greatrgood

For she’s a jolly good “fellow”

Naureen — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:00:32 +0000

In this era of “law firm fellows,” what does it meant to be, well, a non-law firm fellow? A friend with a coveted post-graduate project-based fellowship recently complained to me that she earns far less than law firm volunteers, a.k.a. “law firm fellows,” who typically see their firm salaries dwindle to half or a third of their former selves. Ouch! Just kidding.

The salary discrepancy makes for awkward “What’d you do last weekend?” conversations, but the costs to perennial public interest fellows is much greater: thanks to the influx of “law firm fellows,” the term “fellow” is being rapidly diluted. (Of course, lay-people have long mistaken it for a non-job title, asking me the question most damning to a recent law school graduate, “So, what are you studying?”)

Now, even within the public interest law field, the term “fellow” has been thrown into ambiguity. What does it mean to be a “legal fellow”? Career public interest lawyers, stuck in the pre-”3 to 5 years” experience range, often gain positions as fellows. But increasingly, the term also applies to volunteer attorneys who may only stick around until the economy rebounds.

Which one is really a public interest law fellow? Attribution: Jakob E (Flickr, 2008)

Little is more important to the success of a young attorney than her ability to build credibility, to hoard cachet. Rightly or wrongly (yes, sometimes wrongly), volunteer attorneys on “furlough” from their law firms are considered by some to merely be full-time, extra-competent interns.

For a public interest lawyer determined to stick around, being mistaken for a full-time intern after landing one of your first full-time jobs as a lawyer is more than disheartening. It’s disastrous for our ability to be taken seriously, to get our work done.

Don’t get mad, get a better title. There’s no reason why we should resign ourselves to the term “fellow.” Recognizing the diminished value and meaning of the term, fellowship supervisors should be open to changing our titles. Here are a few ideas:

Do those help? Let us know what you think are some palatable replacements.

Are you my mentor?

Natasha — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:34:29 +0000

Everyone says you need a mentor. Research apparently shows that students and employees are more likely to succeed with a mentor. Makes sense — you get advice from someone who’s been there, hopefully learn from someone’s experiences or tap into their network. Law students and lawyers can “get” a mentor through student organizations, the local bar, or public interest associations. You can build a mentoring relationship with your boss or some other veteran in your field. Wherever you turn, you are bound to find a proponent of mentoring, whether for advice on course selection, job searching, legal writing, etc. Mentoring is everyone’s great idea! But like other great ideas, mentoring often struggles in practice. In law school, I signed up to have a mentor through a local bar association. A mentor was never assigned to me. Once I graduated, I signed up to be a mentor with the bar association. I never got matched with a mentee. Even when a match is successfully made, whether it will work out is mainly a mildly educated guess.

Remember when it was this easy? Attribution: wall flour collective (Flickr, 2009)

During and after law school I’ve led a mentoring program for high school students and young professionals. Not exactly a public interest (or even PI-to-be) harvesting ground, but the concept and experience have demonstrated one crucial element in successful mentoring: establish your mentoring expectations and guidelines. Few of us know what to expect from a mentor/mentee relationship. How often do you meet? Will you meet in person, talk on the phone, just email? As a mentor, am I expected to plug my mentee into my network? As a mentee, can I ask my mentor for an introduction, ideas for job searching, or advice on coping as a public interest attorney? Oh, and as a public interest attorney in the making, is it okay that I was assigned to someone whose only PI experience is their 1L summer at the public defender? (Networks, that’s why! We’ll get to that in a different post.)

Below are typical challenges to growing mentorship, each of which can be tempered by establishing both mentor/mentee expectations at the outset.

1. Let it be
When I’ve raised the issue of expectations to those in charge of mentoring programs in the legal sector, the response has been pretty uniform: mentoring in law school and in bar associations is informal, things should happen organically, and there’s too much pressure if there are ‘rules.’ Oddly, this area of our profession may be the only one in which results are expected to “happen organically.” Without some sense of expectations that will ‘rule’ the process, actual mentoring may never happen. That helps no one.

2. (Don’t) give it time
Outside of the institutional or program-based mentoring context, however, the organic aspect of mentoring raises even greater challenges — particularly in the PI field. When it comes to personal relationships, too many public interest attorneys are pressed for time, especially now in this economy with fewer staff, more clients and smaller budgets. Law students, too, are typically overstretched among classes, internships, and other projects. It takes time to build a relationship, to meet with a mentor/mentee, to respond to e-mails and phone calls. Another time-intensive aspect: figuring out what you want from mentorship and how you expect to achieve it. If you aren’t engaged in that process at the outset, then expect to spend even more time in an ineffective, disappointing experience.

3. Take a hike
And let’s remember that not everybody wants to mentor, despite their outward interest in mentoring. I presume the ‘old guard’ cares about nurturing ‘young’ talent to eventually take over the sector so they can retire happily knowing they made their mark and left the organization/sector in good hands. Still, how many of us have worked with those older lawyers who talked about building for the future but obviously were not going share their time, knowledge or advice unless we pried it from their cold, dead hands? To be fair, not every mentee is fully invested in the process, either. Signing up for the program doesn’t necessarily mean the mentee-to-be is ready or willing to listen. An introductory conversation about expectations could save half-hearted mentors/mentees from their own frustrations and help each party go back to the drawing board more quickly and perhaps less despondently.

Can I make a confession here? I’m ready to say it: I have never had a mentor in the public interest legal sector.

The people I seek for advice on job searching, career freakouts, “why am I here” type questions don’t work in the public interest sector. They are at private firms or the government. While I respect them and value their opinions, I still feel like something is missing. Granted, I have had a bit of a circuitous path into PI lawyering, so maybe I haven’t met the right people.

But the question is fair: are there any PI mentors still out there? If they are, maybe we need to ask them to step up.

In contrast, my private sector mentor has been incredibly supportive since the first time we met. We used to meet every couple of months or so to discuss my career plans and dreams and provide feedback on random career situations. When I was job searching, he printed his entire Outlook Contacts and highlighted the ones he thought would be helpful. I don’t know if mentors do this on a regular basis, but that was possibly the nicest thing a mentor has ever done for me (besides the lunches at the Source, or course). The public/private issue was completely overshadowed.

The public interest sector appears to be failing to mentor young, PI attorneys and PI attorneys-to-be. It’s an arguable proposition, but jump with me to the more important question: why this failure? Are we just un-mentorable? Undoubtely, there are scores of experienced PI attorneys who would like to mentor us. What’s stopping them? Don’t have the time? Can’t identify the people who need mentoring? Are some disillusioned by the mentees who didn’t follow-up? Do others doubt they have much to offer to the less-experienced?

I’m ready to have that first conversation with you, Public Interest Law, about expectations. This sector must respond to the basic concern that mentoring isn’t a factor right now. Whether it is up to the bars or individuals themselves, there must be a re-emphasis on mentorship. That’s what leading the org, the sector, the cause, the movement is all about.

I suppose that’s why greatrgood was created. Instead of fumbling around in the dark and mentor-less, we can learn from each other. And then we’ll to give it back in our commitment to mentoring!

Loyalty is a One-Way St.

Naureen — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:57:51 +0000

A German lawyer recently wrote to ask for my help as he negotiates a position at another New York law school:

As I have never worked in the US, there are some practical things I would like to know so that I have some idea about what to ask for in the negotiations… regarding taxes, health insurance, etc.?

I was happy to oblige. But minutes into our conversation I realized I had absolutely no advice about job negotiations — I’ve never negotiated a position. Even this year, as for the first time I have been in a position of not-exactly-groveling, I find myself unable to ask my kindly employers for anything.

I did, however, take steps to put myself in a powerful bargaining position, in the event that I could work up the courage to not-exactly-grovel. (And maybe ask for a smartphone? Mebbe? Please?) (Oh, ok. I mean, it’s totally unnecessary. Just a sign of our decadent times, really.)

Combing listings on Idealist.org (from my computer, not my phone), I applied for other jobs — some great jobs, a few for which I was qualified. I even told my employer about an interview I’d scored at a rival program. But once said-interview was over, I despaired to a mentor: I wouldn’t feel morally right about leaving my current position, even if I don’t receive a raise or a promotion. I’d feel like I was leaving my kindly employers in the lurch, like I was ditching my dorky friend at the mall, like I was the take-take-take with no give.

Loyalty, mentor said, is a one-way street. Too true, but I’m afraid to take the detours.

It's not a long and wending road, that's for sure. Attribution: Slightlynorth (Flickr, 2007)

I’m superstitious that if I leave a job, my next employer will be the cranky unpredictable monster that everyone’s always warning of — the kind of nightmare employer some friends have, to their continually vocalized regret. And I’ll take the certainty of kindness over the possibility of monster+perks.

It turns out that I won’t be getting a raise or promotion after all. When I told my mother the news, she chided me: your boss called your bluff, now you better get going.

Probably. But there’s no guarantee that the next one-way Loyalty St. will lead to someplace better.

Your liberation is mine, all mine

Naureen — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:08:30 +0000

“If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time…But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

–Lilla Watson

Last Monday, legendary social justice lawyer Bill Quigley spoke at Columbia Law School. It’s rare to meet such a warm and approachable Elder of social justice lawyering, and we were delighted to have him.

Quigley began by quoting Watson, above, and one of his main points was that social justice lawyering can’t just be about what you “give” – it’s also about what you get.

“We can get joy and inspiration in this work – we have to be actively involved with the people,” Quigley said, encouraging us to shrink the professional distance between clients and ourselves. These relationships, he said, can be “the most invigorating, life-getting experiences.”

That’s very appealing. I want the life-getting stuff. There’s a misery to my detached immersion in human rights deprivations, my distanced entanglement with recalcitrant problems at home and abroad. And in my too-few experiences with people in affected communities, I have regretted my shyness, my clumsy smiles.

Yet, to be anything but awkward seemed presumptuous, sometimes.

What makes me good enough to be a friend, what entitles me to something beyond a professional relationship?

In Waston’s (questionable) parlance, why do I get to have my own liberation, just because I’m working with you on yours?

Over the tea you so warmly share with me, the biscuits you’ve just bought for my visit, I needn’t even bring up our clashing identities, our class and culture differences, how my privilege cuts down your life, how it must, and how I’m unlikely to ever really give it up, even as I try and act against all of this.

Tea time far away... or in an imperial version of liberation? Attribution: Carlos Zembrano

Maybe Quigley isn’t saying that I should get to have new friends, but that I should give in to the emotional impact these experiences may have on me. I shouldn’t feign an impossible detachment. Maybe I should claim my secondary trauma, and even transform it.

But as one of my colleagues noted, this approach unhappily recalls oblivious student essays: how studying abroad made Joey Smith, formerly of Idaho, realize that people in India are poor, but still happy. And beautiful, so beautiful in their misery, wearing pretty colors. Happier and wiser than us, with our depraved wealth. And maybe Joey will try yoga. There’s a new studio nearby his first Brooklyn apartment.

Your J.D. isn’t fixing the drain

Zafar — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 03:58:43 +0000

“Every day, I read about how hard it is for a lot of people to find a good job.”

Network TV rarely catches my eye, but there I was on a Sunday night enjoying a 60 Minutes fluff piece when the hoary, propped-over-his-desk Andy Rooney appeared to wrap up the show. I leaned in to hear this commentary, ready to soak up the wisdom and empathy of someone who’s seen the booms and the busts go by.

“I’m skeptical of course,” Rooney continued, “because I think if you know how to do anything, someone’s going to pay you to do it.”

You probably know how to do a thing or two. I suspect you know how to do a lot of the work that makes public interest law happen. But maybe you are also a recent grad or former clerk, and, in spite of all your resume building, you face unemployment or some variation on underemployment. Maybe you’re as able and willing as ever to research and apply case law from the European Court of Human Rights, or maybe conducting a KYR presentation in Spanish at a county prison is what you are pining to do for a living. I bet you believe, firmly and deep down, that, given some training and patience, you could jump into an intake, develop a case theory, draft a complaint, and bust down to the clerk’s office in a blaze of social justice passion. That’s all good, but if you can’t seem to get paid for doing that stuff, Andy Rooney suggests you stop thinking so highly of yourself.

Rooney’s idea that someone out there will pay you “assumes that a person who has been an executive, for example, would clean up debris by the side of the road for the county supervisor if he really needed a job.” According to Rooney, “he won’t do that of course because what he thinks he ought to be is the county supervisor.” In other words, if you are suffering in this job market, then you just need to come down to earth. Your J.D. is no excuse to be waiting out the recession, volunteering your skills and hoping for the right kind of opportunity. You want a paid job? Stop being elitist and whiny and pick up a plumber’s wrench already.

We need people who can actually do things. We have too many bosses and too few workers. More college graduates ought to become plumbers or electricians, then, go home at night and read Shakespeare.

Is that what’s keeping the unemployment figures so high — intellectual indulgence? In my own case, last summer, after five consecutive months of ~~searching for any quasi-legal job with a minimum wage~~ ~~applying to any paying job out there~~ reading Shakespeare, I took the best job I could get: kitchen prep/barrista/ice cream scooper at a vegetarian cafe. Learning my job from a doe-eyed musician just 10 years my junior, I eventually figured out how to fold a chili cheese wrap and to scoop the perfect, spherical scoop of ice cream. The 16-year old high schooler, the stoner JC student, the struggling public interest lawyer — we co-workers at the cafe could each succeed and fail in the same ways, on the same tasks. We experienced similar moments of satisfaction and frustration, and we each had some bigger plans for ourselves, whether it was going on tour, getting messed up, or practicing law.

But what I also discovered in that rank-and-file work experience was that I never felt proud of myself for the work I was doing. Was it elitism and self-glorification that got in the way?

Contrary to Andy Rooney’s impression, I held no illusion that I should have been the “executive” in the kitchen or at the counter. I accepted my limitations and nonetheless knew, deep down, that I had every ability in me to contribute to something bigger, the activism, the campaigns, the cases that might impact change and lives. Perhaps this was the illusion — to aspire toward high-minded achievements and get paid for it — but it was the illusion I had clung to over the past four years as a law student and recent grad.

Though hardly Shakespeare, the loftiness of public interest career goals often garner ridicule precisely because they seem about as ridiculous to the dollars-and-cents crowd as 16th century poetry does. The 60 Minutes commentary gives me pause, for the first time in years, to wonder whether the ridicule is fair. How pie-in-the-sky is it, in this economy, to be discussing pride and aspirations as legitimately self-imposed restraints on one’s job choices? Just like everyone else out there, a public interest lawyer needs to earn cash, pay off debts, and support dependents. Where exactly does serving your community or upending systemic injustice fit into the struggle just to get by?

Thrown at us from the minute we utter the word “public” to the unconverted, these are familiar questions for P.I. law students and lawyers. Self-examination, however, could go further. The 60 Minutes piece leads me to question the extent to which the careeristic orientation of public interest law predominates over one’s public-minded motivations. If ‘public interest’ describes the work you were doing before opting to pursue a J.D., is it satisfying enough for you to ‘go back’ and do ‘non-legal’ public interest work? Is it ‘natural’ to feel jilted when your law degree carries you no higher up the public interest ladder than your undergrad degree? Or are you just too caught up in the professionalization of social change?

Obviously, Andy Rooney doesn’t have these concerns in mind. His concern is that we bail on our high art and paid searches for meaning. It is nice to think you could jump out of the sinking hippie ship of public interest law, into something plebian and ‘useful,’ something that will pay you for the sake of function alone. Switch to corporate law? If you’re like me, you have no clue at this point how to operate the corporate sector. Get a job as an electrician or plumber? Those mid- to high-skill vocations would require extensive training, certification and practice before anyone would think to hire you. How about a steady low-skill job? Construction? Package delivery? You will be laughed out of your interview — as I was last summer when I showed up at UPS the smallest, least physically endowed person in the entire building. Of course, that kind of humiliation isn’t the worst. At least I had good reason to expect it and little trouble understanding it. I can’t say the same of my experiences in the P.I. job market.

Should you stay or should you go?

Naureen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:25:59 +0000

Last night, I got rejected. And as Morrissey says, “Rejection is one thing, but rejection from a fool is cruel.”

The fool was an employer who wrote me to say that with so many exceptionally qualified applicants, she couldn’t interview me. My reaction was to toss the letter in the recycling bin and head off to sleep. My day had been exciting, my work was engaging, and I wasn’t not looking forward to tomorrow (today).

I already have a job. So really, in this economy, I’m the fool, not the employer.

In this hyper-impossible job market, is there ever a good reason to leave a job? Or decline a job offer?

Attribution: Compound Eye (Flickr, 2008)

The short answer is: No. Not when there are hardly any jobs to be had. And as we documented last week, that job scarcity is compounded by the availability of better-dressed “furloughed” lawyers offering to work for free.

Another short answer is: Yes, of course. The whole point of choosing to do public interest law is to take a career path you believe in. So do it.

The uncomfortable reality is that to walk away from a job or job offer means to seek another – to run to another, and five cover letters in, it starts to feel like any new job will do. And while it may be undignified and depressing to stay in a job you don’t want, it’s spiritually debilitating to search frantically for a livelihood.

Talking over the fellowship and funding chase with a colleague this week, I was reminded of Irving Stone’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” which depicts Michelangelo struggling from patron to patron, seeking “grants” for the David and Sistine Chapel.

Unless one goes into government work or lands a solid staff attorney position, the early career of a public interest attorney necessitates the modern-day equivalent of kissing the pope’s ring and hoping for his benefaction.

But the alternative to this persistent job instability is to compromise, to play the job hunt conservatively, leading to mom-like mantras: stay in the job you have, take the first one offered. And finally, of course, forego the pursuit of public interest jobs altogether, in favor of the stability of a large private law firm. This begins to sound reasonable, mom or not, while “find what you love” seems naive.

But in any other facet of life, would your friends ever advise you to simply take what you can get? Imagine how unimaginable that advice would be if its subject was dudes instead of jobs:

Sukhman: “So, do you think you’re going to stick around your relationship for another year?”

Sonya: “I don’t know. I just feel like I’m not growing anymore. I want to try something different.”

Sukhman: “Yeah, but what if you can’t find anyone else? I keep hearing about people getting dumped from their relationships. Is this really the time to walk away?”

Sonya: “Well, I did get asked out on a date by someone new. But I really don’t think I’d be happy there”

Sukhman: “I can’t believe that in this climate, you’re even thinking about turning down an offer!”

Of course, contrary to what soap operas would have us believe, you can live without love. But you can’t live without money.

Sweet Nuthins: Income-Based Loan Repayment, the Jobs Bill, and the Revenge of Secured Transactions

Zafar — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:25:49 +0000

Count me as one of those discouraged, slouching, increasingly jaded (pre-Rahm) supporters of President Obama. I watched the State of the Union address last month hoping to see the president call out some fools and come correct on a number of issues. What I wasn’t expecting was his heartening mention of changes to federal income-based loan repayment.

We all have days like this. Attribute: tjtrewin (Flickr, 2010)

Since 2006, the prospect of “IBR,” as set forth under the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, has captured the attention of public interest law students and L-school advisors, not to mention their counterparts in other areas of higher education. It sounded so simple – rewarding former students for giving their skills and training back to the community – but the legislative advocacy behind CCRAA was tireless and probably has not received due credit. In July 2009, the law went into effect, implementing income-based/income-contingent/public service loan repayment. Just the words “income-based repayment” make me happier, but in conversations with peers and friends – particularly among public interest lawyers 3 or more years out of law school – I sense the word has not gotten out effectively to struggling P.I. folks.

This coming week Equal Justice Works will continue its leadership role in advocating and educating about IBR. Their webinar Getting Your Student Loans Forgiven: How government and nonprofit employees can earn public service loan forgiveness is ’sold out,’ (repeat offering on March 31), but TeamGG has a ticket and every intention of talking up the IBR option. Admittedly, we may be overestimating its impact and potential, but this State of the Union cameo should add optimism:

And let’s tell another one million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years – and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college.

The president wants to expand debt forgiveness for graduates, and while his party doesn’t always help him out, he must view this issue as a gimme. (Consider that immigration reform, with so much energy behind it, didn’t get one second of time in the speech.) These few words and round numbers were meant to resonate with “the masses” at home, but even for those versed in loan repayment assistance programs, the numbers carry significance. The figure of “10 percent” would mark a five-percent decrease from the CCRAA’s hard-won income-percentage. The “20 years” figure is down from 25. (The master rhetorician that he is, Obama mentioned the 10-year public service option even though it is no different from what was passed back in 2007.) For those of you skipping lunch and dinner the same week you are diligently paying off student loans, these improvements couldn’t come about any faster.

The Jobs Bill… and you
I grabbed that header from Inc.com, by the way, because there shouldn’t be any public interest lawyers out there, particularly directors, ignoring this legislation’s implications – they would go well beyond unemployment insurance and “green jobs.” Two of the core facets of the bill, as it stands in the Senate (link to pdf), are a $5,000 pay-roll tax exemption for new, non-replacement hires and a $1,000 tax credit for retaining recent hires.

If you are a public interest lawyer who has been waiting for an interview for a long time – or an executive director who keeps putting off hiring needs – maybe you should call up Harry Reid and your local Congress members and tell them how much you need this kind of incentivizing in the job market. The bill is still tough on the jobless: to be eligible for the pay-roll tax exemption, a public interest law firm or organization would have to be hiring someone who worked fewer than 40 hours in the 60-day period preceding her first day on the job. That is some crazy desperate unemployment.

LSC in the House
As PSLawNet Blog picked up, the Legal Services Corporation recently made an appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee to support their FY 2011 budget request. LSC is asking for over 516 million dollars, a boost of nearly $100M from FY 2010. This increase would almost entirely impact LSC’s ability to fund legal services organizations that assist in foreclosure and housing-related cases. LSC believes it needs $484.9M in Basic Field Grants. That amount is nearly $65M greater than the entire FY 2010 budget and almost $85M above the entire FY 2009 budget. The big ask is meant to prevent LSC programs from having to turn away “two people for every client served.”

Although the FY 2010 budget had raised funding for loan repayment assistance programs by $50K (up to a whopping… one million dollars), the FY 2011 budget does not seek a similar increase. Which is kind of deflating until you think back to how deep this the foreclosure crisis has become.

LSC is betting its budget on Congressional support for legal services that will clean up the mess of banks and lenders. It’s also betting on how well all you P.I. folks learned secured transactions and mortgages back in law school.

Yes, that was a joke.

Why have there been so many great South Asian-American women social justice lawyers?

Naureen — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:15:50 +0000

I keep running into, hearing about, and growing jealous of great South Asian-American women lawyers. Granted, these women are mostly just staff attorneys, not organization directors. But having garnered the most coveted fellowships, they are perched firmly on the “cutting edge,” pursuing some of the most innovative litigation and advocacy on immigrants’ rights, counterterrorism abuses, and workers’ rights known to Man (more on the Man part later).

How’d that happen?

To answer, let’s journey back in time to pre-post-feminist history, to 1988, when Linda Nochlin broke ground with the provocatively titled essay, “Why have there been no great women artists?”

Is the old guard drawn to the vanguard? Attribution: Gideon Tsang (Flickr, 2006)

Nochlin didn’t dispute the premise – that there weren’t any great women artists. But she said that the idea that an artist’s greatness emerges inevitably, ineluctably and in spite of any adverse social situations was really just a pleasing myth:

“The artist, in the nineteenth-century Saints’ Legend, struggles against the most determined parental and social opposition, suffering the slings and arrows of social opprobrium like any Christian martyr, and ultimately succeeds against all odds generally, alas, after his death-because from deep within himself radiates that mysterious, holy effulgence: Genius”

Wait a minute, stop the time machine! That sounds sort of like my life. A South Asian-American woman myself, I’ve struggled repeatedly against my parents (pre-med and pre-marriage) and social strata – after all, we’re women of color, disempowered and discriminated against (sometimes), and somehow…somehow we’ve made it after all, Mary Tyler Moore style, inevitable-ineluctable-genius-style, truly, madly, deeply.

Actually, Nochlin wrote, this notion of unstoppable emerging genius is a farce:

Those who have privileges inevitably hold on to them, and hold tight, no matter how marginal the advantage involved, until compelled to bow to superior power of one sort or another. Thus the question of women’s equality–in art as in any other realm–devolves not upon the relative benevolence or ill-will of individual men, nor the self-confidence or abjectness of individual women, but rather on the very nature of our institutional structures themselves and the view of reality which they impose on the human beings who are part of them.

It’s not that we, the emerging legion of South Asian women social justice lawyers of North America, are individually special. But then, what is it?

I don’t know what Nochlin would have made of us, but maybe she would start by pointing out that there isn’t a corollary legion of great South Asian-American male social justice lawyers.

And this conspicuous absence would seem to debunk the obvious answer to our question, that the current generation of great South Asian-American women lawyers is largely and simply the product of well-to-do parents who emphasized education + 9/11 as a politicizing moment. That can’t be the answer, because those circumstances are true for our brothers, too. And they aren’t succeeding like we’re succeeding.

So, back to the future, I’d like to talk about the Man – the (often) white men who still do most of the the hiring and firing in our field. Some of them are our mentors; we admire them and even adore them (weird?).

And as Nochlin might say, it’s their “view of reality” that enables us to be the uh, artistic geniuses of social justice work. Why do they admire and even adore us (definitely weird)?

Is there a quality of this work that they believe is befitting to South Asian-American women, but not men? And I’ll make the inflammatory suggestion here that perhaps our skin color makes us appear more credible, while our gender makes us less threatening.

But what about the male-female balance more generally – why are there relatively fewer male law graduates pursuing public interest work? Is part of the reason that they don’t believe they can compete for public interest jobs? And are they kind of right?

Is public interest law valued/de-valued as “women’s work”? Especially, brown women’s work?

I think I’ve painted a very bad portrait, after all.

Looking for a Job, Attorney Asks P.I. Orgs to Look beyond the Deferred

TeamGG — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:49:17 +0000

Following up on last week’s post on the scary state of public interest law, TeamGG is happy to offer the viewpoint of a legal aid attorney currently looking for a new job. The funding stream supporting her salary is “evaporating.” She wishes to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing employment prospects in her current search.

As an attorney at a legal aid organization, I receive an annual salary of less than 40,000 dollars. If I were a potential client seeking legal assistance, under my organization’s guidelines I would qualify for free legal representation. I get by on this – let’s call it “modest” – salary as I am a prodigious spendthrift. I bring coffee to work in a thermos. I pack sandwiches for lunch. I go five thousand miles between oil changes. My dry cleaning is sporadic, but it doesn’t affect my lawyering.

As a lawyer, I represent my clients to the best of my ability, regardless of their ability to pay, regardless of whether their case involves a trivial legal matter or complex litigation. On cases big and small, I clock in sixty or more hours a week.

All of this – the long hours, the low pay, the scrimping and saving – I was expecting. It was what I signed up for. I am a public interest lawyer, after all. It is more than balanced out by the rewarding nature of the work I do. And I get by.

Now I am looking for employment.

Some decision-makers still view their industry inside a bubble. Attribution: viking_79 (Flickr, 2009)

On PSLawNet, as I write this, there are eight listings for public interest attorney positions in my area of the country. There are twenty-two listings for deferred associate volunteer positions. Let me be clear: these are listings posted by non-profits, advertising attorney positions that are open only to deferred associate volunteers.

The deferred associate phenomenon is a product of the economic bubble and the recession that we are now mired in. During good times, law firms snapped up associates, competing for the best and brightest. A Columbia Law grad could – and only a very few of my peers didn’t – pursue firm jobs with $160,000 salaries straight out of law school.

Now that the bubble has burst, however, law firms cannot afford to pay those salaries, and many don’t have enough work to fill their associates’ days anyways. Some firms decided to kill two birds with one stone. To lower their payroll while also addressing a real need in the public interest law community, they offered reduced salaries to current and oncoming associates in exchange for not showing up to work, but rather volunteering for a year or more at a public interest legal organization.

Suddenly, the non-profits were overwhelmed by “deferred associate” volunteers. Now, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing. Not at all. I applaud the firms for their response. Legal services and non-profits can certainly use the help. I know. I work at one, and we are swamped with work.

What I do not applaud is the response from many non-profits. Rather than expanding their staffing, some are filling vacancies created by attrition with deferred associates rather than new permanent hires.

If you are reading this you probably already know that the mantra of this site is that public interest lawyer is not just a calling, but also an industry. And industry-wise, it’s not just about salaries. It’s about opportunities, experience, and mentorship.

Right now, the opportunities, experience, and mentorship are all going to deferred associates, who bright and capable as they are, could have decided to go into public interest law to begin with.

The fact that they desire to volunteer speaks well of them, maybe they even toyed with the idea of going into public interest. I’m not saying they’re among the legions of law students who disdainfully say “that for the first time, they are considering and seeking work with government and public-interest groups.” But when push came to shove, they chose a firm job over public interest.

Now they’re doing my job, except they get paid twice my salary to do it.

There are reports that many of these accidental legal aid lawyers will stay in public interest law. “These new lawyers have found that their new jobs are more fulfilling and more interesting, and – more importantly – they’ve seen that they can live on a smaller salary.” This is great. We need more talented, dedicated public interest lawyers. Let’s hope they can live on a quarter of their former salary just as well as the half of it they’re getting right now.

In the meantime, we also need to provide employment opportunities for the young lawyers who were going into public interest law all along, knowing full well the dirty secret of the public interest legal world – that the lawyers defending the most vulnerable members of our society often toil in poor working conditions while making low salaries with little job security (these factors led directly to the formation of the country’s first union for legal aid lawyers, but forty years later it remains an outlier).

Therefore, to management at public interest legal organizations: please, don’t turn your backs on the current generation of entering public interest lawyers. Welcome deferred associates to your organizations, but not at the expense of new hires.

Thank you.

Clerks: Rated D for Demoralizing

Naureen — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:21:07 +0000

In my nightmare, I got fired.

My boss confronted me: I had been getting into the office late and leaving early. It was clear that I had no passion for my job.

And if I did have passion, it was of the despairing variety. I was part of The System, but I sure as hell wasn’t fixing it from the inside.

I dreamt this a few nights ago, but I lived it in 2007 when I worked exclusively on asylum cases for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. I made lasting friends, learned a ton about asylum law, and hopefully became a better legal writer thanks to the patience of the supervisor who appeared, red-faced, in my dream.

But I hated my job. We churned out dozens of denials of petitions of review filed by asylum-seekers, mostly from China, whose claims had been denied at the administrative level. Though speedy, we were diligent. My colleagues took solace in the fact that we gave due process, that vaunted “opportunity to be heard” to asylum-seekers.

And the denials were necessary, some of my colleagues said: when people build bogus stories and cheat the system, they de-legitimize and dilute asylum in the eyes of the public. And asylum is unique: refugees are people who are at risk of being tortured or persecuted if we decide they can’t stay here. In this narrative, being vigilant gatekeepers was necessary to keep the gates open for bona fide refugees.

Even if I agreed with the premise, I squirmed at being turned into a dentist or garbage collector: I’ll grant that someone needs to do it, but I don’t want to be the on who does it.

Attribution: 2nysis (Flickr, 2010)

Clerking was just not what I’d dreamt of doing, when I decided to try being a public interest lawyer. And I don’t think I’m alone. That’s why it’s surprising that third-year law students are routinely advised to seek clerkships as their first jobs out. By the end of three years of law school, a lot of us yearn for work that reminds us of why we came to law school in the first place. Ordinarily, a clerkship isn’t that.

Unless you love lawyering for its own sake, the cold, non-ideological craftsmanship one learns at a clerkship isn’t inspirational.

Especially at the appellate level, a clerkship’s focus on puzzling around abstractions like jurisdictional requirements, civil procedure and standards of review facilitates a certain amount of detachment.

And then, for me, it didn’t. Exposing me to the devastating power of the “unbiased” law, my clerkship recommitted me to refugee and asylum advocacy. To riff off of the cliched Gandhi quote, my clerkship made me want to be the change I couldn’t bring.

greatrgood

For she’s a jolly good “fellow”

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