Fellowships that Turn Young Lawyers’ Passion into Service

Episode Notes

Transcript

Verna L. Williams:

They come to this work and they bring fresh rage to the table. Their rage is nice and fresh, and they’re ready to get out there and they want to make a difference. And you can’t help but get swept up in that.

Announcer:

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.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of LSC and your host for this episode. Today I’m joined by Verna Williams in a role as CEO of Equal Justice Works. Verna leads a team dedicated to promoting Equal Justice by creating opportunities for law students and law schools to engage with public interest law. LSC Partners with Equal Justice Works on one of these initiatives called the Rural Summer Legal Corps. The program places law students in legal aid programs serving underserved rural areas across the country. We’re happy to be celebrating the 10th anniversary of that fellowship program this year. Bird’s Career has encompassed a wide range of experiences from her work at the National Women’s Law Center to the US Department of Justice, to serving as dean of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Law. Through all of them, her dedication to public service and equal access to justice is clear. Verna, you and I go back a long time to our days working together in a law firm, sly Austin, and it’s always great to see you and a pleasure to speak with you today. Could you start by talking about the mission of Equal Justice Works and the type of initiatives EJW implements?

Verna L. Williams:

Well, thanks a lot, Ron. It’s really a pleasure to be here with you too. And it’s hard to believe that so much time has passed since we rode ZI together, so it’s been a minute, as they say. So equal Justice Works, we are the country’s largest postgraduate legal fellowship program. We connect public interest advocates and law students to communities in need. We’re animated by the principal that justice shouldn’t be a function of one’s income, one’s zip code or any other factor. And so we work with LSC on the Rural Summer Legal Corps, as you mentioned, and I’m extremely proud of this program. This tenure partnership places law students in rural communities where the access to justice crisis is very dire, but that program’s not the only one. We have a postgraduate program where fellows design their own projects working with prospective host organizations, and we have what’s also called the cohort program where we get funding from a foundation to pursue a particular issue like disaster resilience or the legal consequences of opioid addiction. And we deploy fellows to different parts of the country to deal with those issues. And since our founding in 1986, we’ve had over 2,700 alums. We have expanded capacity at host organizations. We fostered robust pro bono relationships among fellows, their hosts and unsponsored. And we’re working to expand that impact by developing programs to reach pre-law students and lay people supporting the community justice worker movement. So we’re pretty busy, just like you are at LSC Ron,

Ronald S. Flagg:

And when you talk about your 2,700 alums, just to make this clear, that means tens of thousands, many tens of thousands of people have been helped by those 2,700 young law students and recent law graduates. It’s really quite an impactful program, Verna, between Sidley and your current role at Equal Justice Works, you’ve held positions at several great institutions, some of which I mentioned at the start of our conversation. How has all of that experience affected your approach to your leadership at Equal Justice Works?

Verna L. Williams:

Well, I think the first thing to realize is that Equal Justice Works. I think our secret sauce is working across sectors. We work with a public interest community, we work with people in different political persuasions. We work with law schools. And in my career, I’ve also worked in lots of different sectors, law firms, government, legal ed, public interests. As a public interest lawyer, I learned the power of coalition building and that was instrumental in my work as a law professor where I led the effort to create what became the Nathaniel Jones Center for Race, gender, and Social Justice. And it’s notable that I did that in Cincinnati, Ohio, where working across the aisle is essential. So at my core, I’m a public interest attorney and I know that there’s no one way to serve the public interest and that people can do good wherever they are, and that those issues aren’t the preserve of any one political party.

I’m about building coalitions to make a difference. Finally, I learned about the Access to Justice crisis as a dean and I was horrified. I learned at that time that the access to Justice gap in the state of Ohio was upwards of 80 something percent, and I was determined to do what I could in that capacity to make a difference in Cincinnati. And so at the University of Cincinnati, I supported a help center for unrepresented litigants. And so when the opportunity to lead Equal Justice Works came across my desk, I saw that through the lens of access to justice and was eager to lead this organization. It was an opportunity that brought together all different threads of my career.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, EJW and all of us are lucky. You are where you are. I often say that to make a dent in the justice gap, we need at least three things, leadership, innovation, and collaboration. And you really reflect all of those values. And again, we’re so glad to be working with you at LSC and talking to you today. Since we’re talking about law students and legal education, I’m curious about your own experience. In your Harvard Law School days, did you know what you wanted to use your law degree to pursue? And did you feel your legal education gave you the tools you needed to get there?

Verna L. Williams:

Yeah, Ron, I had no idea what I wanted to do other than make a difference. That was the motivating factor. I wanted to make a difference. When I went to law school, I thought, well, I won’t practice. I’ll just do policy work. But I didn’t even really understand what that meant. And in the course of three years and getting experiences at places like what’s now called the Southern Center for Human Rights and another law firm, I came across a community of different minds, different thinkers, and it made me see that all kinds of things were possible. And so I started to think of myself differently because I was there. So I’m speaking generally, of course. I absolutely got the tools to do what I do now. Although at the time I have to confess lots of law students, I thought that what I was learning was absolutely irrelevant to practice.

Not that I knew very much about practice, but as it turns out, I mean what I was learning in the classroom, really how to learn, that was a big part of what it was, a big skill, an important skill in practicing law and my extracurricular activities, working with organizations and advocating on behalf of students. That was stuff that I ended up making my living at. So I absolutely got the skills necessary to become, to do what I do now. I think a legal career is one of lifetime learning, and it was definitely the foundational for me in that regard.

Ronald S. Flagg:

When you look back on one’s career and life experiences, at least from the vantage point I’m at now, it’s amazing the experiences that you find that you can draw on in your day job. For example, as I look back on my life, one of the most impactful things I did was being a girl slash women’s soccer coach for 15 years as my kids were growing up. So you never know where you’re going to learn something valuable.

Verna L. Williams:

That’s true.

Ronald S. Flagg:

I recently spoke to Chief Justice Steve Jensen of the South Dakota Supreme Court on this podcast. And Chief Justice Jensen talked about the issue of public interest drift. We know, and from your experience at the College of Law Cincinnati and in your job with EJW, that many students who pursue law choose the profession because they want to help people. And you said that was one of the things you wanted to do as well, and that’s true of me as well. But when we look at the rate of lawyers entering public interest career, what we see is that over time we’re losing many of these well-intentioned students along the way. What are your thoughts on this public interest drift phenomenon and how can we address this concern?

Verna L. Williams:

So many thoughts, Ron. One thing I got to bring to the table is this statistic that I found really alarming. The A BA tells us that of 1.3 million attorneys in the us, only 1% are paid legal aid attorneys. So this phenomenon, public interest drift is real. It is real, and we need people in the field. Why does this happen? Well, I think there are lots of reasons. Among them, there’s a lack of clarity around public interest career paths. When you compare the career path for going to big law, in particular in big law, there’s a time of year that the firms come to the law schools. The students know exactly what it is they’re supposed to do. But when it comes to public interest jobs, those jobs are more dictated by the budgets of public interest organizations. So it varies. There is also disparities in advising students about public interest careers.

So some students are attending schools like Harvard or NYU that have really robust public interest programs, but other schools, the person who’s advising them about public interest careers may be a professor. So somebody who has a really full plate on their own and they don’t have the time to really advise young folks in the way they need to be advised. So people miss out on getting important information about deadlines or resources that they could take advantage of. Then of course, the elephant in the room, the cost of higher ed, significant law school debt, we’re talking $200,000 on average, and that’s just for law school. That’s not even including undergraduate debt. And the data tell us that this debt is especially large for students of color. So that’s discouraging them from taking on these jobs because of course, at the base of it, the entry level salaries are not competitive compared to big law.

And I think sometimes law students may have the misperception that their choices are either to be really rich by going into big law or to be destitute by going into public interest law. And so they move away from the public interest careers. Some thoughts because it’s not enough for me to identify problems. I got to think about how to work our way out of this solution, out of this situation. So based on what I’ve said, more resources for public interest advising and career advising, more resources for public interest employers so that they can pay people better. And I also think it’s important to educate students that the arc of their careers is long and that they can plot a path for public interest work. I mean, you and I started out at Sidley, and that’s not mean years later. That’s not where we are. It goes back to something I said earlier.

There are lots of ways to give back and to contribute and help the public interest even if you don’t land in a legal services organization or even if you don’t land at what was my dream job as a law student, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. I mean, I thought when I didn’t get that job, my public interest career was over, but that was not the case. So if we can advise the students about just take it one step at a time, here are certain things you can do to prepare yourself to either go into public interest work or to have a fulfilling career in which you incorporate pro bono work in a meaningful way so that you can assist people.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, thank you for that. And as we’re talking about one step at a Time, I’m of course reminded of the program that Equal Justice Works and LSC Collaborate on, which I mentioned in my introduction, the Rural Summer Legal Corps, which is now in its 10th year. And this program, this fellowship, enables law students to gain practical experience by pairing them with legal service organizations to assist underserved rural communities. And of course, there are legal needs across the country in urban areas, suburban areas, and rural areas. But rural communities face particularly acute needs because in many rural communities and areas, there are few and often no lawyers. I’m not talking about no public interest lawyers, I’m talking about no lawyers. There may be a county judge and prosecutor, and that is literally, those are literally the only lawyers in some rural counties across the country. Now coming out of our Rural Justice Summer Legal Corps, we’ve had some fellows who’ve gone on to careers in legal aid after participating in the program. But even for those who don’t, I think it’s so valuable to give law students an understanding of the civil justice gap and of the specific challenges in rural justice that I just alluded to, having this immersive experience at a legal services organization hopefully leaves a lifelong impact on their perspectives as lawyers and makes them more likely to engage in pro bono work as you referred to, because they’ve already had that foot in the door at Legal Aid. Now thinking about 10 years of the Rural Summer Legal Corps, what are your thoughts on the program?

Verna L. Williams:

Well, I think in a nutshell, I could just say I totally agree. I think it’s a stroke of brilliance, honestly, to frame this program around access to justice. I remember as a dean at University of Cincinnati, the difficulty we had encouraging law students to go back to the rural communities from which they came because they wanted to be in the big city. They wanted to be in Cincinnati or they wanted to be in Columbus, and they couldn’t think of a reason why they would go back. And I thought, well, if we talk about it in terms of access to justice, and they recognize these are communities where, as you said, there are no lawyers whatsoever, these are communities in dire, dire need of legal assistance that that would help. And so I think that framing it in this way is a brilliant thing. I also, I would love to study the RSLC participants to see where they landed and how they’re contributing to the public interest universe, because I think you’re right, your gut is absolutely on point that even for those who didn’t go to Legal Aid, they were affected by the program and that it generated a stronger interest in pro bono work or it motivates them to continue being active in that regard.

And it’s so important. I think it’s the kind of program that is really important for all law students. It would be important for us to educate every single law student in this country about the access to justice crisis because people just don’t know. And I think that if they realized that 92% of low income people’s legal needs are going unmet, they would be more than willing to step up and do whatever they could to make a difference, and perhaps we could create a groundswell. Now, I’m starting to dream developing doctrinal and clinical courses that are focused on rural communities. In addition to access to justice, it’s important to recognize the implication for our legal system of this crisis, the bad outcomes, the cascade of problems, that further entrench poverty, reinforcement of the notion that we’ve got a tiered system of justice that is a recipe for alienation and disrespect. And so anything that we can do to amplify the important work of RSLC, I’m all for

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, given a justice gap nationally in rural, urban, and suburban areas together of 92%, that is over 90% of the problems faced by low income Americans receive no or inadequate assistance given a gap of that magnitude. It’s important for us to think creatively. It’s important for us to think big, and as I said at the outset of our conversation, we need leadership, innovation, and collaboration. So I am really excited and happy about your big thinking. Now, these are challenging times, and you’ve had a unique vantage point watching lawyers at the very start of their careers as a law school dean and now through Equal Justice Works. As you think about the cohort of students that you work with day in, day out and over the course of the last many years, what inspires you about working with students today during this pivotal period and what do you most hope sticks with them as they move forward?

Verna L. Williams:

Well, as you ask that question, Ron, I’m reminded of one of my early days at Equal Justice Works, and it was the very best day. I was having breakfast with a bunch of fellows and fellow alums and listening to them, talking to them about their projects, and it was, I don’t know about you. It was one of those days when this light bulb goes on, and I’m like, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be. These are my people. I mean, it was exhilarating. And every time I talk to fellows, I get that feeling and talking to some folks at the host organizations where they land. One of them framed it that they come to this work and they bring fresh rage to the table. Their rage is nice and fresh, and they’re ready to get out there, and they want to make a difference, and you can’t help but not get swept up in that.

I appreciate the rage. I felt the rage. I’m all for it, and I’m going to do what I can to help you make the difference that you want to make. So it’s extraordinary. I love working with them, and I love the prospect of them making a difference, and that’s the whole reason why I wanted to come. I’m so grateful that I landed here. It’s a way that I can contribute in this moment and have a really significant impact by all these amazing fellows that are working out in the field trying to make a difference. They give me great hope.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, Verna, I think your observation that you are where you’re supposed to be is quite apt. Thank you for joining me today, but much more importantly, I’m so grateful for your leadership in promoting public interest law and for the wonderful partnership between our organizations. Truly, always a pleasure to see you and talk to you.

Verna L. Williams:

Thank you, Ron. This is really a delight as well. Thanks for inviting me to be on the show, and I appreciate our partnership as well.

Ronald S. Flagg:

My pleasure. Thanks to our listeners for tuning into this episode of Talk Justice. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. In the meantime, stay well.

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