THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Justice Served : As Head of the Country’s Largest Pro Bono Law Firm, Steve Nissen Recruits the Best Legal Talent in Los Angeles to Work for the Poor

Steve Nissen looks every inch the high-priced attorney he used to be. As he steers his four-wheel drive toward Century City, cell phone to his ear, he insists that, really, he is just like any other practitioner of L.A. law.

But he’s not. Nissen heads Public Counsel, the largest pro bono law firm in the country.

This means he works 18-hour days, wears at least 15 hats and gets paid about one-hundredth of what he might have earned as a partner at Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Tunney (now Manatt, Phelps, Phillips & Kantor). That’s the high-profile firm he left 11 years ago, at age 33, to work at the tiny agency that ministers to the poor.

Public Counsel is not tiny anymore. And Nissen is becoming a legend in the legal world--a kind of Ralph Nader of the Bar.

Why would a man entering his acquisitive years in the grabby 1980s abandon the barrister’s high life for a job catering to the financially impaired?

“I was committed to the concept of equal justice for rich and poor. It’s chiseled in stone above the entrance to the Supreme Court; it’s a fundamental value in this country. I also had a vision of what Public Counsel could become for poor people, who can’t find justice because they can’t afford lawyers to represent them.”

Nissen parks the car and ascends to the glossy offices of a well-known corporate law firm for a lunch served in what looks like a mini version of the war room at the Pentagon. Arrayed around the large conference table is an assortment of highly groomed, nattily dressed, noticeably antsy associates who have come to hear Nissen, but who, judging by the chatter, clearly have big-buck cases whirling around in their heads.

Nissen, indistinguishable from the pack in a gray suit and conservative tie, waits until coffee arrives to stand and explain what Public Counsel does and why the assembled attorneys might like to participate as occasional volunteers.

Thousands of kids are being scammed by vocational schools that provide no useful training, he tells the group. In fact, one fed-up state official created a fictional institution whose founder bore the name Arnold Ziffel, the pig on “Green Acres,” and whose motto translated from Latin to “We don’t teach students. We cheat them.” The phony school applied for--and was granted--access to federal funds, Nissen says. “Our goal is to protect students and shut down phony schools.”

He goes on to describe the hard-working family who signed for $180 worth of carpet in a home-equity swindle that ballooned to a $20,000 debt. In that case, Nissen says, “Public Counsel’s attorney got a $2.1-million verdict and managed to put a number of bad guys out of commission.”

The group is riveted as Nissen tells of two handsome little brothers who lived in a shopping cart and panhandled for their drug-addicted mother. Their grandma found them, brought them to her home, enrolled them in school and promised to keep them safe. Then the mother sobered up long enough to try to take them back. She might have succeeded, Nissen says, if a pro bono lawyer hadn’t obtained legal custody for the grandmother, with whom the boys live happily today.

By volunteering for Public Counsel, Nissen tells the attorneys, “you will have a tremendous impact on individual lives.”

At meal’s end, it seems clear that some will lend their expertise to help the poor. And that, Nissen says, is what his clients are entitled to.

“Being poor shouldn’t brand you as unworthy of justice,” he says later. “Our clients are hard-working people; some hold down three jobs and sleep only three hours a night to give their children a better life. If they are being ripped off, they deserve the same justice under law as a richer person.”

Last year, about 2,500 attorneys from private firms donated more than 150,000 hours--about $24.3 million worth--of legal services to about 10,000 people in Los Angeles County through Public Counsel. Clients do not walk in off the street. They must be referred by the Legal Aid Society or other qualified agency. Public Counsel then studies the civil cases (it does not handle criminal matters) and prepares outlines for volunteer attorneys to review. Once a volunteer attorney selects a case, it becomes his or her responsibility .

When Nissen arrived at the dank, cramped Public Counsel offices at 6th Street and Mariposa Avenue more than a decade ago, there were two staff attorneys doing mostly consumer fraud cases, and a budget of $219,000.

Under his watch, the firm has grown to 12 staff attorneys, two social workers and a supporting cast, for a total of 35 full-timers and an annual budget of $2.4 million. Besides attorneys, the volunteer ranks include 1,000 law students and a crew of summer interns.

And three months ago, Public Counsel moved into a renovated, 11,500-square-foot building at 6th and Ardmore Avenue, with adequate space to manage the many projects Nissen has added, including children’s rights, disaster relief, new Americans’ rights, homeless youth and community economic development. The new headquarters, Nissen says, “provide dignity for our clients, and a positive experience rather than an intimidating one.”

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The 6-foot, self-described “former jock” who graduated from Fairfax High School, Stanford University and Boalt Hall law school at UC Berkeley, says he intended to return to Manatt, Phelps after only three years at Public Counsel. He “really enjoyed” his stint at Manatt, he says, and can’t explain why he is magnetized by poverty law, except that “it’s so. . . .” Short silence. “Fulfilling.”

Frederick Nicholas, the attorney, developer and philanthropist who founded Public Counsel 25 years ago, says the three most important events in the organization’s history are its birth, its adoption in the ‘70s as the official pro bono arm of the Beverly Hills and Los Angeles County Bar Assns., and the arrival of Steve Nissen.

“His leadership, fund-raising skills and devotion to the cause have made Public Counsel what it is today,” Nicholas says.

Mickey Kantor, the U.S. trade representative and partner at Manatt, Phelps says about Nissen: “He is a brilliant lawyer [who] could earn many multiples of what he now earns, but who spends his life organizing the private bar to bring justice to people who otherwise couldn’t afford it.”

Such work is essential if our society is to survive, Kantor says.

“No one would deny people the right to vote because of economic status. [And we cannot] deny them access to the justice system simply because they happen to be poor. Nissen . . . is totally devoted to that cause.”

That devotion is indeed total.

“He’s always out there pitching,” says Nissen’s wife, attorney and UCLA instructor Lynn Alvarez. “People know this about him. It’s part of who he is, and it’s something that we joke about all the time. . . . He lives and breathes the stuff. If we’re out somewhere, I just say to myself, ‘Steve’s working the room. I’ll go talk to someone else.’ ”

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Fund-raising prowess is crucial because Public Counsel gets 96% of its budget from individual and corporate donations generated through functions held in big hotels and private living rooms, through speaking engagements at groups big and small--all with Nissen presiding.

In fact, he has no time to practice law at Public Counsel. So Nissen, the great recruiter of volunteers, himself volunteers as a prosecutor for the Los Angeles city attorney’s office. “It gets me back into the courtroom,” he says.

No matter how much time he devotes to fund-raising, he says, it seems as if a financial crisis is always looming. One of the many successful outreach programs Nissen has instituted will die this month unless he comes up with money to pay Rebecca Gudeman, a Harvard and UCLA law school graduate who holds legal clinics at city high schools.

“Most people think children don’t have legal issues,” Gudeman says. “But the law can help them achieve positive things in life and help them get out of bad situations.”

In one memorable case, a Hollywood High School student dropped in for advice on how to get away from his mother. “He was 16 and said his mom drank and neglected the kids. But he didn’t give much detail. The next week he came back with ‘The Great Gatsby,’ which he was reading in class, and spent an hour telling me how Gatsby’s life paralleled his life in the gang. He amazed me with his insights. The third week he came in and just hung out. And on his fourth visit, he said he wanted to tell me the truth: ‘My mom does drugs. She smokes crack. She gets crazy. She chases me with a butcher knife. I’ve woken up with a machete at my throat.’ ”

His older brother’s threat to kill him if their mother got in trouble had kept him quiet. Gudeman has worked with the boy for a year. She tried placing him with a relative, but the brother stopped that plan. He is now set to live with “a member of the community” who will become his legal guardian.

“He wants to go to college, “ Gudeman says with pride.

Nissen has faith that he’ll raise the money to keep her on staff. But it won’t be easy in this economy, so he keeps trundling, day and night, to the musicales and fireside chats, and lunches and dinners where he pours forth on the legal troubles of the poor.

It is a way of life that Nissen understands. He grew up in a house on Fuller Avenue, “in the shadow of El Coyote restaurant” in Los Angeles. His father, a labor lawyer, took him around to all the union halls.

“I’d meet his clients, and they were working-class people. He represented the retail clerks, the sheet-metal workers, the fishermen’s union, some screen-extras guilds. As a little kid, I thought that’s what all lawyers did. My world view was that lawyers helped people who worked hard. I never realized they did other things until I started watching ‘Perry Mason.’ ”

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These days, Nissen starts his rounds at 5:30 a.m., with an hour at the gym before work. His workdays end at about 9:30 p.m., when he arrives home in Beachwood Canyon, usually greeted by his wife and their two dogs.

Alvarez, who will give birth to their first child any time, also left a prestigious law firm--Strook, Strook & Lavan--to pursue public interest law, specializing in immigration and ethics. She met Nissen when he asked her to join a panel on immigration at Public Counsel. They were friends for six months before they started dating, then lived together for a year before they married in 1989.

They are definitely a matched pair. The thrust of the legal ethics course she teaches at UCLA, she says, is that lawyers have a responsibility “not to turn their backs on the oppressed and the needy.”

Alvarez says there are fewer jobs in pro bono law than excellent lawyers who would like to fill them.

“Despite the cynicism of the general population toward lawyers,” she says, “a lot of us are in this profession to give something to the community. I see it even in the students I have. Sure, they want to pay the bills and have a career. But they are also idealistic and want to do good things. You should not lose sight of just how many really good people are lawyers out there.”

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Steve Nissen

Age: 44.

Background: Born in Los Angeles, now lives in Beachwood Canyon.

Family: He and his wife, fellow attorney Lynn Alvarez, are expecting their first child any minute.

Interests: Golf and tennis.

On spreading around Los Angeles’ legal talent: “There are tax, real estate and corporate attorneys in big private firms who work on multimillion-dollar deals on a daily basis. They have the expertise so badly needed by community-based, nonprofit organizations and by small business in the inner city who are unable to afford such talent. We put the two together.”

On treating clients as if they were rich: “Why not elevate this work to the same standard as any high-price corporate legal work? I’ve done both in my career, and this is just as important as what’s done in places where people expect you to wear a suit every day.”

On a blind and ailing client facing eviction as a result of a home equity scam: “Public Counsel didn’t let it happen.”