again in 1972 but was dropped because an agreement could not be reached between Congressional supporters and the President over the selection of the Board.

Earl F. Landgrebe wrote in the June 1973 “minority views” section of the House report on the LSC legislation.

President Nixon signed the LSC Act on July 25, 1974.

Later, pursuant to the findings of the Delivery System Study completed in 1980, LSC encouraged the development of pro bono programs and subsequently required programs to use 12.5% of the funding for private attorney involvement, most of which went to increase pro bono efforts.

Since 1981, funding for the Legal Services Corporation has been hard fought, often reduced and even threated for elimination on occasion, while new restrictions and guidelines were placed on individual grantee programs.

Since 1984, if you paid your attorney a retainer to secure future representation, the attorney placed the funds into an IOLTA at various banks.

By 1986, net legal aid expenditure was £342 million per year.

By 1995, the annual cost was £1.4 billion.

The resulting consent decree, in effect until 1997, transformed the department.

The LSC Board of Directors marked the 35th anniversary of the law’s enactment on July 24, 2009, at an observance at the Brown v.

While, in 2014, criminal solicitors’ and barristers’ fees were markedly cut (by, respectively 8.5% and 6%) the harshest damage has been done to graduated fee arrangements.

Nearly three hundred (300) organizations employed over 400 full-time lawyers with an aggregate budget of nearly $5.3 million (or approximately $40 million in 2015 dollars).