Notes from the first call

On the call: Laura Huizar Yale 3L, Jamelia Morgan Yale 2L, Amanda Gutierrez Yale 3L, Romy Ganschow Yale 3L, Jared Miller Columbia 1L, Ally Vaz Occidental College, Edgar Aguilasoch UCI, Jay Diaz Boston College 3L, Diane Eikenberry GW 3L, Ray Burke Boston College 1L, Ben Elga Harvard 1L, Daniel Saver Harvard 3L

Next Call: Monday April 9, 2012 8 pm Eastern Time, 3 pm Pacific Time

1) Recap of themes that emerged from conversations at RebLaw (Laura Huizar)

a. This is a broad, cross-school problem created by lots of different actors including schools, bar associations, private foundations, government etc.

b. If we want to organize around this issue, we should think about where we as law students have particular power and leverage.

c. Student debt is a really important component of this problem.

d. Schools have varying levels of support for public interest work and should consider directing our efforts at addressing school’s commitment to public interest

2) Feedback on possible projects posted to the blog that grow out of these themes.

a. Law School tuition index:

i. Diana (GW) – this is a good idea; GW is very concerned about funding for clinics which serve the public interest, but its clear that money that could be funding the clinics is going toward professor salaries and other things. Are there any publications or organizations that try to maintain information on tuition dollars spent on public interest activities already? EJW has a guide to law schools and that may have some of this information. Students at Stanford put out some publication comparing loan forgiveness programs at some point. We could partner with or ask EJW to do this project since they have staff and time presumably.

ii. Daniel (Harvard) – this idea makes sense given where students have power and who we can pressure; schools are guarded about this information (how much money they have and how they spend it) so EJW or someone probably hasn’t gathered this yet, and we might need to sort of fight for this information but even if that’s what comes out of this it could be a productive fight. We’d just be asking for information about what they’re spending our tuition dollars on, a matter of transparency. If the schools aren’t willing to comply with telling us how our own money is being spent, that could be very powerful in and of itself.

b. Incubators

i. Edgar (UCI) – has been doing a lot of lobbying to get incubators set up throughout California and is now working with Fred Rooney and others to get a national incubator called JUST LEAP (?) set up. This would be an online-based network of private public interest lawyers, to facilitate pool their resources and broaden their reach and impact. Edgar will send information to the group about how to get involved in this effort and will post to the blog.

c. Law firm pressure from school administrators

i. Jared (Columbia) – this is a good idea to use law schools as a point of pressure, but schools are not likely to put their relationships with firms at risk in order to pressure the firms. The truth is that so many students go to firms and that’s where the emphasis at schools will be, and it will be hard to get them to risk that in the name of public interest.

ii. Ray (BC) – it would be hard for schools like BC that are not in the top 10 to do go out on a limb against the firms in this job market. This is not a bad idea, but we might have a harder time getting real results as compared to things like the Incubator model.

iii. Laura (Yale) – is there another point of leverage using student groups, as opposed to administrators, to pressure firms to do more?

iv. Romy (Yale) – a student group at Yale does voluntary surveys of corporate firms and ranks them for their “family friendly” policies. This program has been around for about 10 years now and firms actually really care about this survey and the results, and some people think firms have tried to have more “family friendly” policies in order to make the list and get more good publicity. Perhaps we could do something similar with this issue.

v. Amanda (Yale) – this could be sort of related to the law school tuition index idea, in terms of getting some transparency about which firms are committed to public interest, but it might

vi. We could reach out to publications that rank law firms and maybe they would be interested in partnering with us to bring more light to this issue and including it in their rankings.

vii. Daniel (Harvard) – if we pitch to these publications that there is a growing movement of public interest law students and this national group with students from X schools wants to partner with you (publication) to work on this issue, they could be really interested.

d. Case competition

i. Jamelia (Yale) – the goal of this problem would to solve legal problems, by having organizations submit their pressing legal questions to this group. It would also serve to get more students involved in public interest work. This could effectively be a bit of an alternative to the fellowship model, by making the project-generation stage more client driven.

ii. It’s not clear if this potential project would be as much of a structural change as a partial way to get at some of the problems we’ve identified.

3) For next call:

a. Participants should think through each of these proposals and any others the would like to develop; think about what strategies we might be able to use in carrying out each proposal, what a timeline for each proposal would look like and which you would favor so that we can make a decision on the next call about which one(s) to pursue.

b. Daniel (Harvard) – having a broad coalition of law schools from all over will be the best way to have a larger and longer impact. To grow the coalition and, we’ll probably need for our first project to be smaller and less ambitious so that is doable; we can have some sort of success or benchmark to look forward to, and hopefully build more momentum and participation once we have something to show for what we’ve done.

From Ally

I'm not too sure yet of what we can offer as undergrads in terms of the legal advocacy that was discussed, however, I was thinking we could put together a website with a comprehensive overview of scholarships, fellowships, grants, career opportunities post law school etc to give people considering a career in public interest law an idea of what is available to them. Thoughts?

Deans' Coalition to Advocate for Voluntary Tax

Students could organize to pressure all of their law school deans to come together to lobby private law firms to pool funds together for public interest purposes. Law school deans can collectively exercise some power over the private law firm market, since they can control which firms they direct their students to and how accessible they make their top graduates to particular firms. They can create pressure on the private bar to contribute a given percentage of their profits to a pool of money that is allocated for public interest purposes. The fund could function similarly to an IOLTA account, where money from the account is given out to public interest organizations directly. Alternatively, it could supplement existing pools of private money that fund post-graduate fellowships and summer fellowships, such as the Equal Justice Works funds. Law schools could rank firms according to their public interest contributions, or they could decide to make life more difficult for firms that contribute below a given amount of their profits to this public interest fund.

Law School Tuition Index:

The public interest spending vs. tuition index would compare individual law schools based on the total amount and the percentage of tuition dollars they put back into public interest-promoting activities, such as loan forgiveness, post-graduate fellowships, summer public interest stipends and other programs that directly benefit students' abilities to work in the public interest. This could be a clear and graphic way of publicizing and even shaming law schools that charge high tuition rates but do not use those tuition dollars to truly benefit their students or the public interest. Using dollars spent as the metric would be an easy (if rough) way of quanitfying a school's commitment to public interest. Given recent media attention around the high cost of legal education, it would also potentially resonate with the public more than a perhaps more subjective index about the quality or how students feel about other public interest programming at their law schools.

Promoting Incubators for Solo and Small Practices:

Fred Rooney's Incubator for Justice program trains recent CUNY Law graduates for 18 months in the basics of running a solo or small practice law firm, assists them in tackling larger justice initiatives, and provides substantive training in different areas of the law, including immigration, labor and employment and other issues. Fred tours the country promoting his Incubator model to other law schools and hopes that more schools will start taking their obligations to provide continuing legal training to their alumni and to provide justice to their communities more seriously. The Incubator model costs almost nothing to the law schools and can really help new lawyers to do financially and emotionally sustaining work, yet Fred and others have noted that schools are somewhat reluctant to adopt Incubator programs. In order for this model to be adopted at more schools and for solo and practice low-bono work to be seen as a respectable and viable option for students leaving law school, it might be help for this group to do more to raise the profile of the Incubator and lobby more schools to adopt similar programs.

Working with Pro-Bono Counsel at Private Law Firms

One possible solution to the problem of under-funding for public interest work is to partner with pro bono counsel at private law firms. Most law firms have designated a point person to select and coordinate the firm's pro bono projects. Pro bono counsel may serve as a great initial contact for any advocacy that focuses on increasing funding for public interest work because of their access to firm funding and their involvement in agenda-setting for the firm's pro bono projects. For example, one possible project could involve reaching out to various pro bono counsel across the country to see if they would be interested in forming a consortium to fund public interest projects and/or public interest fellowships. The incentive for these firms to participate centers on RebLaw's role in recruiting students to submit projects or finding public interest organizations in need of legal assistance. In short, RebLaw could find the people and projects to fund and the consortium could secure the funding. Such a partnership would reduce the amount of work on the firm's end and of course raise additional funds for meaningful public interest work.