The Legal Aid Society’s Community Development Unit was recently approached by a small business owner who is seeking assistance with their business bankruptcy filing and possible dissolution of their business.  

The owner opened his small business in 2014, which focused on walk-in repairs to electronic equipment and sold electronics second-hand. However, maintaining the business is no longer feasible. The shop is currently closed while the owner litigates a matter pertaining to the business’s commercial space, eliminating the owner’s ability to provide any in-person services and earn income. The owner has also found he can no longer keep up with required filings and expenses, which has led to both personal and business debt.  

Legal Aid does not work on either small business bankruptcy filings or dissolutions but would be willing to assist with connecting a volunteer with this client to ensure they receive the support they need. 

The Community Development Unit’s client submitted an application to the USPTO to register a trademark for her business name. The USPTO denied the application based on Trademark Act Section 2(d) for a likelihood of confusion with an already registered mark. The mark was also denied for failure to show the applied-for mark in use in commerce with any specified goods. This determination was made final by notice dated January 29, 2025. Our client does not understand the written determination from the agency attorney and would like an attorney with trademark experience to help her understand the decision and advise her on next steps.   

Our client is facing a holdover eviction in Brooklyn Housing Court and The Legal Aid Society is representing him in his eviction. Our client is being evicted from the home that he asserts was given to him by an older man in exchange for serving as this individual’s primary caretaker for more than a decade. The homeowner died intestate in 2023. Our client has lived in the home since 2011 with his three children and his partner.  

He is now seeking assistance to help him contest the administration of the individual’s estate and the ownership of his home because upon his passing in 2023, our client is asserting that he became the rightful owner of the home. To prove he is the rightful owner, he seeks to proffer the deceased individual’s notarized will that was signed by both the individual and our client, that shows that the individual gave our client his home as payment for his services to him as his primary caretaker. Additionally, there may also be an unjust enrichment claim that could be made in Surrogate’s Court. 

The letters of administration were filed 9/16/2024 in Brooklyn (Kings County) Surrogate’s Court. Ideally, the team would like to move to stay his Housing Court eviction case while he contests the administration of the estate in Surrogate’s Court. His next Housing Court date is March 31, 2025. 

Our Health Law Unit seeks pro bono assistance on behalf of our client who wishes to pursue affirmative litigation against her prior employer who failed to properly notice a COBRA-qualifying event and retroactively disenrolled our client from their health insurance. These actions caused our client to be ineligible for Medicaid and left her with extensive medical debt. 

Our client worked for a New York State-run psychiatric program until October 2020 when she was terminated due to loss of funding during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our client had a self-funded health insurance plan through her job and coverage was set to end a month after her termination. Our client was approved for Medicaid once she believed her employer-provided health insurance ended. However, the New York State of Health (NYSOH) sent her notice that she could not enroll into a Medicaid managed care plan because she was still enrolled in her prior plan. Our client did, however, qualify for Medicaid fee-for-service as secondary insurance. When our client attempted to disenroll from the employer-provided plan she was told that her employer would have to terminate her coverage and that she could not do so unilaterally. Our client made numerous attempts to contact her former employer’s HR department but never received a call back. Our client needed medical attention during this time, so she continued to use her employer-provided insurance with Medicaid fee-for-service. Between 2020 and 2022, our client went a step further and confirmed her coverage by calling plan provided by her previous employer before most, if not all her doctor visits.  

In January 2023, our client called her plan before a medical appointment and was told that her former employer terminated her coverage retroactively to November 2020. Our client received a COBRA notice dated 2023 indicating that in 2020 she experienced a COBRA-qualifying event and that she would have to pay over $800/month retroactively to 2020 to receive coverage. Our client cannot afford to pay retroactively for COBRA because most, if not all, of the medical providers she saw between 2020-2022 do not accept Medicaid fee-for-service. Our client is now responsible for all doctors’ fees billed during her non-coverage period, which she cannot afford. 

Initial research by our Health Law Unit on the COBRA FAQ on the NYS Department of Financial Services website indicates that employers are supposed to send COBRA notification within 30 days of the qualifying event. Furthermore, our client was supposed to receive a COBRA letter 30 days after her job loss and not three years after the fact.  

Our Health Law Unit advocates seek pro bono co-counsel to explore what steps our client should take to address the failure of her prior employer and represent our client on the relevant advocacy and potential litigation.