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The disturbing vitriol with which people spit out lawyer jokes seems to establish that most Americans feel every member of the legal profession is somehow tied to the O.J. Simpson case, Pat Riley the motorcycle lawyer or the million-dollar settlement for the poor old lady who spilled molten McDonald’s coffee in her lap. 

Yet as easy as it is to laugh, generalize a profession and regurgitate the words “overly litigious,” it is just as simple to overlook the real injustices done to the poor, who, lacking the key ingredients of money, power and exposure, have not gained much from this “overly litigious” society. 

So then, whom do you call when you’ve got no assets and your landlord is attempting to put you out on the street? What if you’re already out on the street? What if you’re out on the street and disabled? What if you’re out on the street, disabled and suffering from a debilitating disease? 

Suddenly those lawyer jokes wouldn’t be so funny anymore. 

“Since we opened in 1988 we’ve assisted clients with about 15,000 legal issues and trained and supervised over 500 law students,” estimates Bernida Reagan, the East Bay Community Law Center’s executive director. “We were started by students from the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley who wanted to do two things: Provide legal service for poor people – a lot of people like they were walking over when they tried to get to school – and also provide clinical opportunities for law students to get hands-on training representing clients in general and poor people in particular.” 

The organization that started 12 years ago with a handful of frustrated grad students and a broken typewriter has grown to accommodate a stable of nine supervising attorneys and the constant presence of dozens of law students, most of them from Boalt Hall. 

A full 97 percent of the center’s clientele hearkens from the low-income sector of society while 30 percent are homeless – and the Shattuck Ave. offices may be besieged with as many as 300 calls on a busy day. 

“There’s no typical call at all,” says client liaison Cseneca Parker. “I know that each call that comes in is what, to the client, seems to be an emergency situation. They’re crises, and they range from how to file for divorce to how to prepare for a will to tenant-landlord disputes. One thing we pride ourselves on is that a human being answers the phone; people don’t dial into some crazy voicemail hell system. We’re the only agency serving low-income individuals that does not automatically put people into an automated system.” 

In fact, helping people out of the system is what the EBCLC is all about. While Parker affirms there is no prototypical quandary for the thousands who call each week, the center’s major areas of emphasis are working to prevent evictions, assisting people squeezed by the welfare system and aiding poor people stricken with HIV/AIDS. 

“Right now, evictions are at an all-time high in Oakland and Berkeley,” says Laura Lane, the supervising attorney of the EBCLC’s housing unit. “In San Francisco and Berkeley, as prices go up, people move into Oakland, where you can be evicted for no cause. Landlords are trying to get people out to raise the rent. We’re trying to get better protection for tenants in Oakland.” 

Unlike Berkeley, where landlords must demonstrate that tenants have acted in a detrimental manner before evicting them, Oakland renters can be hit with 30-day notices known in the field as “no cause” evictions. Lane points out that Sentinel Fair Housing and the Eviction Defense Center estimate a recent 200-300 percent jump in the number of 30-day notice evictions in Oakland. 

And whether it’s eviction defense, helping welfare recipients receive job training or disability benefits, manning the homeless outreach program or slicing through the red tape withholding money and treatment from many impoverished AIDS patients, much of the EBCLC’s work is done by law students. 

“As the semester goes on, the students take on more and more responsibility,” says EBCLC Developmental Associate Sarah Horsley. “Interns do a lot of the work of the law center under the very close supervision of what we call supervising attorneys. Students are our main contacts with the clients.” 

So far, hundreds of these lawyers-to-be – or not, as it turns out sometimes – have learned lessons they could never pick up in a classroom. 

“We’ve built up a core of people dedicated to public interest law,” says Reagan, the center’s executive director since virtually day one. “Whether they’re working at a law firm or public interest law jobs, we’ve really helped develop a large group of people compassionate to the needs of poor people and helping people stabilize and improve their lives. Many of our graduates now run their own programs.” 

Adds Parker, “this is not an agency that has a front to be a community service provider and doesn’t really do it. We really help people. 

“I came into this agency as a client in need of many legal services, and they didn’t just fix things for me, they taught me how to fix them myself,” continues Parker, who has been affiliated with the EBCLC for nine years. “Now I’m a part of the EBCLC family, and another good thing about this law center is it is a family. A multi-cultured, multi-gendered type of family.”