On Wednesday, January 29, Legal Aid Society lawyers at Brooklyn housing court were beginning their morning client intake in Room 902, the space designated for lawyers working through the City's right to counsel program, when something unsettling happened. "One of my colleagues asked our supervisor, 'What should I do if I see a bedbug?' because there was one crawling on their cubicle," a Legal Aid lawyer told Hell Gate. (The lawyer asked to remain anonymous because she was not authorized to speak to journalists.)
The Office of Court Administration, which manages the courthouse building, then closed the room, kicking people out. "Usually I would have done five intake interviews that day, but instead, I did zero," she said.
Lawyers with Brooklyn Legal Services, another organization that uses Room 902 to meet with potential clients, arrived the next day to find it mysteriously locked, with no explanation from OCA. In text threads reviewed by Hell Gate, those lawyers spent much of the day—time they should have spent helping tenants—frantically communicating with their counterparts at other legal organizations to figure out what was going on, in the absence of communication from OCA.
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