Upsolve, Inc. et al v. James

Filing 7

DECLARATION of Gregory Silbert in Support re: 5 MOTION for Preliminary Injunction .. Document filed by Rev. John Udo-Okon, Upsolve, Inc.. (Attachments: # 1 Exhibit 1 - Rohan Pavuluri Declaration, # 2 Exhibit 2 - Rev. John Udo-Okon Declaration (Part 1), # 3 Exhibit 2 -Rev. John Udo-Okon Declaration (Part 2), # 4 Exhibit 2 - Rev. John Udo-Okon Declaration (Part 3), # 5 Exhibit 3 - Professor Tashi Lhewa Declaration, # 6 Exhibit 4 - Professor Pamela Foohey Declaration, # 7 Exhibit 5 - William "Tyler" Evertsen Declaration, # 8 Exhibit 6 - Liz Jurado Declaration, # 9 Exhibit 7 - Christopher Lepre Declaration).(Silbert, Gregory)

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January

22

 --

-----------------------------

&<5.;
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Exhibit $

Action Plan: The American Justice Movement
Executive Summary
Today, Upsolve is one of the most impactful nonprofit membership organizations in America
helping low-income families access their civil legal rights. We do this through our free online
education, community, self-service technology tools, and advocacy.
About two million individuals consume our free legal education per year and our self-service
legal tools have helped low-income families relieve over $400 million in debt. Our average user
has less than $1,000 in savings and earns under $20,000 per year.
Upsolve exists to address one of the fundamental civil rights injustices of our time: Low-income
Americans who cannot afford lawyers often don’t receive equal justice under the law. People
have a constitutional right to a free attorney in criminal cases, but not civil cases. So if a person
needs legal help in a civil case but cannot afford a lawyer or cannot find free legal help, which is
often in limited supply due to the high educational costs required, she will be forced to go it
alone. The effects of legal fees in poverty law can be like modern-day poll taxes: If you can’t
afford the fees, you can’t access your rights.
Over the last three years, we’ve learned that education and software alone cannot solve this
civil rights injustice. The way to truly bring about equal justice under the law is to empower
professionals who are already acting in the public interest – clergy, patient advocates, librarians,
social workers, community organizers, and frontline nonprofit staff – to provide free legal advice
to poor and working-class people who need legal help but can’t afford lawyers and can’t find
free legal help.
The access to justice crisis gap harms economic mobility, contributes to the cycle of poverty,
and comes at a financial cost to the entire public. This civil rights issue is also a racial justice
issue: the status quo has a disproportionate impact on communities of color, preventing many
people from vindicating their legal rights. Communities of color often have disproportionately
fewer lawyers, and especially lack trustworthy legal advocates that reflect the diversity of their
own communities.
Given our track-record reaching, educating, and assisting low-income families at scale about
their civil legal rights, Upsolve is launching the American Justice Movement (AJM) to
empower individuals who cannot afford lawyers to receive free legal advice from trained and
vetted professionals who are not lawyers. AJM is a non-partisan political movement that aims to
strengthen the American democracy by safely expanding the rule of law to people who are
unable to access our courts.

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The first initiative of the American Justice Movement is the Consumer Rights Project. Upsolve
will train outside nonprofit professionals to be AJM Justice Advocates. These professionals will
provide personalized, free legal advice to low-income individuals and families who have been
sued by their debt collectors and need help responding to that lawsuit.
We believe the American Justice Movement will help low-income families understand their rights
and curtail unsavory behavior from certain creditors. Our goal is to create a more accessible
and humane financial and legal system.

Problem
Debt collection lawsuits are one of the most common civil legal issues in America. According to
a study by the Pew Charitable Trust, 1 in 4 civil cases is a debt collection lawsuit.1 This amounts
to about 4 million debt collection lawsuits every year. In recent decades, debt collection lawsuits
have more than doubled. Almost always, these lawsuits are for less than $10,000 and often less
than $5,000.2
Over 70% of debt collection lawsuits end in default judgments against the defendant because
the defendant simply does not show up. This means that nearly 3 million Americans lose their
debt collection lawsuits and lose their property and face the risk of wage garnishment, bank
seizures, eviction, and lasting damage to credit without the plaintiff needing to ever prove their
case and without the court ever needing to consider any facts at all.3 It is a civil rights
injustice that low-income Americans suffer these grave harms, losing their property
rights without being able to meaningfully access the courts to have a neutral
determination of their rights.
Very few private attorneys exist to represent individuals who have been sued for their debts.
This is because the low dollar amounts of these claims make it difficult for private attorneys to
build a sustainable business model around debt collection defense representation. And there
aren’t close to enough free lawyers in America—especially in light of the high educational
costs—to meet the demand of every single person who needs legal help. One 2010 report
stated that the leading free program serving low-income NYC residents facing debt collection
lawsuits received funding sufficient to serve less than 2% of the approximately 300,000 New

1

The Pew Charitable Trusts, How Debt Collectors Are Transforming the Business of State Courts (May
2020), https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2020/06/debt-collectors-to-consumers.pdf.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.

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York City residents sued each year by debt collectors.4 The COVID-19 pandemic has limited the
availability of this service and others like it.
Research on debt collection lawsuits further shows that exceedingly few defendants in New
York have an attorney, compared with nearly 100% of plaintiffs. Nationally, studies estimate that
over 90%—and in some cases 99%--of individuals sued for their debt receive no legal advice at
all.5
On the other side of these lawsuits, debt buyers can take advantage of economies of scale to
cheaply bring hundreds or thousands of mass-produced lawsuits, with little risk that they will
ever have to prove their case since so many low-income New Yorkers default. As a result, there
is reduced incentive to check the quality of their claims or the supporting evidence, and
increased risk of fraud and abuse. Research shows that although many debt collection suits
have merit, a substantial portion are meritless or overstated.
Civil debt collection lawsuits may well be the area of poverty law where there’s the largest gap
between a need for legal advice and the amount of legal advice available – either paid or
unpaid. Our conversations with Upsolve website visitors align with this data. Most Upsolve users
we’ve talked to have been unable to afford or receive legal advice after they’ve been sued for
their debt. It’s their top unmet legal need.
There’s also striking data on the racial disparities in debt collection lawsuits. A study of
judgments over a five-year period in St. Louis, Chicago, and Newark, New Jersey, found that
even after accounting for income, the rate of default judgments in mostly black neighborhoods
was nearly double that of mostly white ones.6

Solution
We believe individuals sued for their debt would benefit from free, individualized legal advice
about their rights from trained Justice Advocates.
Because low-income Americans cannot afford paid lawyers and free lawyers are in too short
supply to meet this need, Upsolve is launching the American Justice Movement to meet this

4
The Legal Aid Society et al., Debt Deception: How Debt Buyers Abuse the Legal System to Prey on
Lower-Income New Yorkers (May 2010), https://www.neweconomynyc.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/08/DEBT_DECEPTION_FINAL_WEB-new-logo.pdf.
5
The Pew Charitable Trusts, How Debt Collectors Are Transforming the Business of State Courts (May
2020), https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2020/06/debt-collectors-to-consumers.pdf.
6
Paul Kiel and Annie Waldman, The Color of Debt: How Collection Suits Squeeze Black Neighborhoods,
ProPublica (Oct. 8, 2015), HYPERLINK "https://www.propublica.org/article/debt collection-lawsuitssqueeze-black-neighborhoods" \h https://www.propublica.org/article/debt collection-lawsuits-squeezeblack-neighb

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need with professionals who are not lawyers. AJM will train nonprofit professionals to be AJM
Justice Advocates under AJM.
To receive advice from Justice Advocates, low-income individuals will answer a series of
standard and scripted questions about their debt collection lawsuit. In our own conversations
and research, we’ve learned that debt collection lawsuit defense is an area of the law where
many judges and attorneys understand the value in training Justice Advocates who are not
attorneys to provide free legal advice.
Based on the information an individual shares, the Justice Advocates will provide free
individualized legal advice about whether and how to draft and file an answer, so the client can
respond to the lawsuit. Providing this advice and assisting low-income individuals in responding
to their debt collection lawsuits will ensure that plaintiffs cannot secure a judgment without
proving their case. For many of these individuals, the lack of response is not due to their
unwillingness to respond and is not because they concede that the lawsuit has merit. Rather,
they lack either the financial resources to seek legal counsel or lack the support to understand
their rights and the procedures associated with responding to their complaints. As a result,
these individuals receive automatic default judgments against them, which can result in
potentially life-altering consequences down the road. Across the board, consumer lawyers and
advocates agree that responding to the initial complaint is the first important, and critical, step in
a debt collection lawsuit.
Specifically, the Justice Advocate will be trained to provide free, routine legal advice on whether
and how to draft an answer. This is extremely simple in New York given the straightforward
check-the-box answer forms that the State already provides.
Potential advice, based on the specific situation of the user, could include:
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Advising an individual to check the box on the answer form to indicate that the plaintiff
must verify the debt amount.
Advising an individual to check the box on the answer form to indicate that they do not
owe the plaintiff if they’re the victim of mistaken identity.
Advising an individual to check the box on the answer form to indicate that the plaintiff is
collecting debts that are time-barred if the debt is outside the applicable statute of
limitations.
Advising an individual to check the box on the answer form that they were not served
properly if the plaintiff did not meet their obligations when serving the lawsuit papers.
Advising an individual to indicate on their forms whether their income or assets are
protected in a debt collection lawsuit, based on the exemptions available in the state.
Advising an individual on how to submit the form.

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The Justice Advocates must make clear to clients the limited scope of the advice they are able
to provide and will require clients to acknowledge the nature of the advice. Some clients will
require more attention, and, in these scenarios, the Justice Advocates will inform the clients that
they may require the attention of an attorney and may provide the user with potential institutions
to reach out to for further assistance. To further ensure the integrity of the advice given, Justice
Advocates will be required to comply with relevant ethical rules around conflicts-of-interest and
confidentiality that attorneys giving similar advice would be required to comply with, and the
activities of Justice Advocates will be carefully tracked and monitored.
We choose to recruit and train non-lawyer Justice Advocates for reasons of supply, cost,
convenience, and trust. There are many, many more frontline nonprofit staff and other
community-embedded professionals than lawyers in America. It is also less expensive for
institutions to hire professionals who are not lawyers than lawyers. This enables philanthropic
and government funding to go further toward accomplishing its intended means of helping lowincome families.
For consumers, it’s more convenient to receive help from individuals already embedded in their
communities, and, importantly, they’re often more likely to trust these individuals. There are
already many social workers, community organizers, librarians, and frontline staff embedded in
communities across America that better reflect the diversity of the populations they serve than
lawyers, who are disproportionately white.7 These individuals are acting in the public interest.
They should be equipped to serve low-income and working-class families who have been sued
for their debts and cannot afford legal fees.
We are launching with a focus on New York, where Upsolve is headquartered and where we are
most familiar with the state, given that we’ve had physical offices in NY for over five years. Our
New York users and others have come to us expressing the need for this advice and their
interest in receiving limited legal advice from professionals who are not lawyers. And New York
is where we have found the first interest from potential Justice Advocates willing to take on the
role and responsibilities of providing this advice for free and for the purpose of helping lowincome Americans access their legal rights.

Guidelines for AJM Professionals
To expand the supply of Justice Advocates, we will recruit clergy, librarians, social workers,
community organizers, nonprofit case workers, nonprofit paralegals, and other frontline nonprofit
staff.

7

Am. Bar Ass’n Comm’n on the Future of Legal Services, Report on the Future of Legal Services in the
United States (2016),
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/images/abanews/2016FLSReport_FNL_WEB.pdf.

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But in order to ensure that Justice Advocates are acting in the public interest and in the best
interest of the advice receivers, AJM imposes strict conditions on the Justice Advocates and the
advice they provide.
1. We vet and train professionals providing free legal advice to ensure the quality of the
Justice Advocates and the advice they provide. As part of this quality-control process, all
Justice Advocates must affirm that they will only provide limited legal advice on issues
for which AJM provides training and that they are doing so in the interest of increasing
access to justice by helping low-income Americans access their civil rights.
2. We require all Justice Advocates providing legal advice to abide by a shared set of
standards. At the top of the list:
a. Justice Advocates must never receive financial or in-kind contributions from
beneficiaries for providing legal advice.
b. Justice Advocates must inform every client that they are not a lawyer before
providing any legal advice and clients must acknowledge the limited-scope of the
advice being provided.
c. Justice Advocates must inform individuals receiving advice about the American
Justice Movement website, so that AJM beneficiaries can report bad behavior
and bad advice.
d. Justice Advocates must comply with the same confidentiality and conflict-ofinterest requirements imposed on lawyers providing pro bono representation.
3. Upsolve will review and investigate complaints about Justice Advocates and will
remove Justice Advocates who fail to uphold quality care and assistance requirements
and notify them of the risk of further liability if they continue to provide unauthorized
assistance.

Distribution
To reach our target audience, the American Justice Movement will employ two strategies in our
first phase:
1. Provide our 150,000+ monthly Upsolve website visitors with access to available Justice
Advocates.
2. Recruit and train Justice Advocates, who are already serving communities of need, to
raise awareness.
To recruit Justice Advocates to train, we’ll conduct outreach to community-based nonprofits that
serve communities in need.

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Potential Impact
Nearly 4 million people per year are sued for the debts and receive no legal advice at all. The
norm is that they don’t respond and they automatically lose their lawsuit, with potentially
disastrous consequences. This undermines our democracy and compromises our rule of law.
America can and should do better.
The American Justice Movement empowers any low-income or working-class individual or
family sued for their debt to receive free, carefully vetted legal advice from a professional in their
community. We aim to restore the promise of equal rights under the law by addressing one of
the largest unmet needs in our civil justice system.
Free legal advice from AJM professionals will have several concrete advantages in the lives of
low-income families. These relate to their personal finances, safety, freedom, and livelihood.
The downstream effects of erroneous debt collection lawsuits include homelessness, hunger,
and poverty, which come at a cost to all of society.
In the long run, AJM aims to curtail debt collection lawsuits and practices that are unsavory.
Debt collection agencies and debt buyers today know that the vast majority of individuals they
sue will not respond. And they know that most people who do take action will not receive any
legal advice. Some unsavory debt collectors take advantage of that information gap by filing
sloppy or unfounded suits.
If more low-income people who were sued in a debt collection action had the ability to receive
free legal advice, we believe they would reduce the potential for abuse and encourage debt
collection agencies to be more careful in initiating suits in the first place. After all, multiple
studies suggest that individuals who receive some kind of representation fare better in debt
collection lawsuits than those who respond to their complaint but don’t receive any kind of legal
advice.
The theory of change built into the American Justice Movement– helping people directly in the
near term while fighting to create a more accessible financial and legal system in the long term
– is aligned with the Upsolve philosophy for how to maximize our impact in the world.

Why is this Urgent?
COVID-19 has caused significant financial distress and has limited the degree to which lawyers
and courts are able to provide free assistance, with a disproportionate impact on communities in
need. Moreover, certain debt collection and eviction moratoriums are set to expire in 2022,
which may lead to an unprecedented level of debt collection lawsuits. It will be critical for

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individuals from communities in need to be able to understand and access their legal rights
when they’ve been sued by their creditors.

Budget & Ask
While Upsolve has already committed existing staff resources to developing AJM, we have
already raised $100,000 to fund one full-time AJM staff member and are planning to raise
additional funds to further broaden the program’s reach. We will hire someone with a track
record of consumer-rights advocacy, a commitment to social justice, and a deep familiarity with
the legal system and the ways it comes up short for poor Americans. This consumer advocate
will be responsible for outreach to nonprofit professionals already embedded in communities
across New York, training them on how to provide limited scope, free legal advice to individuals
sued for their debt, and ensuring that the advice being provided is advancing the interests of the
public and consumers.

Legality of this Service
Under existing regulations governing the practice of law, the American Justice Movement
cannot provide this service: state law is clear that non-lawyers cannot provide legal advice
without facing the risk of prosecution and potentially criminal punishment for engaging in the
unauthorized practice of law. It does not matter whether the law is federal, the legal advice is
free, the user cannot afford a lawyer, or the area of the law is simple and routine. It does not
matter if the advice is a form of political advocacy intended to help communities access the
courts, advance racial, social, and economic justice, expand individual freedom, protect property
and liberty, or fight debt-based poverty. It also does not matter whether the user prefers to
receive free legal advice from a trained consumer advocate who is not a lawyer and fully
understands that the consumer advocate is not a licensed lawyer.
But the United States Constitution guarantees all Americans the right to access their legal rights
in court, regardless of their race or socioeconomic status. And the Constitution also guarantees
the rights of AJM and the Justice Advocates to associate and advocate to ensure that all
Americans can understand and access their legal rights. In order to achieve the goal of this
program, Upsolve intends to fight in court to protect the right to provide and receive free legal
advice for the purpose of expanding access to courts.
Given the risk of state regulations on the unauthorized practice of law, we are asking for a
conditional gift. We hope to receive funding to support AJM’s Consumer Rights Project if we can
be certain that it is legal to offer the services we’ve outlined above.

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