A Whole New Ballgame
My apologies for not posting in a few weeks. A couple of days after finals, we went on a much needed vacation. We spent nearly three weeks in Peru, which was a great way of relaxing after my 1L year. We visited lots of amazing sites, including Machu Picchu, the floating Uros Islands of Lake Titicaca, and the cities of Cusco and Arequipa.
After getting back this past weekend, I started my first co-op at the Greater Boston Legal Services (GBLS) Consumer Rights Unit. GBLS is a large, dynamic, and active organization that provides legal serivces to indigent clients in a variety of areas, including housing, health and disability law, family law, and of course consumer law. There are a lot of interns here this summer (at least 60), including quite a few NUSL students. The Consumer Rights Unit is one of the smaller ones here at GBLS, and although it handles a vareity of cases, the focus right now is on foreclosure prevention.
Although I have only been here a couple of days, I am already getting a sense of how complicated these cases are going to be. Because of the securitization of mortgage loans (a concept I'm still trying to get my head around), it is extremely difficult to sort out the facts of these foreclosure cases. Furthermore, in the past few months the Obama Administration has instituted several new policies that are designed to help people avoid foreclosure. So even when litigation is not appropriate, our unit is helping educate potential clients and other attorneys about the availability of these programs.
Tomorrow night I'm getting together with a bunch of NUSL friends to hear about how their first co-ops are going, and it should definitely be interesting comparing notes.