On an average day, Alice Nicholson meets with three or four clients, reviews financial documents, represents people in State Supreme Court who are about to lose their homes, and in her spare evenings, she takes to the podium at the Brooklyn Bar Association to teach fellow attorneys a thing or two about foreclosures.

Nicholson, a Brooklyn-based attorney, said she knows that what people facing foreclosure in New York need is legal aid. She is among the growing number of attorneys participating in the Foreclosure Intervention Program, administered through the Brooklyn Bar Association’s Volunteer Lawyers Project. The program is among the initiatives launched this year to encourage New York attorneys to offer free assistance to homeowners facing foreclosure. In a recent workshop, Nicholson trained volunteer attorneys how to negotiate with banks to modify mortgages so homeowners have reduced monthly payments and can stay in their property, at least for now.

“About 90 percent of my legal services work is in foreclosures now,” said Nicholson. “At the beginning of the year, I had almost no foreclosure clients.”

In her private practice, Nicholson normally charges between $3,500 to $5,000 per case. She said that some lawyers charge more than double that fee. But, like other attorneys partaking in the Volunteer Lawyers Project, Nicholson offers her services pro bono to homeowners facing foreclosure.

A report issued in October by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy and law institute based at New York University, said the housing foreclosure crisis is also a crisis in legal representation. The report said that in Queens -- the only New York borough where data was collected -- 84 percent of defendants in foreclosure proceedings involving subprime, high-cost, or non-traditional mortgages, went without legal representation this year. Supporting the Brennan Center’s findings, Judge Arthur Schack of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn said that approximately 90 percent of the homeowners facing foreclosure in his court this year have appeared without legal counsel.

Additionally, in a report presented to congress in March, the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with reporting monthly on the state of the financial crisis, said, “Many troubled borrowers are unaware that there may be options to save their home or prevent a foreclosure.”

According to the Brennan Center, the types of mortgages involved in these cases were almost always aimed at low-income and minority homeowners – the very people who lack the resources to pay for legal representation.

Nicholson said that various legislative measures, enacted in response to the housing crisis, have increased the demand for lawyers to be involved in foreclosures. In March 2009, President Barack Obama launched the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), also known as The Obama Plan. It created guidelines for the mortgage industry on modifying loans to help people stay in their homes. The program also offers incentives for lenders to offer modifications. Homeowners facing foreclosure can call for settlement conferences with their lenders, in which modifications are negotiated in court before a retired judge.

“The settlement conference procedure was so challenging for me at first, let alone the client,” Nicholson said. Settlement negotiations are so complex that many defendants have no information on loan modification possibilities or how they might show lenders an ability to pay in the future, she said.

Many homeowners do not know about potential options under the Home Affordable Modification Program that could allow them to keep their homes. And providing guidance about such programs is what organizations like The Brooklyn Bar Association, South Brooklyn Legal Services and the city-run Center for NYC Neighborhoods are attempting to provide.

In June 2009, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke out to promote mandatory settlement conferences between lenders and homeowners. “For the 12 months ending in March, more than 13,000 homes in our City were reported at risk of foreclosure. Many of them are eligible for loan modifications and refinances but [homeowners] either don’t know it or don’t have the help they need to negotiate with their banks,” said the mayor. The Volunteer Lawyer Project’s aim is to inspire attorneys to offer their services in these settlement conferences.

Clients are referred to the Volunteer Lawyers Project by South Brooklyn Legal Services, who screen prospective clients for eligibility, said project director Jaime Lathrop. To qualify for aid from Legal Services, a client must live in Brooklyn and have a low income.

Although there is some flexibility as to how low a client's income needs be - and each case is considered individually - SBLS offer a rough guide. An individual with an income of $13,000 or less will qualify for assistance, for example. Some clients referred on to the assistance project by South Brooklyn Legal Services do not meet the criteria, but an attorney with the VLP can use his or her discretion and decide to take on the client pro bono nonetheless.

Attorneys who volunteer with the Volunteer Lawyers Project are required to do at least one pro bono case each year. Nicholson said that she and other attorneys do many more.

Among Nicholson’s pro bono clients is Beverley Ricketts, who for more than a year has faced foreclosure on her condo and landed in the attorney’s office via the volunteer project and Brooklyn Legal Services. In a settlement conference set for January 2010 Nicholson will try to obtain approval of a modified and repayable mortgage for Ricketts under the Home Affordable Modification Program.

“I was totally lost without Alice; I don’t know what I would do without her,” said Ricketts, with dark circles of exhaustion surrounding her eyes. “How can an average person be expected to understand all those legal terms? It’s like a different language.”

Nicholson argued, too, that even if the most that legal representation in a settlement conference can achieve is buying the client some time and respite, then the effort is worthwhile. In all of the 90 foreclosure lawsuits that the Volunteer Lawyers Project has taken up since April of this year, the lenders were prevented from moving forward with the foreclosure until a good faith effort to work out the loan defaults was made. Nicholson said she considers this a mark of the project’s success, as does Lathrop. “Most of the cases have ongoing settlement negotiations where lenders have offered modifications and the attorneys have concluded that the offers are either not in the borrower’s best interest or that the modification would likely fail if it moved forward. From that perspective, every case where a homeowner has a pro bono attorney looking over their shoulder and keeping the playing field level is a victory,” Lathrop said.

There are some cases where foreclosure cannot be avoided, even if a settlement conference can buy a homeowner time. The Congressional Oversight Panel report says: “In some cases, foreclosure will result in a smaller loss than any viable modification.” And there are attorneys in New York who are less optimistic than Nicholson about how far legal assistance can go in preventing foreclosures in the long term.

Daniel Gershburg, a New York real estate attorney and a volunteer with the Volunteer Lawyers Project, said that the idea of helping people to stop foreclosures is noble, but lacks practicality. “Let’s say you stop a foreclosure, and then what? What’s going to happen next?” he asked. The only way clients would be able to keep their homes, he said, is if they earn enough so that no more than 31 percent of their income goes to mortgage payments. “If that’s not the case they are better off just walking away from that house,” he added.

Nicholson agreed that there is little hope in cases where a clients have lost a considerable portion of their income. “In that case,” she said, there is not much you can do.” But in those instances when something can be done, she argues that having legal representation makes a tremendous difference, emphasizing that the documentation that you have to present in these settlements is endless and complex. “There are bank statement, hardship letters, etc. Plus all the income has to be deposited in their bank account,” she said.

Nicholson and other New York attorneys said they are convinced their free legal aid is doing some good and that more is needed. Over all, they said, even if the settlement agreed to in court helps only for a short period of time, that time is valuable for homeowners in dire straits.