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Longtime legal services attorney honored by Legal Aid
SHERRY KARABIN
Legal News Reporter
Published: June 18, 2020
Throughout her lengthy career as a legal services lawyer, Cherie H. Howard said she always viewed the work she did as “the last line of defense between clients and the abyss,” doing her best to fill the void as much as possible.
“For example, legal services attorneys help prevent the loss of housing, public benefits and income and utility shutoffs, helping clients to get an overall fresh start,” said Howard, who retired from her position as senior attorney and former managing attorney of the Youngstown office of Northeast Ohio Legal Services (NOLS) in 2013.
“Poor people simply don’t have the money to hire private attorneys to provide these protections or to defend themselves against predatory practices or initiate a lawsuit when they have been defrauded.
“The need is immense and legal services organizations have finite resources,” she said. “Because of funding, we probably meet only about 20% of the need, which is why it is so important for private attorneys to volunteer to the extent possible to supplement what the staff can do.”
In fact, ever since she retired Howard has been doing just that, devoting several hours each month to providing pro bono services to clients of Community Legal Aid Services Inc.
“I primarily handle consumer law matters, which can include debt collection, used car purchases and repairs, repossession or other debtor-creditor transactions,” said Howard. “I provide advice to income-eligible individuals who come to Community Legal Aid’s Financial Wellness workshops in Mahoning County. My primary goal is to provide clients, who are being harassed by debt collectors and are fearful of being sued, with peace of mind by explaining their legal options.
“I also meet with clients at the organization’s new Clarence Darrow Court Clinic in Trumbull County. I will review their paperwork, give them pro se advice and pleadings and in some instances actually represent them in court.”
Rachel Nader, managing attorney for Community Legal Aid’s Volunteer Legal Services Program said Howard’s passion to help the less fortunate is one of the many reasons she is being honored as the organization’s 2019 Mahoning County Volunteer of the Year.
“I was very surprised when I learned that I had been recognized,” said Howard. “I wasn’t even aware that the program gave recognition for pro bono work.”
“Cherie is a soldier on the frontlines,” said Nader. “She practiced for almost 40 years, with the bulk of her time spent at legal aid, where she handled predatory lending and foreclosures. Since her retirement, she has been going full speed ahead providing her services pro bono.
“I can call her at 6 p.m. on a Sunday and ask her to meet with a client on Monday morning and she will do it. It is a pleasure to work with someone, who sets the bar rather high for the rest of us.”
“Cherie has a special place in my heart,” said Community Legal Aid Services Executive Director Steven McGarrity. “She worked for Northeast Ohio Legal Services, which we partnered with for many years.
“She spent her whole career helping people,” he said. “She steps up to make sure people who can’t afford an attorney can still get the help they need, especially in complex consumer law cases. She has led CLEs for us since her retirement and is an all-around great attorney and asset to the bar.”
A native of Youngtown, Howard received her bachelor’s degree in English from Wilmington College in Ohio. She then earned a master’s degree in early childhood education from Kean University in New Jersey, working for about five months as a long-term substitute teacher for fifth graders at the Miller Street School in Newark, New Jersey.
“I never intended to teach,” said Howard. “I took courses in education and child development because I had a new baby and wanted to be a good parent.”
Before law school, Howard directed the federally funded Recruitment and Training Program, which was designed to help women and racial minorities get apprenticeships in the construction trades and other jobs where they were underrepresented.
She also served as a legal intern in the Youngstown prosecutor’s office and at Northeast Ohio Legal Services (NOLS), while attending The University of Akron School of Law. After earning a juris doctorate in 1982, she started as a staff attorney at NOLS.
In 1983, Howard was one of the first attorneys hired at the UAW-GM Legal Services Plan, an employee benefit program that provided legal assistance to autoworkers, their spouses and retirees at the Lordstown, Ohio auto plant.
She left the UAW program in 1985 and returned to NOLS, where she handled bankruptcy and employment law cases. In 1990, she took on the role of director of community education and outreach at Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Legal Services in Brooklyn, New York. Within a year, she was promoted to deputy director and director of income maintenance.
“I handled lots of welfare benefit termination hearings, disability, and unemployment insurance cases,” she said. “Our office covered five zip codes in central Brooklyn where 130,000 eligible clients lived within three square miles. We had a contract with the state of New York to represent welfare recipients at social security disability and SSI (Supplemental Security Income) administrative hearings and in federal court. We had hundreds of cases in the office at any given time.”
In 1998, Howard moved back to Mahoning County, Ohio, where she began serving as managing attorney of the Youngstown office of Northeast Ohio Legal Services.
The following year, Howard took on the first of many foreclosure cases handled by NOLS involving predatory mortgage fraud. She also organized workshops to educate the community about the rapidly growing foreclosure crisis.
“Most of our clients owned their homes free and clear but were duped by loan brokers and home improvement contractors into taking out mortgages to finance exorbitant repairs that were either shoddily done or not at all. We organized trainings in an effort to recruit private attorneys to take cases.
“We never lost a foreclosure for a client who wanted to keep the house.”
Howard also developed educational materials and forms for pro se clients seeking criminal record expungements and those seeking to defend themselves against debt collection lawsuits.
“Given that we cannot possibly represent everyone, I wanted to provide guidance on procedures to help individuals representing themselves,” she said.
Howard said one of the outcomes she is most proud of is the favorable decision she received for her client, Plaintiff-Appellant Debra Rogers in the federal appeals court case, Debra Rogers v. Commissioner of Social Security, 486 F.3d 234 (6th Cir. 2007), which she said started out small, but ended up having larger implications.
Rogers, who suffered from pain and other symptoms associated with fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis, was seeking disability benefits. The Commissioner denied her claim and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio affirmed the Commissioner’s ruling.
In its May 2007 decision, the Sixth Circuit held that “the Commissioner failed to provide sufficient justification for his denial based upon the applicable legal standards,” reversing “the judgment of the district court upholding the Commissioner’s decision” and remanding the case “with directions to return the claim to the Commissioner for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
“Because there’s no objective evidence in the form of diagnostic reports to establish the illness, some Social Security judges had decided that fibromyalgia was an imaginary condition and denied claims,” said Howard.
“The court’s decision in Rogers offers a blueprint for lawyers regarding how to build a winning fibromyalgia case and how judges should evaluate the evidence at hearings,” said Howard. “The decision has been cited in court decisions over 8,000 times.”
Looking down the road, the Trumbull County Bar Association member said she plans to continue to volunteer her legal expertise as much as possible.
“Fraud, abusive debt collection and predatory practices continue to be a problem,” said Howard. “While a single mother getting ripped off at a used car lot by a dealer who ignores Ohio law, falsifies documents and sells a car that is essentially worthless might not sound like a big deal to some, it’s important to remember that such individuals are some of the most vulnerable in society.
“If a person saves up for months only to be defrauded and then has no way to get to and from work and loses a job, the result can be disastrous.
“Taking these cases to court and getting a money judgment not only helps the individual client but also serves as a deterrent to used car dealers and other bad actors from engaging in deceptive consumer practices,” said Howard.