Attorney Makes a Case for Volunteerism

Every third Friday of the month, lawyer Luis Garcia has a standing appointment with the poor.

After work, the attorney makes his way to a crowded neighborhood off bustling Warner Avenue in Huntington Beach. It’s a low-income immigrant enclave called Oak View, once known for its aggressive gangs and scary crime rate. Today the place may be more peaceful, but poverty still grinds away at people packed into apartments with sad stucco exteriors and little landscaping.

Their legal problems are as unglamorous as their daily lives. Bad credit. Domestic disputes. Traffic accidents. Evictions. Immigration snafus.

But they cannot afford legal fees, even for a simple consultation. So they save up their problems and their paperwork and wait for that one night per month to see el licenciado, as lawyers are called in Spanish.

Garcia--who got his law degree when he was in his 40s--came from a community like this one. Now, at 54, he’s giving back by volunteering at the Oak View Family Center, which runs a legal clinic and an array of other programs from a cramped temporary building behind the neighborhood’s elementary school.

The evening clinic is scheduled for two hours. Occasionally it runs late if too many clients show up. Garcia, a grandfather who lives miles away in Monterey Park, stays until he sees them all. Otherwise, some may never get the help they need.

“I’m the only attorney they have,” Garcia said. “If I don’t show up, the clinic doesn’t go.”

I first learned of the program from Rose S. Moreno, an assistant in the paralegal department at Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley. The college co-sponsors the Oak View legal clinic, staffing it with students who learn to interview clients and screen their cases.

More Lawyers Sought for Clinic

Rose, who is Japanese American, appealed for more bilingual attorneys to lend a hand at the clinic. Her husband, Samuel Prieto Moreno, a retired schoolteacher, often helps out as a translator.

The Huntington Beach couple believe immigrants need legitimate advice in their own language. They need to be steered away, said Rose, from “those who make promises, take their money and deliver little or nothing.”

The clinic has tried to recruit other attorneys. Only Garcia has stepped forward so far.

“The world is not full of people who want to go out and do pro bono [free] work on Friday night,” said Margaret Lovig, head of Coastline’s paralegal department. “Luis Garcia is great, and he’s wonderful, but I’m sure at some point we’re even going to exhaust him.”

The college has plenty of volunteer attorneys for its other two clinics, one serving a Costa Mesa senior center and another for the campus community. A panel of 15 lawyers rotates duties at those locations.

But if Garcia gets sick or has a last-minute emergency, there’s nobody to back him up at Oak View. So far, he’s been absent only once in two years, said Lovig. Even then, the clients got advice from Garcia, who later spoke to them by telephone.

The attorney said he agreed to donate his services because he understands what it’s like to learn the ropes in a new country with unfamiliar rules in a foreign language.

America can be mystifying for newcomers. They don’t know how the system works, or why the law holds people liable in different situations. Sometimes, they receive a summons or subpoena and simply don’t know what to do about it.

“You can’t communicate, so you don’t know who you can trust,” Garcia explained. “Everything seems strange.”

Southern California was once a strange new place to Garcia, who was brought here as a boy from El Paso, Texas, his birthplace. His family settled in East Los Angeles in the early 1950s, and his father later opened two barrio bakery shops.

After a three-year stint in the Army Signal Corps, Garcia came home to work the ovens in the family business. Eventually, he got a job with Pacific Bell and became a systems analyst for high-speed data switchers.

Garcia stayed with the phone company for 19 years. Attending school at night, he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Cal State Los Angeles. Four years later, in 1988, he got his law degree from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Pacific Bell picked up the tab for tuition.

Garcia, who has been a member of the California State Bar since 1990, now works for the law office of Liem H. Do & Associates in Westminster. He and his multicultural colleagues--two Vietnamese and one Jewish--serve primarily Latino and Asian clients from Santa Ana and Westminster.

Often, immigrants need information more than they need legal representation, Garcia said. They need to know their true liability when they get involved in traffic accidents. And their small-claims options when they get stiffed for wages.

“They put up with things because they don’t know what their rights are,” he said.

Garcia doesn’t pretend to be a total altruist. He acknowledges that his volunteer work can help his practice through referrals and getting his name known without advertising.

“That’s one of the reasons lawyers do this sort of thing,” said Garcia, adding that so far he hasn’t picked up any private cases from Oak View.

In thinking of his motives for helping, Garcia recalled the advice of an old college professor. People find happiness, the professor used to say, when their job satisfies their pocketbook, their ego and their need to help others.

Any volunteers?

For more information on the legal clinic, call the Oak View Family Center at (714) 375-3728.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.