Descriptions of 2005 John G. Brooks Consumer Law Fellowship Recipients

Connecticut Fair Housing Center
The Center will hire a new staff attorney as their Fellow, who will handle a mortgage lending caseload including negotiating workouts of loans in default, assisting with foreclosure defense and filing affirmative complaints on behalf of borrowers who are the victims of predatory lending or predatory servicing. The Fellow will work with the Connecticut Anti-Predatory Lending Task Force to address predatory lending issues statewide, and will work with other programs and initiatives to publicize predatory lending issues in Connecticut and the services available to assist homeowners who may have been victimized. The Center is particularly concerned with reforming the discrimination and segregation in Connecticut’s housing markets, with some of the most segregated metropolitan areas and some of the highest sub-prime lending rates for African-Americans and Latinos in the country.

Jacksonville Area Legal Aid
JALA’s Fellow will expand their existing consumer advocacy by addressing Jacksonville’s dubious distinction as the highest area of concentration for sub-prime loans in minority communities in the country. The Fellow will focus exclusively on the needs of the low-income African-American homeowners victimized by sub-prime lenders. The Fellow’s approach to sub-prime lending institutions will range from offering to educate such institutions about bad lending practices and soliciting the creation of non-predatory lending programs, to administrative advocacy with the state’s Attorney General and the Federal Trade Commission, to complex litigation.

Legal Aid of Western Michigan
The Fellowship will enable LAWM to significantly expand its consumer law work by hiring a new full-time attorney to fight predatory lending practices that target Hispanic and African-American homeowners in western Michigan. The Fellow will focus on preserving homeownership by litigating cases in the three key areas of sub-prime mortgages, land contracts and mobile home sales. Michigan is one of a minority of states where seller-financed land contracts represent a major segment of the home financing market, typically charging usurious interest rates and providing much fewer protections for homeowners than conventional mortgages. LAWM will now be able to target a core group of fringe lenders who finance land contracts at exorbitant rates and on unfair terms.

Legal Aid Services of Oregon, Farmworker Program
The Farmworker Program at LASO will use a Fellow to represent farm worker clients in a wide range of consumer law issues that significantly impact farm workers and other low-wage immigrant workers. The Fellowship will allow LASO to expand their services into an area of the law that is an increasingly high priority for their clients but that they have not been able to address in the past because of limited resources. LASO expects that the greatest need for consumer law advocacy will be in the areas of predatory lending, notarios, money transfer services and other consumer services and products that target Spanish-speaking immigrants.

Legal Services of Southern Piedmont
LSSP’s Fellow will coordinate a new regional project that targets specific abuses related to automobile fraud, auto financing and automobile warranty cases afflicting low-income minority consumers in the 14 counties in the North Carolina Piedmont. While representing low-income minority individuals victimized by abusive auto financing and automobile warranty cases, the Fellow will also work on the policy changes that are necessary to save these consumers millions of dollars in automobile fraud that is an emerging epidemic in North Carolina and throughout the country. The Fellow will also expand the scope of payday lending cases currently handled by LSSP, and will be involved with larger predatory mortgage cases. In addition, the Fellow will provide support for additional impact litigation in all areas of consumer law.

Memphis Area Legal Services
Building on its extensive caseload of litigation involving predatory mortgage-lending practices, MALS will use a Fellow to expand the agency’s consumer advocacy by including more non-mortgage-related predatory lending practices such as auto title loans, payday lending, advanced check cashing and tax refund loans, and other “easy money” scams. The Fellow will conduct research and analysis to identify predatory lending patterns and practices in African-American and Latino neighborhoods, initiate affirmative lawsuits to address the most egregious practices, and increase MALS’ outreach and education efforts to provide consumers with more information on these secondary predatory lending practices.

Montana Legal Services Association
MLSA will use the funding to create a new staff attorney position to establish a formal Consumer Law Unit and expand its representation of Native American clients in consumer law cases. The Fellow’s time will be dedicated exclusively to representing Native American clients with a focus on impact litigation, as well as developing consumer litigation strategies on a statewide basis and resources for increasing consumer law advocacy for Native Americans in Montana. The Fellow will focus initially on predatory auto financing practices and self-help auto repossession among Montana’s Native American population.