Caroline is a Housing and Consumer Staff Attorney with Legal Aid in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work sees her representing low-income tenants and consumers in both state and federal courts throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia, fighting cases such as unjust evictions or housing conditions.
Transcript
Caroline Closco, Housing Consumer Staff Attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center, here in Charlottesville. So we are a private non-profit. We provide free civil legal services for low income people. And because we do not take money from the federal government, like a lot of other legal aid programs do. We not only provide individual services to low income individuals, we can do policy work and we can do like class action lawsuits and we can do impact work. So it's a pretty cool place to be. The bread and butter of my practice is eviction defense. And its primarily eviction defense for people who are in public or subsidized housing. That's just sort of like the way we do it. So if somebody is being sued for eviction for non-payment of rent, or a violation of the lease, they come to me and I will either give them advice or I'll file an appearance in court and represent them, all the way to the end. If there is a pattern that we notice, like I've got this one case right now where a couple years ago there was a rash of sort of illegal and unreasonable towings from this one subsidized apartment complex. And so I've got a case going on behalf of several different residents of that complex. I go to court, I would say, a few times a month. I go to court for a full on contested trial probably like once a month, I would say, or less. But most things do end up settling. If I'm going to take a case, I think that something is wrong, it's either wrong with the law, like the actual reasons that I'm arguing, or there's something else going in the background that makes it wrong.
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