Legal Aid Gets Funds for Programs

The Legal Aid Society of Orange County has received a total of $300,000 in federal grants for pilot programs to determine the most financially efficient way to provide the county’s poor with legal assistance.

An additional $150,000 federal contract also is expected to be awarded soon to the nonprofit county agency.

The grants were awarded by the Washington-based Legal Services Corp., a private, nonprofit group set up by Congress to distribute millions of dollars in federal funds to agencies providing free legal aid to the poor for non-criminal affairs.

They were presented Wednesday night at a reception at the Holiday Inn in Anaheim, where the corporation’s board of directors has been holding meetings with local and regional agencies and attorneys for the poor.

Robert Cohen, executive director of the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, said the experimental programs will involve testing the cost efficiency of using private attorneys to handle family-law cases such as domestic abuse, child custody and divorce. The attorneys would be paid by the federal government and low-income clients still would pay nothing.