The Sept. 15th issue of the Gotham Gazette highlights efforts by Legal Services NYC-Bronx and South Brooklyn Legal Services to assist tenants living in crumbling, foreclosed-upon multifamily buildings. Legal Services NYC-Bronx Staff Attorney Ian Davie and SBLS Housing Unit Co-Director Brent Meltzer discuss the challenges tenants face when landlords and banks abandon properties, leaving them to cope with seas of trash and debris, rodents, bedbugs, mold, water damage, unsecured entrances and a host of other conditions which threaten their health and safety.

Whether relatively new to the courtroom or a veteran litigator, trial lawyers come to learn, both through formal instruction and by experience, that there are many ways of approaching the fundamental tasks of opening statements, direction examination, cross examination, registering objections and summations, each of which is an essential component to trying a case successfully. Legal Services NYC Senior Counsel Victor Olds conducted interviews of more than a dozen state and federal trial judges to obtain their views on these basic, but critical areas of trial practice, and wrote about his finding's for the New York Law Journal's "Tips From the Bench."

Legal Services NYC-Bronx Staff Attorney Nelson Mar is representing the Colon family, who are fighting to keep their special education student son, Cristian, from being socially promoted into a higher grade before he is academically ready. The September 7th NY Daily News has their story.  

New York Times editorial, August 24, 2011: "Most low-income Americans cannot afford a lawyer to defend their legal interests, no matter how urgent the issue. Unless they are in a criminal case, most have no access to help from government-financed lawyers either."