Federally funded legal services programs in Virginia are engaged in activity
that appears strongly abusive, from misrepresenting the number of clients they
serve to filing endless appears of marginal cases designed to expand various
benefits programs to those not credibly entitled to receive them.
Legal Services of Northern Virginia Overcounts Case Load
Legal Services of Northern Virginia (LSNV), supported in part by federal tax dollars from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), has been caught dramatically overcounting the number of cases that it handled in 1997. This case data is important because it is ultimately compiled and used by LSC to argue for funding increases from Congress. In a report filed with LSC in 1998, LSNV claimed that it had closed case files on 4,166 cases the previous year. But the LSC Inspector General’s office determined that at least 566 of those cases were completely bogus, many either counted multiple times or cases that had been closed in previous years. This figure represents 13 percent of the cases that LSNV claimed as closed. Even more shocking, the Inspector General’s office found out that of the 4,771 cases LSNV claimed as ‘open’ at the end of 1997, a whopping 72 percent were either old cases no longer being pursued that should have been closed or ‘cases’ duplicating cases already closed and reported to LSC in past years. The picture that emerges from this overcounting scandal is of a legal services program that is disorganized and out of control.
See Jeremy Redmon, “Legal Clinic in Virginia Again Under Scrutiny;
Service Suspected of Padding Clients,” Washington Times, April 20, 1999.
Legal Services Argues for Black Lung Benefits Against All Medical Testimony
Federally funded Client Centered Legal Services of Southwest Virginia (CCLS) decided to represent Harlan Blankenship, a coal miner, through numerous hearings and court appearances in his attempt to get black lung benefits from his former employer despite the fact that every doctor that looked at Blankenship’s case said that his disability was related to cigarette smoking and orthopedic injuries not job-related. In fact, CCLS pursued two fruitless administrative appeals and an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit despite the overwhelming evidence against Blankenship’s case. CCLS appeared to have hinged its entire case on the fact that x-rays turned up evidence of black lung disease in Blankenship. Three doctors who examined Blankenship, however, concluded that any black lung disease was minor and not a cause of Blankenship’s disability. Instead, the doctors pointed to smoking-related chronic bronchitis and a pair of orthopedic injuries that Blankenship sustained outside the workplace. This case is a perfect example of how legal services programs will pursue hopeless cases to extreme ends, costing taxpayers enormous amounts of money and clogging the courts.
See Blankenship v. Clinch Valley Coal Co., 1998 U.S. App LEXIS 21422
(4th Cir. Sept. 1, 1998).
Legal Services Argues Worker Who Refused Job Offer Entitled to Benefits
In another example of abusive pursuit of appeals, Client Centered Legal Services of Southwest Virginia (CCLS) pursued an appeal of a case involving Caroline Sword, a Virginia woman who sought unemployment benefits despite having received an offer from her former employer which she refused to resume her previous job at her previous pay rate. CCLS claimed that there were ‘punitive’ conditions attached to the employment offer. These ‘punitive’ conditions were merely that she would reenter employment as a new employee, without her previous levels of seniority or vacation time and with a requirement that she could not miss any time at work for sixty days. This last condition was imposed because Sword had originally been fired due to excessive absenteeism. The Virginia Court of Appeals predictably held that these conditions on her re-employment were reasonable in light of the circumstances of the case and upheld the denial of unemployment benefits to Sword.
See Sword v. Automotive Industries, Inc., 1999 Va. App. LEXIS 198 (Ct. App. April 6, 1999).