2005 marked the seventh full year of Kramer Levin’s Associate Service Program, in which the firm staffs an ongoing position at South Brooklyn Legal Services.  Three associates per year rotate through this position — each spending several months representing low-income tenants in Housing Court full time.  Externs remain Kramer Levin employees on full salary.  Litigation associate Savvas Diacosavvas, IP associate Aaron Frankel, and corporate associate Tracy Sigal served during 2005, and litigation associate Christos Yatrakis took over in early 2006.  The Kramer Levin extern functions as a full-fledged Housing Unit lawyer, counseling individuals on emergency intake, filing motions in Housing Court to stop evictions, solving public benefits problems, and negotiating settlements with landlord attorneys.  Since 1998, our associates have counseled nearly 1,200 clients, represented more than 300 in active Housing Court cases, and also litigated several Article 78 proceedings in New York Supreme Court.

In one hotly contested case during 2005, Savvas won a trial victory in New York City Civil Court, obtaining an order restoring a 67-year old disabled woman to possession of her rent controlled apartment of 42 years after her landlord locked her out.  Savvas demonstrated at trial that the client, who vacated the apartment after a fire, had taken the necessary steps to indicate her intention to return to the apartment.  In a decision published in The New York Law Journal, the court found that the client had not abandoned the apartment and ordered her restored to possession.

In another matter reported in the New York Law Journal, extern Aaron Frankel obtained an important ruling on behalf of mentally disabled tenants, establishing that SBLS had standing to commence an action on behalf of a mentally impaired tenant and rejecting the landlord’s “Catch-22” argument that no action could be commenced until a guardian ad litem (“GAL”) was in place, but that a GAL could not be appointed until the case was commenced.  This precedent will make it easier for SBLS and other public interest organizations to represent mentally disabled clients in housing court.

The externship program not only provides associates with unparalleled hands-on experience in court and working with clients, it also delivers legal services to the poor with unusual efficiency for a private firm pro bono program.  Ed Josephson, South Brooklyn’s Director of Litigation, calls the Kramer Levin externship “a tremendous addition to our office’s housing work that has allowed us to assist hundreds of families who otherwise would have faced homelessness due to chronic underfunding of the Legal Services program.”

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