Federal Practice Manual for Legal Aid Attorneys: 1.2.10 Direct Action and Community Development Work
Direct action can refer to two different approaches to obtaining your desired solution. First, you can simply fix or coordinate the fixing of the problem. For instance, the defendant in a lawsuit initiated by her town to declare her house an imminent health hazard and to raze it contacted a legal services lawyer. Legally, the attorney could have raised procedural defenses or counterclaims relating to the client’s disability. Instead, the lawyer contacted a local community group that, working with a local church, sent a team of people and a dumpster to the house.