Legal Aid of North Carolina-Downtown Durham office

"I didn't expect much from Durham legal aid initially. After all, legal aid's image in general has taken a real beating over the years. It's thought to be understaffed and pretty much feckless in the face of serious legal troubles. My mom, who has a law degree, had recently suffered a stroke which left her paralyzed on her left side-- and having no other resources, needed medicaid to cover her ltc (long term care) bill. At first, I thought getting the application approved would be a simple task. Then medicaid announced they were going to do the notorious "5 year look back" as part of processing her application and i realized we needed expert legal help. When I told my mom i was going to call legal aid, she had no encouraging words. I'm so very happy she was wrong because we were in quite a fix with staring down the prospect of a $10K a month ltc bill. I'm so glad i followed my intuition and looked them up. Durham legal aid actually has a special cadre of attorneys who specialize in handling medicaid applications. Bottom line, our attorney took the tiger by the tail and got my mom's application over the goal post!!"

"They care for your situation, making sure you get what you need. A job well done. Honest and professional."

"Now, this is the place City of Durham gave 500k to prevent ppl feom getting put out for nonpayment of rent. Understand if rent is not affordable for you move and for the city not to send that money to landlords so they can pay mortgage, tells me somebody got paid because fighting illegal issues is part of legal aid job so give 500k?"

"Incompetent and unavailable. I registered for one of their free clinics through Eventbrite. My confirmation email directed me to a location that was closed for maintenance. There was no contact information on the registration site or confirmation email. So I reached out to this and other LANC office locations to see if I could speak to a human for clarification and new direction. All office lines went directly to voice-mail. I then called their "Help Line" which wasn't at all helpful. I sat and waited for the automated robot to provide me with an option to talk to a non-robot about a general issue such as this. Guess what? Of the 14 options offered to me on the phone, not one would be categorized as a line to call for general concerns. So I called back and just selected a random number to talk to someone; anyone. The "Help Line" then notifies me that average wait times are 15 minutes. 15 minutes?? I waited 20 and hung up. Determined to attend, I went back to the registration site to look for other locations and then drove to the next nearest. I arrived an hour early and was welcomed by staff from the host location. After an hour and a half and no one else arriving, I asked the staff if they could contact someone to see if this event was even happening at all. After some investigating, the host staff notified that LANC, the registration site and confirmation email gave me the WRONG DATE! A ridiculous waste of time. Dated: April 24, 2018"