Amid the surfeit of bad news that has surfaced of late is the less than obvious connection between the economic downturn generally and the budget crisis now being faced by legal service providers. Due to a quirk in the manner in which many organizations receive funding, hard times for Wall Street now means it's even harder than usual to fund lawyers who serve the poor.
The decline in interest rates undercuts the interest earned on a key kind of account maintained by lawyers, called the Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts (IOLTA), a major source of funding for legal aid organizations. Cash-strapped legal aid groups may be fielding more demands than ever, yet find themselves less able to provide services than they were even just last year.
And it is no secret that, even in flush times, the best efforts of these groups barely scratch the surface of the legal needs of poor communities and families. While the victims of Bernie Madoff will almost certainly have their day in court, it's clear that for many victims of mortgage fraud and predatory lending schemes, workplace harassment, landlord-tenant disputes, credit problems, or those grappling with mental illness, securing a lawyer with the time and inclination to properly address their needs remains a pipedream.
A new book by Corey S. Shdaimah, "Negotiating Justice: Progressive Lawyering, Low-Income Clients, and the Quest for Social Change," makes a measured, observation-based analysis of the operation of a single legal service clinic, named with the pseudonym “Northeast Legal Services” or NELS, that serves poor clients in a medium-sized American city.
Through interviews, the author applies social science methods in evaluating day-to-day interactions of lawyers and clients. The book is particularly meticulous in examining whether the work in the clinic maps onto the contours of what has been a vigorous conversation in academic and legal services circles concerning the goals and nature of community-based legal practice.
Starting several decades ago, some legal scholars and practitioners on the left began to question whether the potential for empowering clients in legal work was being realized in practice. Law professors and pioneering theorists Gerald Lopez of UCLA, Lucie White at Harvard, and Amherst College's Austin Sarat, among others, asked whether legal services lawyers were able to, or did, assist clients in achieving social justice through litigation and advocacy, or whether power dynamics within the lawyer-client relationship were actually reinforcing poor clients’ difficulty in effecting change.
After losing many of the struggles to enshrine social entitlements that were part of the so-called “War on Poverty,” immediate goals for legal practitioners did – and had to – rise to the forefront as part of a far more piecemeal approach to legal practice.
Particularly against the current legal backdrop of largely conservative courts, as well as federal funding restrictions that prohibit many legal aid lawyers from bringing class actions and other important types of cases, it became more crucial for legal services and community-based lawyers to ensure that their work did not re-victimize poor clients as those clients sought justice.
