»Elder Law Clinic The Student Experience

The Elder Law Clinic and the Alona Cortese Elder Law Center at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law provides free legal services to low income seniors throughout the county of Orange. The center has both a classroom and clinical component, allowing students to learn key aspects of elder law while obtaining hands-on experience representing real clients. The center works closely with local legal aid organizations and pro-bono attorneys to maximize services provided to seniors.

Students enrolled in the Elder Law Clinic help clients with numerous legal issues including claims of elder abuse, will drafting, advance health care directives, representation at administrative hearings, Medicare, Social Security, guardianship and conservatorship. Students also provide guidance about clients' rights as consumers and how to avoid financial abuse. The clinic and the center are directed by Fowler School of Law Professor Kurt Eggert.

The center was created with the generous support of its namesake, the late Alona Cortese. It depends upon continued private donations to offer these important free services to our clients. 

In the last two years, the Elder Law Clinic has resolved more than 200 cases. In one notable victory, one of our clients had been denied disability benefits despite a severe disabling illness. A Fowler Law student represented her at an administrative hearing and drafted two briefs in support of her position. She was awarded disability benefits and retroactive benefits, going back almost two years. Our client will no longer have to fear that she has to choose between paying her rent and buying groceries or medicine.

In another victory, a Fowler Law student successfully represented an elderly client in a Medicare hearing who had been denied Medicare benefits. The client, when close to death, had been airlifted from a small hospital to a large hospital that specialized in her condition. Despite pre-approving the transfer, Medicare then later denied coverage of the transfer, costing the client more than $10,000. Fowler Law students convinced the judge that airlifting our client was medically necessary.

Recently, the Elder Law Clinic prevailed in a disability case where the client had been wrongfully denied disability for seven years. After a hearing in front of an administrative law judge, not only did the client start receiving her appropriate benefits, she also received a retroactive payment of more than $100,000 for the time she should have been receiving monthly payments.

Students may also learn to represent disabled or mentally impaired seniors. For instance, two Fowler Law students represented clients in hearings before an administrative law judge, successfully obtaining unemployment benefits for a client and obtaining a ruling overturning a denial of General Relief benefits for a disabled client.