Helping Needy or Social Engineering? : Key Turning Point Facing Legal Services for the Poor

Over the last 20 years, California Rural Legal Assistance has racked up victory after victory in its battles with the state’s agricultural interests.

It has won cases securing minimum wages for farm workers, prohibiting certain harsh working conditions such as use of short-handled hoes, and forcing the expansion of federal food programs for the poor.

The group also has been embroiled in a bitter court battle, now before the California Supreme Court, with the University of California over the use of federal agricultural research money. CRLA argues that university research on new technologies such as automatic harvesting machines benefit wealthy corporate farmers at the expense of small growers, who can’t afford to buy the machines, and farm workers, who lose their jobs.

Such legal actions make Michael B. Wallace wince.

The Jackson, Miss., lawyer is chairman of the federal Legal Services Corp., which helps fund CRLA. Wallace contends that CRLA attorneys, and other so-called “poverty lawyers” around the country who work through the legal services network, try to use the courts as an arena to practice their personal brand of liberal politics.

“Many of our (poverty lawyers) candidly admit that they wish to use funds for political and social purposes,” Wallace said.

Legal Services Corp., the federal agency that finances civil legal assistance for the poor, has been torn for most of the last decade by disputes like the one over the wisdom of agricultural research at UC, pitting legal services’ conservative-dominated board of directors against poverty lawyers in the field.

Board members have repeatedly tried to curtail what they have called lawyers’ overly aggressive attempts at “social engineering,” with campaigns that the lawyers, in turn, have labeled right-wing harassment.

Now, however, Legal Services is at a turning point because the terms of its directors, who were appointed by former President Reagan, have expired. It is up to President Bush to appoint a new board. While Reagan was an avowed enemy of legal services, Bush’s perspective is not publicly known. Poverty lawyers are nervous, and so are their conservative opponents, about which direction Bush will take.

Stakes are high.

Wallace and a majority of Legal Services’ board endorse a plan that many legal services attorneys contend would eviscerate their program: to encourage private attorneys to bid competitively against federally funded local agencies to provide legal aid to poor Americans.

Many Bar group leaders argue that competitive bidding would be a costly administrative nightmare and an indirect way of dismantling the more than 300 experienced local and state poverty law programs that are funded by the Legal Services Corp.

“To give to a hostile LSC management the wholesale right to stop funding any and all programs it chooses would be to end legal services delivery for the poor in this country as we know it,” former American Bar Assn. President Robert Raven recently told Congress.

Cut in Funding

The legal services program now receives $300 million a year, a 40% cut since 1981 in inflation-adjusted dollars. State and local Bar groups have taken up some of the slack with money and donations of time. Still, in California the ranks of poverty lawyers have thinned from 600 to 350 in the last eight years.

As a result of these cutbacks, the 1.4 million poor Americans who get free civil legal services each year often receive only cursory attention. For example, at the eviction center of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles on a recent weekday, the two staff lawyers on duty had time to represent only a handful of the 40 to 50 people who showed up with eviction notices.

For most clients, lawyer Lisa Korben only had time to see that paper work was filled out correctly and to advise tenants of their chances of fighting evictions. “You’re going to be homeless,” she bluntly warned a welfare mother with a young child.

Korben, for one, remains committed to her work, saying that “I went into law because poor people don’t have access to the legal system. It could be any of us one day” who might need free legal services.

Still, working under such conditions--and for much less pay than many private attorneys--many poverty lawyers say their morale is deteriorating.

Fire in the Belly

In the 1960s, it was easier for such lawyers to maintain fire in their bellies. The federal War on Poverty was new. Network television entertainment shows portrayed poverty lawyers as heroes.

But times have changed. “L.A. Law” now offers the television role model for aspiring lawyers, and the nation’s top law school graduates are wooed by major law firms offering only slightly less than six-figure salaries. By contrast, legal services attorneys in Los Angeles start at $30,000 a year.

Ralph S. Abascal, general counsel of California Rural Legal Assistance, said it is getting harder and harder to recruit new lawyers and to hold on to those already working.

Abascal said he got a shock recently when he received a survey of law students about to graduate from his alma mater, UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, where he serves on the board of trustees. A lawyer for 22 years, Abascal said graduating students reported their average starting salary was to be $45,200, “which is $1,200 more than I earn.”

Another reason is that poverty lawyers “get burned out. They get disillusioned,” Abascal added.

They also get bored.

Conservative board members want to force poverty lawyers to concentrate on representing individual poor people who have routine problems such as difficulty collecting government benefits, or disputes with their landlords or spouses.

“The programs have been biased against handling routine cases,” charged Legal Services President Terrance J. Wear. “I think some of the lawyers . . . think they have a constitutional right to have an interesting law practice.”

Wear is particularly critical of some suits brought by lawyers on behalf of groups of poor people with a common problem. He said he thinks poverty lawyers go out of their way to look for such suits to pursue their own left-wing social agendas.

While such class-action suits account for less than 1% of legal services work, they have led in some cases to sweeping changes in American life.

In the early days of the 25-year-old legal services program, for instance, cases resulted in slum tenants winning the right to withhold rents until repairs were made. Others barred creditors from garnishing wages until they gave debtors a chance to refute evidence of debt. Still others required government bureaucrats to give welfare recipients a hearing before cutting benefits.

While the principles behind these cases are now well-established in American law, efforts by poverty lawyers to apply them to new situations still arouse strong emotions.

For example, Wear has condemned a lawsuit recently won by poverty lawyers that forced public housing authorities to give hearings to tenants before evicting them.

Housing authorities had tried to short-circuit longstanding rules requiring hearings, in part in an effort to get rid of drug dealers, leading Wear to charge that, “Some (poverty law) programs are concerned that drug dealers are not getting all their procedural rights.”

To which Florence Roisman, one of the lawyers who filed the suit, replied: “That is a disgustingly outrageous lie. The issue is, how does one determine if a person who has been accused of being a drug dealer is one or is not?

“The nerve!” she continued. “The nerve of the LSC (Legal Services Corp.) to suggest that tenants who wish to challenge (government) should not be able to have lawyers to go to court.”

For most board members, however, that is not the issue. The issue is whether poor people should have such an elaborate legal apparatus at their disposal, which includes 16 federally funded think-tanks, such as the one Roisman works for, focusing on various aspects of poverty law.

Roisman works at the one concerned with housing. Other think-tanks focus on issues such as health, and the rights of consumers, immigrants, migrant workers, and children.

Legal services backers compare the experience of attorneys at these national “support centers” to that of senior partners at large private law firms and say that the centers are invaluable to poverty lawyers in the field.

Fund Cutoff Urged

The board of directors, however, has asked Congress to stop funding the centers.

Critics of legal services say the special centers give lawyers for the poor too much power, particularly when the targets of their lawsuits are individuals.

For example, the nation’s largest farm organization, the American Farm Bureau, blames the migrant workers’ support center for running individual farmers out of business with high costs of defending themselves against relentless litigation on working conditions.

The Farm Bureau is the only special-interest group that actively opposes the direction of Legal Services and has joined the lobbying campaign to preserve the current ideological composition of the board.

Opposing the Farm Bureau and the conservatives on the board is virtually the entire organized Bar: the American Bar Assn., deans of some of the nation’s most prestigious law schools, and presidents and former presidents of various state and local Bar associations who have banded together in an ad hoc group called Bar Leaders for the Preservation of Legal Services for the Poor.

They note that all Western European democracies provide free civil lawyers for people who cannot afford them and say that action to save the program here is urgent.

Bar leaders charge that the conservative board has tried to undermine the lawyers by making unsupported allegations that local programs are rife with fraud, by harassing the lawyers with time-wasting monitoring visits, and by renewing local program grants for only a few months at a time, rather than the usual year--an action that makes planning difficult.

Thomas F. Smegal Jr., a private San Francisco attorney who anchors a five-member dissident faction on the 11-member board, said his conservative colleagues want to award grants to private lawyers precisely because they expect private lawyers will not get involved with class actions and therefore will do less for their poor clients than poverty lawyers.

Smegal said: “The legal services lawyer who doesn’t have to worry about making a living representing other clients says (to a tenant), ‘Wait a minute. You’ve got a problem, but what about the rest of the people in that building? Don’t they have the same problem?’ ”

He said that private lawyers handling the same problem would likely tell their client, “You’ve got a problem with your landlord. We’ll go down and take care of it. We won’t worry about your neighbors who have the same problem.”

“What they really object to,” Smegal said of the agency’s critics, “is that a lot of these bigger picture cases bring change. Legal services lawyers win.”

THE FEDERAL LEGAL SERVICES CORP.

What is it? Successor to the Legal Services Program of the federal government’s Office of Economic Opportunity, the Legal Services Corp. was created by Congress in 1974 as a private nonprofit corporation in an attempt to insulate it from political pressures. With its 11-member board of directors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, it is to provide “financial support for legal assistance in noncriminal . . . matters to persons unable to afford legal assistance.” To do so, it distributes federal funds to more than 300 local and state grantees such as the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and California Rural Legal Assistance, and to 16 think-tanks, including the Migrant Legal Action Program and the National Center for Youth Law.

What is its annual budget? About $300 million, which is supplemented by $31 million from state and local governments and $28 million from a program used by most states to funnel interest from lawyers’ trust accounts to provide legal services to the poor. Some programs also receive substantial private contributions. These other sources of funds are used by some local legal aid programs to circumvent congressional restrictions on using federal funds to represent, for example, illegal aliens.

Who is eligible for legal assistance? People who make less than 125% of federal poverty income guidelines. That means in most states, including California, a single person must earn no more than $7,475 to be eligible for free legal assistance. A family of four must earn no more than $15,125.

How many people are served each year? About 1.4 million.

How much of the need of poor people for lawyers is being met? There is no precise answer. But recent surveys in Maryland and Massachusetts, which were criticized by some conservatives, indicate that only 15% to 20% of the need is being met.

How many legal services lawyers are there? About 4,500. Legal services lawyers in Los Angeles are among the highest paid, receiving between $30,000 and $48,000 a year.