This article is part of Street Sense’s 2025 contribution to the D.C. Homeless Crisis Reporting Project in collaboration with other local newsrooms. The collective works will be published throughout the week here.
The process to get free or low-cost legal aid for civil issues in D.C. just got easier.
The newly launched D.C. Resource Bridge (DCRB) streamlines the search for legal assistance by creating a hotline — 202-933-HELP (4357) — which people can call to be matched with a lawyer to speak to about their case. The hotline connects eligible D.C. residents to free or low-cost legal services to help with family law cases, issues with public benefits, financial issues, and cases in the D.C. Court of Appeals.
For many people, the stress of needing legal assistance in the first place is compounded by the difficulty of searching for support they can afford. Legal fees for services in family law, one of DCRB’s coverage areas, vary from under $200 to over $400 an hour, according to the website of local law firm Bourdon & Tortolero.
The city has over 50 different legal offices that provide low-cost aid, each with its own coverage areas and eligibility requirements, according to the leaders of DCRB, which was developed by the DC Bar Foundation and is housed in long-time nonprofit Legal Aid DC. The sheer number of legal services creates a vast but tricky-to-navigate legal landscape, a challenge DCRB hopes to minimize with the hotline.
“Something really wonderful about D.C. is that [legal] resources exist, and there are a lot of them. Something that makes that really challenging, though, is that there are a lot of them … So for somebody who needs to access those resources, it’s really hard to narrow down exactly who you should be calling,” DCRB program manager Catherine Disarno said.
According to DCRB Director Amy Mix, in the first two weeks of operation, the hotline received about 40 calls and was able to connect some people with lawyers, though she couldn’t specify how many.
While the hotline is too new to have seen widespread results yet, Deborah Cuevas Hill, a managing attorney at Legal Counsel for the Elderly, says she is thrilled to see the resource, which providers have long desired. Hill works with cases related to mortgages, foreclosures, collection bankruptcy, and property taxes, and is one of the many attorneys a DCRB caller may be matched to speak with.
The hotline is currently working with about 20 partner legal services, such as the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center and the Children’s Law Center. As DCRB establishes itself, its organizers hope to forge partnerships with all offices in the city that provide low-cost civil legal aid. Disarno said the hotline is hoping to add two to three areas of law every three months as it gets off the ground.
When people call the hotline, they can expect to speak with a navigator who will conduct an initial intake, asking questions about the caller’s legal needs, their financial situation, and other relevant details. The navigator will then use the DCRB’s matching technology to find the partner office that is best equipped to help the applicant and refer them. Whether or not an applicant can be referred to a partner service largely depends on whether they meet the financial eligibility and the coverage areas for participating organizations.
Once an applicant is connected with a partner office, they may go through a second intake before meeting with an attorney who can discuss their issue. Hotline organizers hope the process, from calling the hotline to meeting with an attorney, will take less than two weeks.
Organizers noted that not all referrals are successful, but DCRB can try again with another service. Results from the DCRB’s June 2024 pilot showed a majority of people’s first referrals were a good match. They also cautioned that meeting with an attorney does not guarantee someone will be represented by that attorney in court.
The DCRB has established phone extensions in English, Spanish, and Amharic. Disarno said people can call in any other language, and navigators will use an over-the-phone translation service. As Legal Aid expands its office space in Southeast D.C., people will be able to access more in-person services, Disarno said. This expansion is slated to occur in early 2026.
Other long-standing hotlines, such as the D.C. Debt Collection Hotline at 202-851-3387, which refers people to representation for debt collection cases, have not been disrupted. Since DCRB’s current areas of law do not include landlord-tenant issues, the Landlord-Tenant Legal Assistance Network’s number, 212-780-2575, remains a point of contact for people needing support with eviction defense. That hotline was launched in 2022 and uses a similar model to DCRB.
As the DCRB grows, organizers are working to incorporate feedback from its five-month pilot, during which DCRB was able to match about 50 people with a legal services provider.
“It just matters to connect with people and to make things easier,” Disarno said. “The legal system is so complicated and so hard, and so anything that anyone can do to ease that burden and make it easier is something that we should be doing.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify Legal Aid’s expansion plans.
