NYC Legal Aid Society Expands Affordable Housing Access for 100,000 Families
Attorneys relied on modern ediscovery software to help secure a settlement with nearly 50 defendants
The team at The Legal Aid Society, the oldest and largest public defender organization in New York City, faced a significant ediscovery challenge. They had to review thousands of documents in a sweeping multi-plaintiff housing discrimination lawsuit with fast-moving court deadlines, and some of the team members had limited document review experience.
In the case, the Housing Rights Initiative (HRI) claimed that a yearlong undercover investigation found that 88 brokers and landlords were routinely rejecting applicants with Section 8 housing vouchers. The Legal Aid Society and co-counsel Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC filed a case on HRI’s behalf in the District Court for the Southern District of New York, with the goal of protecting low-income renters from discrimination.
With the help of Everlaw’s modern ediscovery techniques, HRI has secured a settlement with nearly 50 defendants as of December 2024, increasing access to affordable housing for almost 100,000 New York City households.
Everlaw was a key part of their strategy. Relying on the ediscovery platform to easily automate time consuming manual document review helped facilitate the litigation team’s preparation for further discovery, settlement discussions, and motion practice, said Evan Henley, a staff attorney in the Civil Law Reform Unit at the Legal Aid Society.
“Without Everlaw, we would not have been able to obtain relief that will benefit so many New York City tenants.”
Leveling the Legal Playing Field for New Yorkers
The Legal Aid Society, a nearly 150-year-old social justice law firm, works to ensure that low-income New Yorkers have access to justice through comprehensive legal representation in court. The nonprofit, a member of the Everlaw For Good program, provides free legal services in many areas of law including criminal trials, parole revocation and appeals, juvenile justice and child welfare cases, and civil issues such as housing and immigration.
When the Housing Rights Initiative filed the lawsuit in March 2021, its counsel needed to efficiently process large volumes of electronic data while ensuring a thorough review – a tall order for any legal aid organizations running on lean resources.
“The investigation lasted a long time and generated a lot of documents,” Henley said. “Ediscovery tools are essential to doing multi-plaintiff or large-doc cases like this.”
Running Fast and Easy Productions
As a legal services organization that doesn’t regularly engage in document review, the Legal Aid Society needed a tool that could help its team get up and running without a lot of ramp-up time. They and their co-counsel at Handley Farah & Anderson needed to prepare more than 2,000 documents for production.
“For people who are not familiar with ediscovery, it can be overwhelming to get acquainted with the terms specific to each ediscovery tool,” Henley said. “Thankfully, Everlaw is intuitive.”
“Ediscovery tools are essential to doing multi-plaintiff or large-doc cases like this.”
Together, the teams used Everlaw to easily organize their document set, split it into batches of 200-300 documents a piece, and review for privilege and responsiveness with a consistent coding infrastructure. They quickly created binders of Bates-stamped production sets and were able to produce them using a shareable link.
“A lot of cases do not have the right to discovery like this; and certain people working in legal aid may not have had the practical experience with these tools,” Henley said. “But Everlaw’s support team helped get us up and running so we could make the most of our time on a very complex case."
The settlement requires the companies to implement changes to their practices, including paying agents more for renting apartments to tenants with vouchers and reserving units for voucher holders. The lawsuit against the other defendants isn’t over, but Henley said the ability to run a modern litigation process with Everlaw helps the team efficiently and effectively litigate the case.
