A lot of the clients in the last couple weeks I have met with came to legal aid with landlord/tenant issues. Almost all of these have been the tenant. In my weeks of working in Legal Aid, I have noticed a defined trend in these types of cases. It seems like many of them stem from miscommunication between the landlord and tenant. In most situations the landlord is portrayed as the rich, evil, controlling entity. As the volunteer it is my job to ask unbiased questions that seek to find the legal issues at hand. I have offered landlord-tenant mediation to many of the people in these situation. Of course, I am biased a bit with my affinity for mediation, but I made an extra effort to explain not only how mediation works but also the benefits of sitting down with a landlord and discussing what is the cause of the problem. Surprisingly I had a lot of success with people agreeing to give mediation a try! These were probably some of the more rewarding times because I was able to integrate some of the classroom knowledge from the CRES program.
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