Gateway Legal Services to shut down

Gateway Legal Services, a legal aid office founded by the late Richard Teitelman, is closing its doors.

Michael Ferry, the organization’s executive director, said the possibility of closing had been discussed for some time and the organization made the decision to stop taking new cases in May.

“You could see it coming, it wasn’t like an Earth shaking, or even surprising, thing,” he said.

Gateway, which focuses on disability and social security cases, opened in 1997 in St. Louis. Teitelman, then executive director of Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, came up with the idea to set up an entity that would take a portion of the cases LSEM had traditionally done and make them self-supporting.

The organization didn’t take any kind of grant or government funding or seek donations because it didn’t want to interfere with traditional programs like LSEM. Instead, Gateway supported itself by doing reduced fee representation and using the money from those cases to pay for everything, including free cases.

“We were ultimately able to do that for a long time,” Ferry said.

For the past few years, however, the favorable decision rate has fallen substantially, he said.

“That has an impact on the bottom line of everybody who does this work,” Ferry said.

Although Gateway isn’t taking new cases, it is still working on closing out all the existing cases it can and transferring the remaining ones to other attorneys.

Ferry said clients are given options for transferring their cases, including choosing their own attorney, but many are opting to move their cases to Access Disability, a private firm founded by former Gateway Managing Attorney David Camp, which agreed to take on clients with the same fee arrangements.

“As the mission of Access Disability overlaps to such a great extent with the mission of Gateway Legal Services, it was natural for Gateway to partner with Access to represent Gateway’s final clients,” Camp said. “Access has agreed to continue representation of Gateway’s clients on the same terms, working to smoothly transition the cases without delaying hearings or disrupting the judge’s dockets.”

Staff at Gateway has been winding down for months, with the organization not filling open positions and a few people being laid off. Two support staff still work at Gateway, one who is part time.

Ferry started as the executive director of Land of Lincoln Legal Services earlier this month, but is still serving as volunteer executive director of Gateway until it officially closes.

He said it’s difficult to forecast a closing date, but it will likely be after final decisions are made in pending cases.

Given the current climate, Ferry said he doesn’t think it’s likely a similar service will open soon. But he is proud of the work Gateway did, which included winning slightly more than 6,000 cases and more than $239 million for its clients.

“It didn’t make anybody rich, but it did help people stabilize their lives, helped them not be homeless and helped them get the treatment they needed,” he said. “Overall, I think it was worth the effort.”