About NCCLP

This is NCCLP

National Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals (NCCLP) is a free and voluntary, unincorporated private membership association of attorneys, paralegals, legal administrators, secretaries, court reporters, law students, business people, clergy and other concerned community members who commit their time, resources and skills through NCCLP to promote legal recourse and meaningful access to the courts for the growing numbers of people in the U.S. who otherwise cannot afford the high cost of attorneys and are therefore denied access to the legal system. 

NCCLP is all-volunteer and accepts no government funding or any other funding that would restrict the association’s ability to provide a voice to those seeking recourse from current government policy. NCCLP exists only through the participation of volunteers who contribute their time, professional services and other forms of material support. 

For more, read “Why We All Need CCLP”
by James Kaller, Esq.

NCCLP was founded in 1978 as means to expand nationally upon the work of the local Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals since the problem of lack of legal recourse available to low-income working people is a national problem. Legal professionals, students and other community members volunteered their time and skill to form the first CCLP in Sacramento, California in 1976. They came together to address the needs of low-income service workers and grew out of grass-roots organizing efforts to improve the conditions of in-home care workers and the working poor. 

In 1973, a local committee, California Homemakers Association (CHA), organizing both the in-home care providers, as well as the elderly and disabled recipients of care under the joint federal- and state-funded In-home Supportive Service (IHSS) program, fought for and gained recognition from the County of Sacramento. More than a year-and-a-half after the county promised higher wages and benefits for the workers, and more hours of care for the low-income elderly, blind and disabled recipients of in-home services, the county pulled out of negotiations. Volunteer attorneys who had been active in, or supportive of, CHA’s organizing efforts, took the case, realizing that more was needed to prosecute the case than a few individual attorneys, and that it would require an organization to fight for legal recourse for domestic workers and other low-income workers. Through the case of this several-year battle, they formed CCLP. 

The Sacramento example inspired the building of local CCLP organizing drives in New York State, in San Francisco’s Bay Area and in Los Angeles. 

Working in conjunction with farm worker organizations, CCLP’s volunteer attorneys, with the assistance of hundreds of volunteer organizers and advocates, won a class action case against the State of California on behalf of thousands of migrant farm workers whose rents on government-subsidized migrant camps were doubled illegally by the State of California in the late 90s. Through the participation of legal professionals, businesses, religious institutions, students, workers and legislators, CCLP and the farm worker organizations representing their farm worker members were successful in winning back the rent overcharges plus interest for the majority of migrant farm workers affected, as well as halting an additional rent increase the State sought to implement in 2003. CCLP and the farm worker class representatives then agreed to dedicate the remaining monies from the settlement to improvements on the camps, dictated by the farm workers themselves. The biggest gain from this campaign was the development of farm worker leadership through the struggle. 

The idea of Verdict magazine was to provide a publication dedicated to an idea, put into practice, of the pro bono use of our professional skills, coupled with organizing tied to low-income worker drives, to provide answers in the problems of the working poor – real answers that go beyond the short-term non-solutions of the past. 

Verdict provides a means to promote the actual voluntary programs, which in many cases offer the only available legal assistance, free-of-charge, to thousands of working and out-of-work people, who otherwise cannot afford help. The magazine also provides a means to reach out to legal professionals across the country, not just in locations of CCLP organizing drives. By enlisting writers, artists, political cartoonists and sponsors, Verdict expands the reach of NCCLP nationally, as well as providing an alternative to establishment media, which often distorts and selectively reports the news.