Poverty Lawyers Find Reasons for Optimism

Thomas Adcock
New York Law Journal

Twenty-three years ago when he won a $25,000 grant from the New York Community Trust to begin what is now the Urban Justice Center, Douglas Lasdon ran a one-man poverty law operation from an East Harlem building that sometimes had heat in the winter months.

It was 1984, not a good year for lawyers advocating for the homeless and otherwise down-and-out clients. Ronald Reagan was president and wildly popular, due in part to his campaign criticisms of a system that supported Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" in Chicago and "slum dwellers" in Mr. Lasdon's own bailiwick who were suddenly given apartments with "11-foot ceilings and a 20-foot balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium," all for monthly rents of $113.20.

Besides such doubtful rhetoric, other things have changed significantly for Mr. Lasdon and his fellow poverty lawyers.

This week, for instance, as Mr. Lasdon continued settling into new digs encompassing the entire 16th floor of a sleek high-rise in Manhattan's financial district, he announced the availability of $100,000 in seed money to an attorney somewhere out there who might invent as successful a program as his own - in a time when the public attitude toward poor people is likewise changing.

"Throughout the 80s and 90s, politicians attacked poor people," said Mr. Lasdon in an interview. "For the first time in two decades, you hear at least some politicians talking sympathetically about the poor."

He added, "This could be a new day."

Surely it is not every day that a nonprofit poverty law agency has the cash to underwrite a whole new initiative. The money comes as settlement of a lawsuit in 2000 in the Southern District in which the Urban Justice Center, with pro bono help from lawyers at Debevoise & Plimpton, successfully claimed violation of constitutional rights involving the arrests of participants in a hypodermic needle exchange program authorized by the New York State Health Department.

On June 28 in the matter of Roe v. City of New York, 00 Civ. 9062, Southern District Judge Robert W. Sweet granted the center attorney's fees of $100,000. It was the second windfall of the year for the center, which sold off its second home - a building in the East Village purchased for $600,000 in 1997. The resale price was $5.7 million. Four months ago, the center moved into leased quarters downtown, tripling the agency's office space.

Mr. Lasdon decided the time was right - financially and politically - to offer the $100,000 settlement as seed money in furtherance of the center's work.

What Mr. Lasdon is looking for now is "something I could not imagine myself," he said. His reluctance to offer any detail, he said, is in the interest of providing lawyer applicants maximum "freedom to be creative" in pursuit of "extraordinary ideas" for which they will be given autonomy to execute.

Mr. Lasdon's offer itself strikes Vicki R. Walcott-Edim as "innovative and pretty darn smart" - every bit as smart as the real estate transaction that provides the Urban Justice Center, now with an annual budget of $4.5 million and a staff of 30 lawyers and 30 administrators, with a solid capital fund.

Ms. Walcott-Edim, director of the New York office of the Appleseed Foundation, which seeks legal access for the poor, said "you don't often hear of nonprofit organizations saying, 'Well, here's the money - now give us ideas.' It's interesting. Maybe you hire just one person, but maybe you get 50 good ideas."

"It's unusual," agreed Martin Needelman, chief counsel for Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation. "But it's typical of Doug [Lasdon]. He's a visionary."

New Era, New Approach

As for Mr. Lasdon's vision of a new day for the practice of poverty law, Daniel L. Greenberg shares an optimistic view of the Zeitgeist.

"We're at a cyclical place in history where we're beginning to understand communal responsibility again," said Mr. Greenberg, special counsel at Schulte Roth & Zabel and former president of the Legal Aid Society of New York. "Too many people don't have adequate health care, too many people see failing schools and deteriorated housing."

The era of "benign neglect," as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, is ending, Mr. Greenberg suggested, and the poverty law bar may even resume the prominence and admiration it enjoyed in the 1960s and early 70s.

A fundamental difference between today's poverty lawyers and those of a generation ago, Mr. Greenberg noted, was a lesson learned from over-reliance on litigation.

The courts are "essentially an undemocratic branch of government that may be ahead of where people are," said Mr. Greenberg, but courtroom victories "can turn out to be ephemeral because new laws can undo what the courts decide."

The best modern-day poverty lawyers, said Mr. Greenberg, are involved in community organizing and mindful of their elders' "hard lesson."

Meanwhile, there are hard numbers to back up Mr. Greenberg's sense of optimism - and that of Mr. Needelman.

For example, Mr. Needelman noted that Edwin Soto-Lopez, the newly appointed chairman of the New York State Interest on Lawyer Account Fund, has seen to it that bank interest rates on deposits are set to rise from 0.6 percent to as much as 4 percent - meaning an annual revenue boost to Brooklyn Legal Services of as much as $600,000. He also pointed to the 6 percent budget increase granted by Congress in support for legal services to the poor, retroactive to 2006.

Even so, Mr. Needelman wrote in a recent report to his board of directors, "Although these . . . increases are very significant and a huge relief, they probably will only get us back to where we were several years [ago]."

Private Bar

Esther Lardent, executive director of the Pro Bono Institute in Washington, D.C., suggested that a dramatic rise in concern for social disparities by attorneys at large private law firms is another reason for hope of a kinder, gentler public mood.

Soon after Ms. Lardent launched her agency's "pro bono challenge" in 1995, seeking commitment from large firms across the country to increase hours of volunteer lawyering and to assign more than half those hours in service to the poor, she began tracking the pledges.

Ten years ago, she said, the 150 large firms tracked reported a total of 1.5 million hours of pro bono hours. That compares to the most recent total of 4 million.

From this, said Ms. Lardent, "I believe we're becoming gentler, more forgiving and more cognizant of the fact that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere - and that the gifts we have in this country are fragile."

She added, "There is a real eagerness [in the private bar] to engage in pro bono, to engage in the issues of the day, whether Katrina or veterans' rights or the rights of detainees at Guantánamo or grinding poverty with no hope. People see that we've got to do something."

Which is just what the optimistic Mr. Lasdon is looking for, with $100,000 to back up the search.

"I've always been more pessimistic than Doug," said Wendy A. Bach, supervising attorney at Main Street Legal Services, the poverty law agency at the City University of New York School of Law.

"But it's a good thing that he's trying to have hope, and bringing new and different ideas to the practice of representing poor people."