Lessons from Decades of Legal Aid Leadership 

Episode Notes

Transcript

Jon Asher:

I think what it tells us is we don’t come close to meeting the legal needs of the poor, but so too, we need to be flexible, evolving, able to meet emerging and new legal needs.

Speaker 2:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice, an An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Jon Asher:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Jon Asher, your host for this episode. I spent my entire career of 51 years working in civil legal aid with more than 40 years as executive director first of the Legal Aid Society of Metropolitan Denver, and then continuing as executive director of Colorado Legal Services when the state’s three LSC funded legal aid organizations merged to form a single statewide program. Today we have assembled for you a wonderful group of experienced legal aid leaders. They are my well-respected colleagues and friends who literally have decades in legal aid leadership and who like me have recently retired. We have shared experiences due to our Lenivy time as directors of LSC funded legal aid organizations, but we also have unique personal backgrounds and have provided services in a wide variety of different states around the country. Let me begin by introducing my colleagues to you.

Marilyn Harp was executive director of Kansas Legal Services for 17 years and spent over 40 years working in legal aid in Kansas. She is our short timer. Steve Gottlieb worked at Atlanta Legal Aid for more than 50 years and was its executive director for 42 of those years. José Padilla has spent 44 years with California rural legal assistance with 38 years as its executive director. I want to start by considering unmet civil legal needs every few years. LSC conducts a survey of the justice gap. The most recent Justice Gap report in 2022 found low income Americans sought legal help for only 19% of their civil legal problems. When asked if they thought a lawyer could help with their problem, 44% of the respondents said they did not believe a lawyer could help. While we don’t have the data for many decades ago to compare this to, I’ve always thought that despite turning away too many potential clients, one of every two people who come to us are turned away, who come to our door or now come to us online. But nonetheless, too few people know of legal aid. I’m curious to know whether you all think that awareness of civil legal aid and civil legal problems has changed in your time in the field, and if so, what has contributed to that change? Can we start, Marilyn with you?

Marilyn Harp:

I think that programs have been very creative in the use of social media and recognizing that we need to meet our clients where they are, and that’s given us an opportunity to talk about, give programs, the opportunity to talk about what they do in a very different way. But I also think we’ve expanded, and I’ll just speak to Kansas and maybe my own personal journey in this regard even 10 years ago, but when I started things like the expungement of criminal convictions or driver’s license work were not things that I considered part of what the civil legal services programs do in some ways a little too close to the criminal field, but also it wasn’t what people were calling us about. And what I’ve learned is if we see a bit of a need and then start educating about it and doing those kinds of things, people see us as a provider and start flooding into programs.

Jon Asher:

Steve?

Steve Gottlieb:

Yeah, I wanted to focus on some of the changes in the housing area. I think everybody knows how dramatic the increase in housing has been and what it’s done in terms of general society, and I just wanted to kind of highlight some of the things that I’ve seen in the last few years as it affects legal services. First of all, legal aid. Atlanta Legal Aid used to have about 25% of its cases which were housing focused. And in the last few years before family law, that was the highest. Now it’s gone up to about 50% and during covid was over 60%. We served five counties and we used to talk about low income people going into the outer counties because they could find affordable housing. They can’t anymore. So what we’ve had to do of course, is to bolster our work in other counties. The other kinds of indicia of changes and our needs to change have been our noticing for the first time that 30,000 people in Atlanta live in extended care motels, extended motels, and that’s obviously required us to take a completely different tact.

The other, I guess the other thing is that we’ve also realized that we’re going to have to focus on people who are losing their homes because of housing problems and particularly because of increased costs of property taxes. So I think that what has happened in housing has made things get incredibly worse for our ability to perform the services we have. And I think it’s even going to get worse because things are going to get worse when the rental assistance programs end in 2025. So it’s going to require us to take entire new tax in that area.

José Padilla:

Well, I’ll pick up where Steve left off about the changes he’s seen with respect to housing in rural areas. We also have seen that and it has impacted our practice, our housing practice, the normal landlord tenant, people staying in rentals and towns. I mean, for us, one of the big changes has been that many, many, many, many of our clients live in mobile homes and they live in isolated areas. You’re not talking about mobile homes necessarily inside an incorporated area. Many mobile homes are in unincorporated spaces under the jurisdiction of local county governments. So it’s a different approach to trying to do legal rights with those folks or different approach in trying to let them know about legal aid. But that’s one. The other thing is in terms of the practice, Steve is right in that being sort of housing, the affordability of housing is one thing, but the other thing is we can’t assume that our clients don’t own homes.

So I know on one of the economic downturns, we realized that people were coming in farm workers and others who are losing their homes. And so we had to expand our practice working with private lawyers in particular to do foreclosure work. And so we were able to successfully engage that new practice, but it definitely changed, had changed versus our traditional landlord tenant practice that we did. So that change in substantive area is one. The other thing I just wanted to cite, agreeing with Marilyn, we also in California, knowing that it has a very extensive criminal justice system, prison system, having to address returning felons to your areas and engaging expungement work was something totally new for us that we had to another practice that we had to learn. And the other thing about client community changes is that we started asking questions about within the poor, maybe people were suffering differently, maybe based on gender. So when we started looking at how women, particularly farm worker women were suffering their poverty, we realized that one unspoken area was the area of sexual harassment. And so we engaged into the defense getting into sexual harassment cases, successfully doing that. And the other thing was that we were able to also get into L-G-B-T-Q work and we started an L-G-B-T-Q project because we realized that there was a lot of homophobia going on in rural communities, farm worker communities, and we had to change our attitude as to who was the client

Jon Asher:

In terms of emerging legal problems. Just to play off of what the three of you said, not only over the past number of years have housing cases become the majority of the work we have done in Colorado as opposed to family law. That was the majority, not by a whole a lot, but a majority of the work we did for many, many years. But also if somebody had told me in terms of victims of the criminal justice system and the like that I would leave a well-staffed unit getting people identification when they had lived a life with a name other than what was on their birth certificate, people who couldn’t get birth certificates, it’s amazing how many county courts and clerk and recorders offices have suffered fires, floods, tornadoes, and the like. But without a state id, you can’t get housing, employment, medical care, any public benefits.

And responding to that population has been something I might not have expected until the last five, 10 years of my career. I think what it tells us is we don’t come close to meeting the legal needs of the poor, but so too, we need to be flexible, evolving, able to meet emerging and new legal needs. But Marilyn, you oversaw the creation of an elder hotline that provides legal help to anyone in Kansas over the age of 60. What can I ask? Are you most concerned about what troubles you when it comes to the legal needs of seniors today? And what can we in legal aid and the civil justice system do to better serve our senior clients?

Marilyn Harp:

I think that seniors have some unique problems, but they also have the whole range of problems that the general community has. So trying to provide some ability to access services to give people a chance to talk to a lawyer. A part of that that came out of need, another part of it, like all of us, comes out of resources, right? So we were able to start that program because we had a number of attorneys, some of whom had worked with our programs before and done senior work and then gotten into private practice, and they were able to be lured into giving back a little bit of time to answer some questions for seniors. So part of it was the need and part of it was that we had this resource and continue to have resources. So those things are there. I know all of your states have free legal answers now. The ABA program as a referral source, Kansas does not have that program, and we’re hoping to get it started again, but that has not been a resource for us for a number of years, which meant that nobody had a way to do that. And so seniors were a part that we could pick up.

Jon Asher:

Marilyn Colorado doesn’t have legal answers yet either, but it’s being reconsidered and we’ll see.

Marilyn Harp:

Good. I might beat

Jon Asher:

You. Wouldn’t be the first time Kansas speak routed to something. José, you ran and were responsible for a largely rural legal aid programs serving many migrant farm workers, and you serve as co-chair of the LSC Rural Justice Task Force working group. What are you most concerned about when it comes to access to justice for marginalized and poor people living in rural areas? And what would you like to see from legal aid programs going forward?

José Padilla:

Well, first of all, just as was said previously by some of the speakers with respect to the marginalized, you have to start making the assumption that many, if not most of their problems are no different than what other legal a identify as legal needs. Housing is huge. We stopped doing family law, but using some aspects of family law in order to open up access to welfare benefits, for example, was something that put us back into family a little bit. So public benefits was another area that applies to marginalized folks, but then the question is what might be different from the geography of it? The distance and the lack of transportation in some of our very sprawling rural counties makes it very difficult for our client community, some parts of our client community to actually be able to go into the offices. So like Marilyn, the use of the phone trying to do council referral, maybe using telephone, using Zoom, we’ve tried to do that at one point.

We also try to hotline for the farm workers. We tried something called one 800 Aldo, which means 1-800-ATTORNEY, but those weren’t very, very successful, but they were efforts to try to expand services. So the distance is huge. Similarly, lack of transportation in some of our areas is huge, but I really want to focus on something else, and that is that in terms of concern dealing with an immigrant highly immigrant community, well, yeah, highly immigrant community, maybe a third of our clients are going to be immigrant. And at one point in time you have to deal with certain critical parts of your program that have to reach these folks. One of the issues is, and it’s a concern of mine, is that if you want to serve these communities, you have to be language friendly. And that’s how you develop trust. And there are two spaces where you have to be language friendly.

One is when they walk into your office, your intake staff has to be ready to address the languages that are different in the client community. So I would say that a hundred percent of Sierra’s intake staff in the 15 or so offices that we have, they’re bilingual Spanish. And that again, that’s important not only because of communication, but it’s also where you start trying to gain the trust of the client. The second thing about trust is that a lot of the immigrant communities don’t trust government. Many of them try to look at you as part of government. So it’s not easy to be able to reach them because they think you have to persuade them that you are not government and that you have no responsibility to discuss immigration status with government, et cetera. So that’s another thing that you have to break down when you’re working with the kinds of client communities that we deal with.

And so the other part of it, of course, is the outreach. One of the things that has made Sierra Lake different in legal aid at in California legal aid is that we have outreach workers as an essential part of our staff. And these are different than paralegals. Your ideal outreach worker will be both a Paralegal but will also do serious outreach. And by outreach you’re talking about doing rights education on weekends when you can talk to farm workers on a Sunday at a church as an example, but they should be able to do it in their language. A new community at Sierra LA that we had to address was that we found out, we were finding out that there were many, many, many farm workers coming from Mexico who didn’t even speak Spanish well, they were speaking indigenous languages like Tiki, and we had to figure out how we were going to reach that community.

So we had to hire indigenous language speaking outreach workers, and in addition, we formed a special unit called the Indigenous Farm Worker Unit in order to address that. And so trying to deal with those kinds of immigrant communities requires you to both make sure that your staffing is such that you can reach those folks. And obviously you have to tiptoe the issue because it is a very political issue when it comes to LSC. And unfortunately, we’re probably doing my time, probably the most investigated legal aid in the country, and I saw that as a badge of honor. I don’t know if people knew, but at one point, when we were successfully going after the dairy industry, I’m talking about winning quarter of a million dollar wage settlements, half a million dollar wage settlements, they complained to Congress and I was even forced to testify in front of a subcommittee in Congress because of our successful Litigation. So at some point when you’re successful in dealing with some of these marginalized immigrant communities, it becomes political and you have to be ready to address that.

Jon Asher:

Thank you, José. Steve, you began to speak about housing and housing issues, which of course housing issues have become more prominent since the onset of covid, but being involved in legal aid, as each of us have, we’ve seen the housing problems that people living in poverty have always experienced. Do you want to continue your thoughts and what do you think others need to know about the reality of housing in security facing low income Americans and how legal aid can better respond both to the rental market, mobile homes, and the homeowners who are facing housing insecurity?

Steve Gottlieb:

Thank you, Jon. Yeah, I began to talk about that and picking up on one thing that José said, one of the things we really realized in covid, but even before that was how difficult the situation was for homeowners. One of our lawyers said recently that you can’t have SSI and still have a home. In other words, if your only income is SSI, you can’t afford a home. And that’s because a number of things. One is that taxes, homeowner taxes, property taxes have skyrocketed with the values. And so one of the things that we did when we saw that happening was to actually create a little bit of a project where we helped people get exemptions and fight property tax assessments. Because in Fulton County, they went up like 300% in one year when Fulton County decided to reevaluate property. So it required us to be completely, to take a completely different tact, get volunteers to help us and so forth.

And then the other thing that we’ve always been involved with homeowners is the fact that people’s homes were taken. One of my lawyers, bill Brennan, wonderful lawyer, used to talk about how people who wanted to prey on poor people, they first preyed on their income and then when they didn’t have any income, they looked for their assets. And in Atlanta, one of the big assets as is across the country, is the idea that people have homes, which they’ve lived in a long time and the home value has gone up. So they naturally will pray for people trying to get the homes. Now, the new issue ironically, is that people who have been in their homes for a while get bombarded with people who want to take their homes for a fraction of what they’re worth. And we actually had to develop little cards which said we’re not interested in selling, which we would give to clients so that they could put it in their windows so that people would not bother them about selling their homes.

So it’s taken on lots of different kinds of manifestations and you have to be creative in response. The other thing that I’ve mentioned that I’m very proud of our work in is the fact that another population that we had no idea really existed was the people who live in extended stay hotels. These are people who can’t pay their original the two months extra mortgage. They have to have, excuse me, rent they have to have for security. They can’t pay for the security deposit on utilities or they just have bad credit. And so they end up staying in one room, apartments, one room rental extended stay hotel rooms. And it’s gotten to the point in Atlanta where in one of our counties, the buses stop at 30 different rental extended stay hotels in order to take the kids to school. These are no longer a week or two or two months, they’re years.

People just spend time there. And so the manifestation of poverty in terms of housing has taken a lot of different kinds of forms. Let me add one other thing that really does worry me. A lot of programs in the country have gotten a lot more money as we have to help people by providing them rental assistance, get rental assistance through the state or the local government. Well, that rental assistance is supposed to end in 2025, and I wonder what people are going to do when they can’t get that and what legal aid programs are going to do when they can’t hire lawyers with the money that they use to provide rental assistance. Part of it is services to provide the rental assistance. What’s going to happen? Where are we going to be able to provide the resources to clients and to the lawyers who want to represent them? And that’s going to be a real difficult problem.

Jon Asher:

Well, resources, Steve, as we all know, have always been variable and a difficult issue. It took me years to realize there’s no such thing as permanent funding. There’s only current funding, and that’s a reality we have all faced for years. It seems to me that in the short run programs have increased I OTA funding as interest rates have gone up, and that has helped a lot of programs. If those funds are marshaled wisely, both by IOLTA funders and grantees, that can help offset some of the loss of rental assistance and covid emergency funding. But we know that a large part of managing a legal aid program is managing the UPS downs, the current and future funding challenges, and that is not likely to change one way or another going forward that will make setting priorities and case protocols as important as they ever have been.

Maybe that, and looking back is a segue into what I would like us to start to conclude with, and that is each of us have had long careers in legal aid to look back on, but for me it has been important not just to look back, but to always keep looking forward as well. I would like all of us in the legal aid community to see ourselves as part of the history, part of the movement of legal aid and a hopefully not steady progression, but nonetheless, an effort to move increasingly towards an equal society and one committed to fundamental fairness and justice. You’re less likely to have a successful future if you do not know your past, but you can’t be bound to the past. I think we all recognize that you must reach for new and greater heights. Could each of you talk about progress that’s being made or new ideas in access to justice that you’re excited to see continuing? Maybe as importantly, what lessons do you want to share with the legal aid community and its supporters that you think can help shape a vibrant and effective future? Why don’t we start with you, Steve, you were on a roll. Why don’t you continue?

Steve Gottlieb:

I don’t know that I want to say that there is some unique new way of doing things that is going to solve all the problems we have in legal services. And in fact, in reflection, I think it’s finding what we did well and continuing that approach that I think is what I hope we will do. And you put your finger on one of the things that I think is key, and that is that you need the flexibility that we’ve had, the flexibility of being responsive to client needs and to be grounded in client needs. You pointed that out, Jon, and it was word that I would’ve used too, and I kind of referenced it a little bit for Atlanta legal aid with some of our housing work. And there are two other areas which I think illustrate the greatest successes I feel our program ever had because we were flexible and because we responded to people’s needs.

And that is one with the Cuban stuff where we represented the Cuban, the Mario Cubans in the 1980s. And obviously that was just kind of remarkable. And two, to represent people who have disabilities where we went to the Supreme Court and got the Olmsted decision, which people now view as the brown versus Board of Education of disability rights. And I realized thinking about it, that either the Cubans or home defense with the homeowners and people with disabilities, that none of those were really what I would’ve called traditional clients. I think Marilyn made reference to changes in, or maybe it was José, to changes in the client population. And those were not the classic traditional clients, but we responded to them because of the passions of our staff. And so my message going forward is that we have to continue to be flexible and pragmatic. And a corollary to that for me has always been that you have to deal with your staff in a way that gives them the opportunity to do that kind of work. And that means responding to their passions and giving them the dignity that they should be accorded. I mean, there are too many nonprofits out there which are mission-driven, but don’t know how to encourage their, to really be productive and stay around. And to me, that’s the other big key going forward, and that is figuring out how we can maintain the quality of our staff and play to their passions so that we can have groundbreaking kinds of things.

Marilyn Harp:

Marilyn, obviously, I think to think that we’ve figured out how best to use technology both internally and with our clients is, I mean, we haven’t, and there’s much more that can happen there, but it also is about meeting people where they are and not assuming that everybody knows how to do a zoom call or any of those kinds of things that become second nature. So I think that’s part of it. The other thing that I’ve sort of been struck with in this conversation even is I think we all have to, our programs, programs always have to run intake systems. We have to have a way to get clients in the door, but I think Steve is absolutely right that some of the most fun for staff, some of the most important work are finding those cases that either come through intake, there’s somebody saying, Hey, wait, this is a square peg and all we have are round holes, but we need to think about this one too, or a way to do that either through our staff or some kind of mechanism to be flexible, because that is where change happens. José,

José Padilla:

Listening to Marilyn and Steve generates a lot of different thoughts in my mind, but the frame of the question about looking back and then looking forward and staying true to your history, I dunno if people know this, but when C LA’s founding board 60 years ago or so on that board was Caesar Chavez and his alternate was the Farm League organizer, Dolores Huerta. So that really became the root of an essential client community that was not being served. And that I think we developed a legacy of serving that client community well, and that’s the farm worker community. So to that extent, we were tied to movement, we were tied to the labor movement. So you’re talking about lessons in order to develop, to look at the issues that the civil rights movement went after, the idea of equal justice, equal society, et cetera. You have to be able to take risks, and that means that you shouldn’t shy away from heart issues.

For us, part of my legacy looking back was that at a certain period of time, I was not afraid. I decided I was going to take on the immigration issue. And one of the things that we did, not only did we set it up as a priority, but for the one and only time that we did anything national, I decided to send. And at that time, we had lobbyists within our staff. I sent a guy to Washington DC to work with congressional folk to develop and write and pass legislate an amnesty law. So the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, that was something that we set up as a priority area to address the needs of the rural farm workers that we were serving. And obviously the impact that it had was national and was really heavy. When I speak to law students, periodically, I’ll run into some that’ll come up to me and say, they thanked me.

They said, because their parents were able to legalize because of that, and then that’s why they were able to go to law school. And so looking backwards is one thing, but as people said, you cannot be both bound by the past and you also cannot rest on your laurels. So we cannot be wed to just doing our things just one way. One of the mechanisms that has been very, very helpful for CRLA is that every three years, every five years, we have a statewide priority setting conference where we bring all of our advocate staff, and sometimes we brought all our, including clerical support staff, and we bring them together and we just ask two basic questions. Who is the client we serve? Is that client community changing? And two, what are the priority substantive law practices or priority issues that we will engage? And so traditionally, housing has always been one of those priorities since our inception.

Family law was there at the inception, and that no longer has been a priority for many, many, many years. But the other mainstays are labor and employment, again, the root being farm workers. And so we handle labor and employment for farm workers and any other poor that walks in with wage issues. We expanded farm workers to include dairy workers, and we were very successful in reaching out and doing very impactful work with dairy workers. But it answered that question about who is the client, who is the new client? Similarly, women addressing the issue of gender was important. So we identified the whole issue of employment, sex discrimination, and employment, sexual harassment, again, going through the priority setting, conference education and civil rights have always been a mainstay. And so I’m just saying that we can never think that we can’t do better. We’ve always just have to be able to say, how can we change to expand and meet the new needs that we weren’t meeting five years ago? And I think that we all, I think, can benefit from that kind of a stepping back opportunity and space and then asking those very basic questions about the new client and the new areas of practice that we will engage.

Jon Asher:

Thank you all. I think what I am hearing one way or another, it may be a cliche, but I think clients and staff don’t care until they know that you care. And caring I think is not enough. We have very well-intended people come into legal services, but we as managers need to expect that good intentions are not as substitute for good and responsive, high quality lawyering, but not only technical skills, but to evolve and grow and make use of technology and new innovations and emerging legal needs. And to make sure not that legal aids survives, but that we continue to deserve to survive. And that means providing high quality product that is responsive to the emerging legal needs of our client communities. I would like to think that all four of us, one way or another, have spent very rewarding professional lives trying to make that aspiration a reality. And Marilyn, José, Steve is always, I’ve enjoyed speaking with all of you today and thank you for taking the time to share your history and experience and insights with all of us. And my thanks to you, the listeners for tuning into this episode of Talk Justice. Thank you all.

Speaker 2:

Podcast guest speakers views, thoughts and opinions are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the legal services corporation’s views, thoughts, or opinions. The information and guidance discussed in this podcast are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice. You should not make decision based on this podcast content without seeking legal or other professional advice.