Navigating the legal system is increasingly complex and lawyers charge hundreds of dollars per hour, out of the price range of many—if not most—working families. Here in the North Bay, hope for many lies with legal aid organizations.
Eleanor Roosevelt one said, “Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.” It’s a nice sentiment, but is it possible in America today? Navigating the legal system is increasingly complex and lawyers charge hundreds of dollars per hour, out of the price range of many—if not most—working families.
Here in the North Bay, hope for many lies with legal aid organizations and the pro bono attorneys who step up to the plate to support them, donating time and expertise to help those least able to navigate the system. The term “pro bono” is short for the Latin phrase “pro bono publico,” meaning “for the public good.” Today, it’s usually used in reference to a professional who provides free services for those in need to serve the public interest.
Different regions, different models, different needs
The pro bono model varies throughout the state according to the size and needs of the communities. What works in other regions may or may not work here in the North Bay, where we face challenges unique from the more urban Bay Area locales. One of these challenges is finding attorneys to take on lengthy cases. While urban areas typically have large firms, outlaying communities tend to be home to more solo practitioners or very small partnerships. Large law firms often allot a certain amount of hours to pro bono work and can also integrate it into training programs or require it of staff attorneys. Smaller operators don’t have that flexibility and often lack the time or resources to commit to long-term cases.
“What we find works for us is establishing a personal contact with individual lawyers—having them come into the office, take on a case or do a consult, and then leave—as opposed to actually holding a case for an extended period of time,” says Legal Aid of Sonoma County Executive Director Ronit Rubinoff.
Another issue is the difference between the types of law practiced by private sector attorneys as compared to the services nonprofit legal aid organizations provide. For instance, most private practitioners aren’t experienced in eviction work, a very technical area, and shy away from unpleasant domestic violence cases. In Napa, immigration attorneys are in big demand.
“We always, always need to make sure we have enough funding to staff actual legal aid lawyers, who have these areas of expertise, and then leverage the private bar [attorneys] into that,” says Rubinoff.
In Marin, finding help for people with housing, foreclosure or predatory lending problems can be particularly difficult. “So many of the firms that do pro bono have banks as clients, and so they won’t touch this area of law,” says Legal Aid of Marin’s Executive Director Paul Cohen. “It’s a potential conflict.”
Gaining experience and giving it back
Legal services nonprofits are benefiting from the stalled-out legal market, as law school students and unemployed recent grads seeking experience make up a sizeable chunk of the volunteer help at legal aid centers, supported by the guidance of working and retired attorneys. More and more, graduates head to these organizations for experience and, hopefully, connections that may lead to future job offers.
“We absolutely have seen an increase in the number of law school graduates and the length of time they stay. Some will stay with us as much as a year or two, which in the past was very rare,” says Rubinoff. “The lack of jobs is absolutely connected to the economy—and really dreadful for them.”
Rubinoff surmises that law firms used to be in a position to take recent graduates on as new lawyers and provide in-house training, but that’s no longer the case. “You can’t walk into a firm with no experience out of law school and get a job. You have to get that experience somewhere else, and the public sector is providing those opportunities,” she says. “That’s a really big shift.
“Looking at the legal profession, there’s a training gap in the way it’s set up. Someone can graduate from law school, theoretically have no experience, pass the bar and start to practice law. We don’t let doctors do that. It would be unheard of,” Rubinoff says.
Although formal apprenticeships have been discussed within the profession, historically, some of that important training was taken on by private law firms, and so no rules were set. However, the faltering economy and deluge of new lawyers is prompting the California bar to consider changing its requirements.
“It’s a very big shift and hugely overdue,” says Rubinoff. “It’s interesting and something a legal aid office could take advantage of in a good way. We could provide a training ground, because we’re doing it already.”
While the influx of law students and recent graduates has generated more help, these newcomers require oversight by more experienced attorneys. The need for knowledgeable practicing and retired pro bono help is paramount.
Barbara Sherrill, a volunteer attorney with Legal Aid of Sonoma County, is “the heart and soul” of the organization’s housing representation program, according to Rubinoff. Sherrill retired from the Housing Authority of the County of Marin four years ago. But retirement just didn’t suit her, so she submitted her résumé to the clinic and now volunteers four days per week. She and retired attorney Brooke Clyde, who volunteers three days per week, provide continuity and consistency to the clients; between the two of them, someone’s always available to follow through with a case and represent clients in court.
“It works really well. We can have a very strong court presence—and have had for the last couple of years,” says Sherrill. “That makes it good for the clients, because they don’t get dropped. It used to be, when I worked in Marin, Legal Aid of Marin filled out the papers but there wasn’t any court presence. That’s a very difficult position for a client to be in.”
Although qualified to work on civil harassment, domestic violence or guardianship cases, Sherrill mostly works on the multitude of housing cases (most dealing with unlawful detainer, eviction and foreclosure) the community is faced with as a result of the housing market crash. Sherrill and Clyde probably represent an average of eight clients weekly, many of them seniors losing their homes; Legal Aid assists more than 500 housing clients each year. “It keeps both us busy constantly,” Sherrill says.
And the reward for all the hard work and long hours?
“When I became an attorney, I always thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have enough money to open a law firm where you could help people and not charge them $400 per hour?’ This is the closest to that I’ll ever get. We’re able to provide good representation—that’s what we’re doing here—and still not charge.”
Legal Aid of Sonoma County
Legal Aid of Sonoma County has seen a 30 percent increase in client flow in the past five years. It currently serves about 3,000 clients annually and focuses on three main programs: the Child Abuse Prevention Program (CAPP), the domestic violence Safe at Home Program (SAFE), and the Homeless Advocacy Project (HOME).
Rubinoff believes her organization has the largest volunteer program in the Bay Area. In 2011, volunteers contributed more than 7,000 hours of services to legal Aid clients, including 44 attorneys who contributed 3,382 hours, and four law students who contributed 331 hours. “Our ratio is almost one-to-one, volunteer-to-staff, which is huge,” says Rubinoff.
The volunteer pool consists of both attorneys and non-attorneys (including law students, paralegals, paralegal students, undergrads and community members). The mix of volunteers contributed 2,000 hours annually five years ago and will log more than 7,000 hours in 2012. Its funding profile is quite varied, with the largest percentage coming from the private sector, closely followed by government money from the county, the state bar and grants from private foundations.
Rubinoff is desperately looking for funding for a full-time volunteer coordinator to leverage the tremendous volunteer resource. She believes the organization is at the breaking point in terms of supporting its number of volunteers without the proper infrastructure.
“What we get from folks in this community is fantastic, and we’re so grateful for it,” she says. “We’ve doubled the amount of service we can provide our clients over the past five years as a result of our volunteer program. We couldn’t handle half the clients we have if we didn’t have this kind of support. It’s fantastic and it’s inspiring. The problem is, when the economy shifts, we’re going to be left holding the bag. We need to create the infrastructure to support this before that happens.”
Legal Aid of Napa Valley
Napa’s geographic isolation requires a pro bono approach that’s slightly different from those of its neighboring counties. Legal Aid of Napa Valley can’t rely primarily on law students or retirees, but does benefit from the support of its active legal community.
“The majority of our attorneys are active practitioners who have their own practice, whether it be sole practitioners or partnerships,” says Executive Director Diana Dorame. It’s fortunate to have support from the three large local law firms: Gaw Van Male; Dickenson, Peatman & Fogarty; and Coombs & Dunlap LLP. Latham & Watkins LLP also recently took on a significant housing case that was particularly important for seniors residing in mobile home parks.
Legal Aid of Napa Valley focuses on serving seniors, immigrants and low-income residents. Like other such organizations, immigration, elder law, domestic violence and eviction cases make up the lion’s share of its caseload. It operates on an annual budget of slightly less than $500,000 and assists more than 1,200 clients annually. Dorame is the only full-time attorney on staff, assisted by a full-time legal advocate, a full-time administrative assistant, a part-time senior legal services attorney and a part-time family law/housing attorney, part-time immigration counsel and part-time pro bono coordinators. Between 40 and 50 pro bono attorneys help on a pro bono basis and administrative volunteers, many of them bilingual, donate more than 1,000 hours per year to help the organization run smoothly.
“We’re just swamped. The recession has created incredible demand for our services, and we’re the only locally based free legal services in the entire county,” says Dorame. “That creates a special challenge for us.”
The organization uses the efficiency of legal clinics to meet the needs of a larger group of clients. An attorney will travel to a convenient offsite location and meet one-on-one with clients throughout the day, including many seniors who may be homebound or have other transportation challenges. “We’re bringing our expertise to them,” says Dorame.
In addition to housing and senior concerns, the need for immigration-related legal expertise in Napa is huge. The Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which launched in August and lets young illegal immigrants that meet certain qualifications obtain work permits and avoid deportation, prompted a deluge of calls to the organization.
For immigration help, Dorame reaches out to lawyers from San Francisco and Sonoma for help. “We have a cadre of attorneys who come in when we do immigration forums and consultations. We usually do a big one on an annual basis, and they come and help us. We’ve developed these specific relationships and it’s wonderful,” she says. “There are some really stellar attorneys from out of the area who practice immigration law and come and help us.”
Justice by the busload
This year, Legal Aid of Napa Valley partnered with OneJustice’s Justice Bus to help expand its reach.
OneJustice, a nonprofit San Francisco-based legal services support center, partners with other legal service agencies to provide services throughout California. For the past five years, its Justice Bus Project has been training and organizing urban law students to staff free legal clinics in rural communities; in the last year, it organized 24 trips.
“The Justice Bus project focuses on increasing access to justice and legal services in isolated and rural communities,” explains OneJustice’s Candace Chen, an Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps legal fellow at the time of this writing (her two-year fellowship has since ended).
Chen and the Justice Bus have already made two trips with Legal Aid of Napa Valley, one to Calistoga and one to Napa, to provide low-income seniors with legal services such as powers of attorney and advanced health care directives. Law school students from UC Davis and summer associates from Paul Hastings law firm in San Francisco and Palo Alto staffed clinics at low-income mobile home parks and senior residential complexes to address legal concerns such as drafting legal documents.
The bus also made two trips to staff clinics in West Marin this year, in conjunction with Legal Aid of Marin, assisted by the large law firms of Cooley LLP and Fenwick and West LLP (the second trip also included legal interns from Facebook’s Menlo Park office).
In addition to increasing the capacity of the established legal aid centers, the Justice Bus provides law students with invaluable experience. “It’s a great way for them to get experience outside of the classroom,” says Chen. “What we’ve heard from students is that it takes them out of the classroom, reading-studying cycle, and applies what they’ve learned to a real-world situation. For us, it’s building a pro bono culture within their studies, so they’ll hopefully continue on and think about pro bono throughout their careers.”
Legal Aid of Marin
Legal Aid of Marin opens about 2,000 new cases annually and receives pro bono help from between 140 and 200 attorneys each year. Staff includes five attorneys and two legal assistants as well as student interns. The organization handles civil cases including housing, employment, debt, family and dependency, and elder law, with the Marin Community Foundation providing about one-third of its annual funding and the rest coming from private donations.
Experienced attorneys comprised the bulk of Marin’s pro bono volunteers years ago, but the economy and job market conditions have shifted that profile. Increasingly, recent grads are helping out at the center. “Over the last 10 years, we’ve had lots of new attorneys wanting to volunteer—to get experience, I think—and also because they can’t get a job and they’re hoping for connections and inroads,” says Nancy Murphy, who’s been the pro bono program manager at Legal Aid of Marin for more than 25 years.
In addition to individual pro bono representation, Legal Aid of Marin holds regularly scheduled clinics, staffed by pro bono attorneys. Clinics take place weekly at the Whistlestop Senior Center in San Rafael and twice per month at the Mill Valley Community Center.
Murphy says her experience, and the relationships she’s established over the years with local attorneys and the pro bono committees of larger San Francisco firms, help her in her quest to find pro bono assistance. She also contacts new law offices and relies on the local bar association to find new attorneys in the area.
Larger firms are tapped for lengthier cases, such as the Contempo Marin mobile home park case. For years, residents have been fighting in court against owner Equity Lifestyles Properties to maintain their rent-control status. San Francisco’s Cooley Godward Kronish LLP handled the case at the federal level and Hanson Bridgett LLP, also from the city, handled the case at the state level.
“The majority of the big firms have a policy of doing a certain amount of pro bono work,” says Murphy. “When they take on a matter, they’re generally in it for the long haul.”
Although attorneys do occasionally volunteer to take on the longer-term projects, Cohen notices more attorneys looking help for shorter assignments. “I’d say the biggest trend is a lot of pro bono attorneys really want something that’s limited scope. They don’t want to take on a case that’s going to take 100 hours,” he says.
Cohen finds a clinic model works well for these pro bono volunteers and also reduces the wait time for clients. He’s working to standardize clinics to serve dozens or even hundreds of people in a single event, using both pro bono attorneys and law students. He plans day-long clinics throughout the year, staffed by about 30 attorneys each time. The model has reduced the wait time for clients. A recent event served 111 households in three days with 40 law students and about 12 attorneys pitching in.
“Most people who come in just have legal questions and need a little bit of advice. They don’t necessarily need full representation. The clinic is an excellent way to handle that,” Cohen says.
Insert lawyer joke here
Attorneys often encounter negative stereotype, and many have their own stockpile of lawyer jokes. However, without the pro bono commitments of many, the legal system that’s intended to serve everyone equally might only be able to serve those with the financial means to participate.
“We really see the good and the generosity of many attorneys,” says Dorame. “I think the attorneys who work with our clients really do find it to be a very positive experience—an experience that makes a difference.
“I’ve been practicing law for 25 years; I’ve had various jobs and this has been, by far, the most rewarding—to be able to use my legal skills and be able to make such a substantive difference. I think lawyers [who do this type of work] really see directly that their legal skills are just so important and make such a difference.”
