Lawyer Reaches Personal Verdict

As a partner in the biggest and most prestigious law firm in San Diego, Steve Kanaga enjoys all the perks that wealth, power and position can deliver.

He has a swell office, on the 19th floor of a downtown office tower, with a beautiful bay view. He works on the most intricate, intellectually challenging cases the law can offer. He is paid handsomely for his services, well into six figures. He has a lovely home in a nice neighborhood.

And he’s giving it all up, to go be a lawyer for poor people in Oregon. At a fraction, perhaps one-tenth, of his salary.

Kanaga announced a few weeks ago that he would be leaving Gray, Cary, Ames & Frey, the big firm where he has done so well, to go do good at a legal aid office in Eugene, to trade lots and lots of money for a far different reward: the feeling of making a difference for people unable to help themselves in a complicated and imposing system of justice.

An Eagle Scout and ex-Marine Corps captain, Kanaga has been actively involved the past few years in civic and legal assistance projects in San Diego. At 41, he decided the time had come to chase a dream--to dedicate himself full time to public service--while he, his wife and his kids were still young.

“I just feel that I have an obligation to be involved in some kind of civic and public service activities,” Kanaga said last week, preparing to leave the firm this week. He added about his new job: “I hope I can help out. That about describes it.”

In the venerable history of Gray, Cary, which for about 100 years has been a mainstay of the bar in San Diego, Kanaga is the first partner ever to leave to become a legal aid lawyer, said the firm’s current managing partner, Don G. Rushing.

“Steve has certainly made the grade here with honors,” said another of the firm’s partners, Terry D. Ross.

“Steve just came to the conclusion he’d be happier if he could devote more time to his family and do the kind of thing he wants to do by making this change. We all have the greatest respect for that decision,” Ross said.

He added, “But it is kind of ironic that after making it over that many hurdles and putting in the length of time it takes to make partner,” typically six to eight years, “you’d have that kind of career change.”

This is not, Kanaga said, the sort of mid-life crisis that might be better solved by a little red sports car. Instead, he said, it reflects a genuine and deeply held belief that an attorney is bound by a code of ethics and honor that demands service to people who desperately need the benefit of a lawyer’s special skills.

“I just really feel in my heart that I have this obligation,” he said. “I don’t know how else to say it.”

In a profession that prides itself on the principle of pitching in on behalf of people in need, the sad and inescapable truth is that too few lawyers feel that obligation.

“After a decade in which poverty remained higher than it has been since the 1960s, the lack of legal services has created a ‘justice gap’ that places many millions of poor and lower-income Americans outside the system--vulnerable, defenseless and preyed upon,” the president-elect of the American Bar Assn., Baltimore attorney J. Michael McWilliams, said in a speech three weeks ago in San Diego.

In a telephone interview last week, McWilliams added: “The shameful reality is that, to many Americans, our legal system is largely inaccessible, indecipherable and unaffordable.”

The law demands that anyone charged with a serious crime must have a lawyer provided for free--meaning, at taxpayer expense.

But there is no such guarantee for someone with a dispute that’s not a crime, such as a tenant fighting eviction, an AIDS patient facing job discrimination, or a parent threatened with the cut-off of a child’s medical benefits.

For those kinds of disputes, the situation is grim. Lawyers are supposed to volunteer their time--efforts lumped under the label pro bono , shorthand from the Latin phrase meaning “for the public good”--but few do. In San Diego, about 1 in 5 lawyers do pro bono work, according to local bar groups. Nationally, it’s 1 in 4, according to the ABA.

The only other recourse for someone unable to pay a lawyer is the taxpayer-funded legal aid program. There, at offices nationwide, usually in sizable towns, legal advice is dispensed free.

But in California, those legal services programs--typically called legal aid societies--are able to serve only 15.2% of the poor people who need help, according to a 1990 report by the San Francisco-based Public Interest Clearinghouse.

The Legal Aid Society of San Diego gets 300 calls a day from people seeking help, said Greg Knoll, executive director and chief counsel. There’s time each day for only 65 appointments, Knoll said.

The reason so few poor people can get help is simple: there is less money available to serve more people.

Federal funding for legal aid has been frozen for about a decade, amounting to a 40% decline when adjusted for inflation, McWilliams said.

Meanwhile, the number of people in California living below the poverty line increased by 41% from 1980 to 1990, from 3.6 million to 5.2 million, according to the 1990 report. Yet there were 20% fewer legal services attorneys in 1990 than in 1980 (517 instead of 630) because salaries are “appallingly low,” the report said.

In California, beginning legal aid lawyers make as little $17,000 annually, the report said. In San Diego, a senior Legal Aid lawyer makes between $35,000 and $60,000, Knoll said.

By comparison, big law firms around the state offer up to $75,000 a year to lawyers just out of school. The Gray, Cary firm pays beginning lawyers $67,000.

The average partner at Gray, Cary--which has 80 partners among 175 lawyers--makes about $350,000 annually, according to a list compiled by California Law Business, a Los Angeles-based legal publication. Rushing, the firm’s managing partner, declined to confirm or deny that figure and Kanaga declined to discuss his own wage.

Kanaga did not, however, wake up one day and decide it was morally evil to make a lot of money. Nor did he tire of the firm.

In fact, he said, Gray, Cary offers extraordinary opportunity to do pro bono work. Last year, 73 lawyers and 21 paralegals donated nearly 1,800 hours of time, about $250,000 worth, earning it “firm of the year” honors from the San Diego Volunteer Lawyer Program.

It was precisely because Gray, Cary encouraged him to get involved that he joined it in the first place, he said. After a stint in the 1970s as an officer in the Marine Corps, where he was based at Camp Pendleton, he attended Yale University law school and came back to San Diego in 1981, joining Gray, Cary, long the city’s biggest firm.

In 1988, he became a partner. Over the years, he has handled complex lawsuits, cases involving trade secrets, million-dollar deals and construction defects.

But over time, too, he and his wife, Perry Patterson Kanaga, 42, became actively involved in civic and charitable activities.

Before the first of their two sons was born--Ross is now 9 and David is 4--Perry Kanaga worked for a Catholic charity that sought to find homes and jobs for refugees from Ethiopia and Afghanistan. He has worked for years with the Boy Scouts.

Four years ago, with the full support of his partners at Gray, Cary, Kanaga joined the board of directors at the Legal Aid Society of San Diego. Firsthand, he saw the parade of homeless, elderly and abused people pleading for help, he said.

Two years ago, Kanaga broke his elbow. Suddenly finding himself in the hospital with an abundance of time, he took stock of his life and career and contemplated the possibility of doing legal aid work full-time.

There was no single incident, no single case that sparked his thinking. But he realized that he had fallen in love with the work he saw legal aid lawyers doing, that it struck him as genuine and meaningful.

“Those kinds of (legal aid) cases whetted his appetite for doing that kind of work,” said Jay Jeffcoat, a partner at Gray, Cary. “That was the hors d’oeuvres. Steve wanted the full meal.”

Because he was still on the San Diego board, Kanaga did not even inquire about a job at the local office. “He and we have a lot of integrity and it wouldn’t look right for a board member to step right off the board and into a staff attorney’s job here,” Knoll said.

Casting about the country, Kanaga settled on Eugene, where some cousins live and where the legal aid office--formally called Lane County Legal Aid Service Inc.--was receptive.

The Eugene office, serving a county of 250,000 people, gets 7,000 requests a year for aid. But the staff of seven attorneys can handle only 2,900, said Executive Director Laurence Hamblen.

Kanaga is in line to be the eighth attorney--if, that is, he passes the Oregon bar exam. As a reward, he can expect a salary of about $30,000 annually, Hamblen said. “Of course, we would welcome somebody with Steve’s experience,” Hamblen said. “That would be wonderful for us.”

The monthly take-home in Eugene is bound to be a bit different than in San Diego, Kanaga said. “There is a big difference,” he said. “That was something I took into consideration and was aware of. That’s something I’ve discussed with my wife. That will be a difference.”

But so will making a difference.

“I think Steve will really enjoy making a difference in a place like Eugene,” said Knoll, head of the San Diego legal aid office.

“Any legal aid program that would have gotten him is getting a special person with unique perspective and proven dedication to what we’re all about,” Knoll said. “The little part of the world he will touch will be better for him having made this decision. We will miss him.”