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Browse the latest Pro Bono Opportunities at The Legal Aid Society.
NOTE: These opportunities are only available to attorneys affiliated with firms that have an established pro bono relationship with The Legal Aid Society.
If you are interested in working on one of these matters, please contact the Pro Bono Counsel at your law firm to receive authorization and check conflicts.
Our Community Development Project seeks pro bono assistance for an immigrant-owned, husband-and-wife-operated home-based daycare. The owners are first-time business operators who recently established a corporation. The daycare is in the early operational phase and currently serving two enrolled children. The owners plan to expand enrollment capacity and hire employees once foundational business and legal documents are finalized.
The clients seek a general review of their corporate documents and those pertaining to the operation of the daycare. More specifically, the owners wish for assistance with reviewing enrollment agreements, parent handbooks, general policies and procedures, liability waivers, emergency contact and medical authorization forms, tuition and payment policies, and termination and withdrawal provisions. The client may also need advice pertaining to best practices when hiring employees.
These owners took out a business loan to realize their dream of starting their own business and hope to establish a strong foundation from which to grow.
Our Community Development Project seeks co-counsel to help provide training on employer obligations for approximately 50 daycare providers working in northwest Bronx. Topics of interest include best practices for interviewing, hiring, and terminating staff, and other basic legal requirements of employers. This training would need to be in both English and Spanish. The group of providers has requested that the training occur virtually in-person on March 20th, 2026.
Legal Aid’s client is an elderly, disabled single woman who lived in her apartment in Brooklyn since she was a child. This building was owned by her mother who passed away in 2015 and the last recorded deed is still in the mother’s name. After the mother’s death, a bank started foreclosure proceedings on the building.
In 2023, Legal Aid staff found a court filing in the foreclosure case which appears to contain our client’s mother’s will. Most notably, the will leaves all property, including the building where our client still lives, to all of the mother’s children, including our client, in equal shares as joint tenants with rights of survivorship. Until our staff showed this to our client, she did not know it existed.
The family member who is acting as executor to the mother’s estate has been harassing our client and other family members by illegally locking them out and refusing to ensure they have access to utilities. They may have also taken property from the building illegally and engaging in other behaviors to push the remaining family members out of their home.
The case is currently in the midst of discovery, most recently responding to the Plaintiff lender’s discovery requests and interrogatories. The client is still trying to gather the relevant documents showing that her mother was not mentally sound when she signed the reverse mortgage. Plaintiff’s counsel proposed October 31 as a deadline to produce documents, and wants to depose the client in early November, but the client’s current counsel has not yet agreed to either.
A law firm pro bono team has served as counsel of record for the past two years but recently learned of a conflict that did not exist when they took on the matter. The team now needs to withdraw but will assist in transitioning the matter to a new firm.
Our Family and Domestic Violence Unit seeks pro bono assistance to assist with drafting an Appellee’s Brief in a matrimonial action that has a dense procedural history, much of which occurred before Legal Aid began representing the Plaintiff Wife and filed final papers on her behalf in December 2024.
After the Court signed the Judgement of Divorce in March 2025, the Defendant Husband filed multiple motions in an attempt to vacate the Court’s order, which the Judge ultimately denied. In the instant appeal, the Defendant appears to be arguing that the Trial Judge gave improper weight to the parties’ respective financial disclosure affidavits and incorrectly held an inquest in June of 2022, which occurred before Legal Aid represented the Plaintiff Wife. Defendant argues that the Court’s actions violate his 14th Amendment Rights and are procedurally defective under the Domestic Relations Law.
Defendant bases all of his arguments upon his allegation that the judge inappropriately gave weight to the Plaintiff’s submitted financial disclosure documents including a tax return which did not include the filer’s signature and a Statement of Net Worth which did not “include4 receipts.”
The appeal is noticed for the First Department’s March Term. LAS Client has not requested any extension to date.
Our client’s preferred language is Spanish, and we expect that pro bono co-counsel would assist with providing translation and interpretation as needed.
Our Juvenile Rights Practice seeks assistance on behalf of a minor whose mother recently passed away. Our client needs advice and counsel on how to obtain and understand her mother’s will as well as understand the distribution of her mother’s estate. Although our client believes there is a maternal grandmother living in Long Island who may be the executor, she is not certain. Additionally, our client is in a pre-adoptive foster home and seeks to understand whether there is a need to delay the timing of adoption as the estate is being distributed.
Ideally, the Juvenile Rights attorneys hope to connect our client and her foster mother with an attorney to obtain advice about next steps and what they should expect going forward.
Legal Aid represents a group of long-term rent stabilized tenants who live in Inwood, Manhattan. The tenants filed a group housing part (“HP”) action in New York County Housing Court to obtain repairs and to address ongoing harassment. The building has been abandoned for approximately two years. Rent has not been collected, repairs are not being made and landlord debt has been accumulating for the property tax and utility bills. On several occasions, Con Edison has threatened to terminate utility service for failure to pay.
Legal Aid commenced the HP action in July 2025, and subsequently learned that the landlord had passed away. On November 18, 2025, the Housing Court issued a $22,000 judgment and a finding of harassment against the landlord. The team discovered that the landlord had an estate and their daughter commenced an action in Surrogate Court and was ultimately assigned Temporary Administrator.
Legal Aid’s team continues to work on obtaining the necessary repairs for the tenants. Currently, the City’s Housing Preservation & Development agency is slowly making repairs although many outstanding violations remain.
Our Housing Justice Practice’s Group Advocacy Unit seeks guidance and/or representation for the tenants in an action to collect on the judgment against the landlord’s estate.