WHAT IS CHARLOTTE TRIAGE?

In September of 2018, the Charlotte legal community came together, to initiate a pro bono program we called Charlotte Triage. Charlotte Triage brings pro bono volunteers together to assist Legal Aid and Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy in the key areas that particularly affect economic mobility and opportunity: housing, criminal record expungement and healthcare. For example, in Charlotte, only 1.9% of tenants with housing matters were represented by counsel in 2017. Despite the fact that 20% of all people in North Carolina had an arrest or criminal record, and this information is so very detrimental to economic mobility, few Charlotte residents could afford lawyers to expunge such records (as North Carolina law readily allows). Moreover, the state health care registry is hard to navigate, leaving many families with incomplete or improperly-reviewed applications for service — and no legal counsel to support them.

The goal of Charlotte Triage is to help Legal Aid shift some of the practice areas impacting low income people over to a “second ring” of Legal Aid, namely the private bar. Accordingly, under the Charlotte Triage plan that kicked off on September 5, 2018, champions in law firms and corporate legal departments began training pro bono lawyers to serve unrepresented clients in these three identified service areas — with the prospect of the expansion as Charlotte Triage grows.