Making A Difference Through The Offices of the Inspector General

Episode Notes

Transcript

Montana Funk:

This is Young Lawyer Rising from the A BA Young Lawyers Division and Legal Talk Network listeners, welcome back. This is your host, Montana Funk. Today I’m joined by Inspector General Lucy Lang. Ms. Lang oversees investigations into corruption, fraud, and abuse in the New York State government. Ms. Lang previously served as director of the Institute for Innovation and Prosecution, a national criminal Justice organization. She also served as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan where she prosecuted violent crimes and served as special counsel for policy and projects, creating a first of its kind college class for incarcerated students and prosecutors to develop their policy together. Ms. Lang is Presidential Leadership Scholar, a member of the Council on Criminal Justice, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has been vice chair of the American Bar Association criminal Justice section. Today. Ms. Lang and I discussed the Office of the Inspector General as well as her individual role as New York State Inspector General. This is including but not limited to her work with criminal justice reform and advice for young lawyers on how they can become successful leaders as well as professionals. As always, thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy this episode.

Good afternoon, Ms. Lang. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Lucy Lang:

It’s my pleasure to be with you, Montana. Thanks for the invitation.

Montana Funk:

Of course. And I want to kind of start off with at least what I think is a bit of an easier question to ease our listeners into this episode, and that is kind of explaining the role of the Inspector General to our listeners, what it actually entails and what it means to be the Inspector General of New York.

Lucy Lang:

An Inspector general is a government agency charged with oversight of the government itself. And this is a concept that dates back to George Washington who appointed the First American Inspector General to help get the army in shape. And in fact, some historians credit that Inspector General in that time with the turnaround of the Revolutionary War. So it is an age old concept and there are different kinds of inspectors general. There are ones who work in specific areas. For example, here in New York we have one for the MTA for our Metropolitan Transportation Authority that oversees our subways and buses. There are cities that have their own inspectors general, the federal government has a vast network of inspectors general including those at the Department of Justice and other departments. But my role as New York State Inspector General is to oversee investigations into fraud and corruption in the state executive agencies. So that’s upwards of a hundred agencies including the Department of Corrections, the Office of Children and Family Services and many others. I also wear the hat of the Workers Compensation Fraud Inspector General. So we oversee integrity in workers’ compensation system and of the welfare fraud Inspector general, in which role I oversee the integrity of the welfare system. So we have a number of different roles that we as an agency fill here and there are inspectors general all over the world who are doing similar work at various scales.

Montana Funk:

So I can imagine you had mentioned a bunch of agencies that you oversee and obviously dealing with all of them can probably be a pretty daunting task. And something that I’m curious about is given your history and experience before this as an assistant district attorney, how did that role shape you becoming the New York State Inspector General and how did you kind of work your way up to this position that does have such a high responsibility?

Lucy Lang:

Well, perhaps as a criminal lawyer yourself, you relate to the curiosity that drives someone into working in criminal law, curiosity about human stories and experiences and wanting to talk to people and to help solve problems. And it’s that impulse that brought me to the District attorney’s office where I was honored to serve for many years investigating primarily violent crime. And it’s that same kind of investigative instinct that inspectors general have to bring to the work, which is to say, to identify when something isn’t right and to roll your sleeves up and dig in. And our investigations can take the form as they often did for me at the DA’s office of interviews with witnesses. They can take the form of review of forensic materials like phone logs and computer logs and surveillance footage, or they can take the form of more sort of audit type work where we are reviewing documentary evidence.

Montana Funk:

So when you had mentioned the similarities almost you said in investigations, doing interviews, stuff like that, do you find that a lot of the work you did as the assistant district attorney does mirror what you’re doing now? Or do you find that there are such differences that maybe you were trained into this role but now you’ve had to adjust your expectations and how you perform now at a different level?

Lucy Lang:

I have to tell you that I at this stage am doing far less of the hands-on investigative work than my colleagues are. And I rely on my brilliant colleagues around the state who are lawyers, investigators, and auditors who are doing the hard work of piecing the cases together. And in many ways that is similar to the work of a prosecutor or an investigator in other areas of government. And much of my work now is more role of managing a large office and setting the priorities for where we’re going to focus our resources.

Montana Funk:

And I kind of want to segue, and I’ll come back to the justice area of this, but I do want to segue into a topic that I think is important that you can kind of provide insight on, which is that managing aspect. I think that a lot of our listeners are probably in roles where maybe eventually they want to be leaders or they want to be managing attorneys or whatever role they may take. What advice do you have from that managing aspect to young attorneys or attorneys that want to grow into that role that would help them become a leader and provide oversight in a way that fosters a really positive work environment but also gets things done and is someone that’s very reliable in that work environment?

Lucy Lang:

Well, I invite any of those listeners out there who end up in leadership positions and succeed in them to get back to me with what the big secret is because it’s an area where I’m continuing to grow and learn all the time. And interestingly, I’ll be curious to know if you share my view of this, I felt that law school and even my early training as a lawyer really did not do much to advance my intentional training as a leader. And it has been something that I’ve had to prioritize kind of individually in terms of identifying mentors and reading and educating myself about best practices and leadership and management as compared to the way it is in some sectors where maybe the professional degree itself would include some training in that area. Now that said, I have learned that in recent years a handful of law schools are developing curricula around things like leadership for lawyers because I’m certainly not the first person to identify what I see as this gap in legal training.

Montana Funk:

And I absolutely agree with you on that even I’ve only been practicing for about five years now, but I even have noticed in practice versus in law school, just the difference in like you had stated, finding mentors and catching up in ways with people who can actually provide growth for you that isn’t just I know a bunch of knowledge. I read a bunch of chapters of books, a bunch of cases, and here I’m going to spit it out. There’s so much more to practicing then that. And if you wouldn’t mind sharing, if you have some specific examples of how you reach out to mentors, how you found places, or I guess I should say, how you found resources to rely on to build that side of your practice. I think that that’s something really important for our listeners to know.

Lucy Lang:

Well, I feel very fortunate in the mentors I’ve developed over the years. And I would say that being aggressive and not afraid to be put off is one strategy. A very early case that I handled in which I second sat a very senior person who I really didn’t know very well, I found myself talking to her at a work event and she was talking about the case and when I said, do you have a second seat? She said, oh, actually my second seat is leaving the office and I just blurted out would you consider me? And that experience ended up being a really formative one for me, and that relationship continues to be one that really is very beneficial to me in my thinking about being a better lawyer. But I would say that, and you may have found this as well, that another challenge in the field is that very often people who are great lawyers are the people who get promoted to management positions.

And it’s not necessarily the case that being a great litigator for example, is aligned with the qualities that make someone a great leader or manager. So also as the leader of organization now myself, I try to make sure when thinking about promotions and staffing, especially its leadership role that I am not just assessing people based on their legal prowess, but on their interpersonal skills, on their understanding of office dynamics, on their ability to articulate a vision and get people on board and all of those phenomenon. So I also think that being in leadership, which is to say in management, doesn’t have to be for every lawyer. There are so many lawyers who I admire who are on the ground doing the work, and that can be an incredibly rewarding career as much as rising to a management position can be.

Montana Funk:

So for those or listeners who maybe don’t want to go into management but maybe having difficulty expressing to higher ups that they want more responsibility or they want to co-chair a trial like you had done, what would you say to those individuals who maybe are a bit more shy or reserved who don’t know how to approach a partner or a boss and say, Hey, look, I do want more responsibility. I want bigger cases. What would you say to them to kind of give them that confidence that they need to move forward in their career?

Lucy Lang:

If not you, then who? That’s kind of the approach that I have always taken and to respect chain of command. So it all often makes sense to go to your immediate supervisor and say, Hey, I’m really thinking about the fact that I’d like to do X, but also it means seizing opportunities. And sometimes there are opportunities that you may not be wholly comfortable with. For example, in the case of the second seating, that trial case, it was well outside of my experience to do it and it took some gumption to be able to in that moment ask to do it, ask it of someone who I admired and didn’t know well, and at that time may have been a little intimidated by. So I encourage people to just be brave and take the bull by the horns and ask because the worst thing someone can say is, no, I already have someone, or No, you’re not ready.

Montana Funk:

It’s funny you say that. I was just going to say the worst thing someone can say is no. So I think that is important, like you said, just kind of taking the bull by the horns and trying because you’re never going to get there if you don’t take that initiative. And I think that that’s really important for people just to believe in themselves and show that confidence that, hey, I know that even if I’m not ready right now, I will be and I’m letting you know that and hopefully our listeners can take something from that.

Lucy Lang:

I was just going to add, if I can Montana, that I also encourage people to not just seize every opportunity. So it really behooves folks to think about what kinds of problems they like to solve and how they want to spend their day. So I would not, for example, have had I seen an opportunity in opening in a conversation to supervise a bunch of young lawyers at that stage of my career, I probably would not have seized that opportunity because that wasn’t the kind of problem that I wanted to be solving at that stage. But I knew that I wanted to handle to learn how to litigate complex cases. So I certainly encourage people to be proactive about their careers, but also to be discerning and think about what it is that you really want to spend your time working on and improving in terms of your skills.

Montana Funk:

I think that is also a really good point that, I mean that’s something that I also need to think of too, right, is that you don’t have to be the person that’s the top of every single area or doing absolutely everything. Pick those things that are really, you can’t be Exactly. You can’t, especially with workloads, you just would never have the ability to. So like you said, I think it’s important that if you know there’s a couple of areas you really want to advance on, focus on those because you can get good at those areas, but trying to be the best at everything, like you said, it’s not going to happen. That’s a really good way to put it. I want to take a quick break here and then I want to dive more into the work of the Office of the Inspector General.

So before the break we were talking about advice to young lawyers, and I also think it’s really important kind of to shift into this role as the New York State Inspector General and the Office of Inspector General. And something that I’m curious about is it doesn’t seem to me at least that the Office of Inspector General gets as much attention as some other agencies, some other organizations within the us and do you have any idea why that may be and anything that you are doing to make it more known to people that this does exist and is so important?

Lucy Lang:

Well, it’s very sensible in some respects that offices of Inspector General be somewhat under the radar. The investigations we handle are often very sensitive. The materials are confidential and of course when there’s no finding of wrongdoing, you don’t want to have publicly shamed someone or anything along those lines. That said, I have taken the approach that we are the ones responsible for putting the public back in public integrity, and that means making sure the public knows we’re here so that when they see something wrong in government, they can report it, but also so that they get a window into how their taxpayer dollars are being spent to effectuate the work of government. So we have worked very hard to increase the office’s visibility in order to increase the number of complaints and tips that come in and to help demonstrate that there are public servants, not just at our agency, but at the agencies we oversee who are working so hard all the time, who are following the rules, who are getting it right and who are preserving precious resources, who are allocating government resources in the ways that they should.

Montana Funk:

Obviously if you see an issue within the government, I’m sure it can be very daunting to some individuals to want to report that or make a complaint. So knowing that that is important because you want to make sure that people are held accountable, what do you say to those individuals who maybe have seen something or think, Hey, this is an issue, but I am too scared to bring it forward or I don’t even know how to do that. Is there a way to guide those individuals?

Lucy Lang:

It’s similar to what I would say to young lawyers that if not you then who the idea of a democracy, the rule of law all relies on individual people doing the right thing and it’s incumbent on folks who see something wrong to report it. I was really pleased that one of the people who works on our hotline, which intakes complaints from the public, just reported to me that a complaint came in and it was someone who heard me on the radio and I gave the hotline number, which is one 800 to write for anyone who suspects fraud or corruption in New York State government. And in response to that radio interview, the person decided to call and make a report. So that goes to why it’s important that inspectors general be out there and telling people that we’re here and really we’re here for them.

Montana Funk:

Oh, absolutely. And something else that at least to me is intriguing and something that I would hope that you could elaborate on for me is this idea that you had created, and I believe it was last year actually, the office of the Inspector general training unit. So what is that exactly for our listeners, and can you describe why you decided to create that and what that unit actually does?

Lucy Lang:

Well, our training unit is designed to develop both internal and external trainings. So we hired a very experienced attorney who is supported by other members of the office, and she works to identify gaps in our internal practices to follow evolutions in the law and make that all of our lawyers, investigators and auditors are complying with the law in terms of all of our investigations. So she is constantly doing trainings for our staff to make sure that they are up to date following the law, doing consistent with best practices and have the resources that they need to do their jobs effectively. But she also has been partnering with many of our jurisdictional agencies to get out in the field and talk to people who are on the ground doing the hard work of government to train them about the state ethics law and their obligation to report when they see violations of it. And that has also been a very fruitful way of building relationships with people who really are the eyes and ears into the operations of government.

Montana Funk:

I think that that’s extremely important. I think kind of what you briefly touched on with the ethical requirements is we learn, obviously basic attorney ethics when we’re in law school, but it’s a much different thing when it comes in practice. Even just as an attorney on my side of things, let alone, I cannot imagine being someone who works for the government and having to know what is right and what isn’t and how they can report things and what’s an issue. So it seems like very important work, and obviously you do a lot of work as well with criminal justice reform, which is something I’m really passionate about as a criminal defense attorney. So I want to take a quick break here, but then when we come back, I do want to talk about criminal justice reform as well, just kind of what you’ve done with it and what you’ve seen in that area.

So something that I want to make sure that we touch on in this episode is your work with criminal justice reform. I know that that’s important to you. In 2022, you had issued a report outlining some of the penalties that incarcerated individuals face well in the system. So are you able to explain to our listeners, and this can be in multiple parts, one, what type of issues you’ve actually seen within, whether it be New York or even across the United States that are occurring in the criminal justice system as well as what you’re seeing is happening within incarcerated individuals?

Lucy Lang:

All the credit in the world for this work, in addition to my staff who have done an outstanding job on their investigations that you’ve just described, all the credit is really due to one mom who is the mother of a young man who was shot and killed in upper Broadway many years ago. And I was a homicide prosecutor at the time and responded to the scene, handled that investigation. Ultimately two people were arrested and I tried them and they were convicted by a jury for the murder of this woman’s son. And the day after the conviction, I called her and asked how she felt and she said, I slept all night for the first time since chall was killed. But when I woke up, all I could think about were the moms of those two boys. And she was talking about the moms of the two men who had just been convicted of murdering her son.

And it really hit me then that as a prosecutor, my viewpoint was really limited to that of victims and I wasn’t thinking broadly about the system. And so that inspired me to build a college and prison program in which over the course of several years, each semester I would bring a handful of prosecutors into New York State Prison to work on criminal justice issues alongside incarcerated New Yorkers. And it was those semesters of sitting and learning alongside incarcerated New Yorkers. That really opened my eyes to a more holistic view of the system. And when I became Inspector General, in which capacity we have oversight over the New York State Department of Corrections, I knew that it was critically important that I see things through the work to see things through the lens of people who are incarcerated across New York. So we visited every prison in the state.

We met with incarcerated folks and their families. We met with corrections staff and administrators and civilian volunteers, and we have identified a number of areas for where there’s significant need for improvement. The one that you pointed to is the unfortunate racial disparities in the administration of discipline behind bars. And we were able to bring to bear our investigative and auditing resources to crunch that data and determine that there is still a problem that people of color are more likely to be penalized more severely than white people in New York state’s prisons and to publish that report last year. So that’s a piece of work that I’m really proud of in that area.

Montana Funk:

And I have to also thank you for creating that program, bringing the prosecutors into a system and having the people who were incarcerated work next to them. Because obviously me being on the other side of it, I see every day what my clients face within the system, whether they’re incarcerated at our jail or prison, or even just out on the streets. And something I always say is it helps so much to have a good relationship with the prosecutors as well. And I find that a lot of the people that work on the other side who have the approach that you’re saying, seeing it on both sides really is what’s going to help foster this environment for our whole criminal injustice system to grow, whether it be advocating for the victims, victims, families, or that individual whose son passed away thinking of the families of the incarcerated individuals.

So I think that that’s a really important perspective that I just appreciate you bringing to this episode. And obviously I think that there’s issues probably in multiple agencies and we can’t obviously solve everything in one day, but do you think that there’s anything across the nation that young lawyers can actually do to help create some growth in the system, in the criminal justice system? Or what other ways can those who maybe don’t have the resources to create a program like that, is there any advice you have to them to say, Hey, you can do just this little thing to kind of help?

Lucy Lang:

Well, I think that we all have to bring a real kind of humility to our work, whichever piece of the system we may be working in. And look, I don’t know that it has always been true, but for me, but it has certainly always been something that I have endeavored to do to not presume that I know everything about a single case, to understand that the defense attorney knows their client and that I have something to learn and that I should learn if I’m going to understand the bread that this situation and wherever possible. And I understand that it isn’t always, but to take the kind of collaborative approach that you’re suggesting. And I always found as a prosecutor that being collegial and sharing information made things ultimately work out better than taking Dig your heels in kind of adversarial approach. And it is a similar approach to the one that we try to take in many instances with the agencies we oversee that, of course, our job is to fair out wrongdoing and to make sure that folks are held accountable if they’re abusing government resources.

And we do. But to go knocking down doors to try to get information often doesn’t reveal the full extent of what you’re trying to discover. And so I have found that by meeting with people and getting to know them and trying to understand these agencies, we are uncovering more than I think we would otherwise be if we were simply seizing materials and issuing subpoenas and demanding people be interviewed. So bringing the humility endeavoring to collaborate and being the best member of theBar that you can be, I think will only elevate the profession for the next generation. And I have great respect for young lawyers who are out there doing it every day at a time when there’s such doubt and crisis around the integrity of the justice system.

Montana Funk:

I think humility is a great word, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. And something I want to make sure we also touch on, it’s not just the Department of Justice, but obviously your work expands to multiple agencies. And if you’re comfortable talking briefly about some maybe other challenges that you’re seeing or issues that you’re seeing reoccurring amongst other agencies within the government and how you have worked, how your offices work to remedy those and how our listeners can also move to make sure that all the governmental agencies are acting accordingly and following the ethical requirements that they need to do. If you wouldn’t mind elaborating on that and just like I said, some of those overlying issues you’re seeing amongst other agencies,

Lucy Lang:

I think that the best that any of us can do is to have impact in the sphere that we find ourselves in. So of course there is skepticism about various parts of the federal government or the judiciary or very senior level government officials, but I suspect that what really makes people feel doubtful about the integrity of government are things like when there’s parking block abuse here in New York City or a case out of this office some years ago where there was a lottery system for campsites, and the same people seem to be getting the plumb campsites year after year, and it turned out that there was corruption in the allocation of campsite. It is in some ways, it is the small corruption in government that makes people so skeptical and distrustful day to day as much as it is the suspicion of much larger and concerning things. So I would say that everything that any of us do to scrutinize how public resources are used and to make sure that public officials are accountable to us is worth doing because sometimes it really is the little things.

Montana Funk:

Well, I only have two more questions for you and I hope that they’re a little bit easier, but something that I want to kind of wrap up this episode with is those attorneys who are listening or maybe law students who are about to be attorneys who want to help make a difference at a bigger level than just representing clients such as we’ve talked about throughout this whole episode, is holding government entities accountable and scrutinizing the little things. What advice would you just have generally for those individuals?

Lucy Lang:

You can make a great career in oversight. There are inspectors, general and watchdog agencies throughout your state, your locality at the federal government, as I’ve said, and I would really encourage people who are interested in public service careers to explore opportunities in those kinds of offices, especially if you’re someone who likes to investigate. If you’d like to take sort of an interdisciplinary approach to your work, I think that there is so much to be done in the world of government oversight and really would encourage young lawyers to look to those opportunities and to pursue them. But more generally, I would say thank you to the young lawyers out there who are considering careers in public service. We wouldn’t be able to function as a democracy without you. And I hope that all of you listening who are able to choose that path, do that and have bright careers ahead.

Montana Funk:

Well, thank you so much for offering all this insight and your words of encouragement, just everything that you’ve discussed and just how broad your job really is. So something that I like to ask all my guests, just because I think that it’s really important for our listeners is where they can find you and not only you, but where they can find your resources and listeners who maybe want to look into more about the work that the Office of the Inspector General is doing, where are some places that they can find you?

Lucy Lang:

You can follow our work on social media at New York State ig. Our website is www.ig.ny.gov, and anyone who has concerns about fraud and corruption in New York State should report it to 1-800-DORIGHT. We are actively hiring lawyers and auditors and investigators throughout New York State, so please check our website for job postings if you are in the market. And I am really grateful to you, Montana, for giving me the opportunity to share a bit about our work and hopefully recruit a few future inspectors general.

Montana Funk:

Well, thank you Ms. Lang for joining me. This has been an amazing conversation and I really appreciate it and all the work you’re doing, and I hope too that this has inspired some people and I’m sure that it has. So thank you so much.

Lucy Lang:

Take good Care, Montana, and thank you so much for all the work that you do to keep the wheels of justice moving.

Montana Funk:

Thank you, listeners. That is all we have for you today. As always, I want to thank you for tuning in, and I want to thank Ms. Lang for joining us. If you like what you heard, you know where to find us. You can listen to us anywhere that you can find podcasts, and as always, please recommend our show to a friend. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. And until next time, I’m your host, Montana Funk, and you’ve been listening to Young Lawyer Rising, brought to you by the A, a Young Lawyers Division and the audio professionals at Legal Talk Network.