May 11, 2006
Fulton County Daily Report
Meredith Hobbs, Staff Reporter

Georgia Appleseed is the newest seedling to sprout from D.C.-based Appleseed, a public interest law group whose motto is "sowing the seeds of justice."

Sharon N. Hill became the new group's first executive director in November because she wanted to tackle legal and social issues from a systemic approach after spending most of her career on the front lines-as a legal aid attorney and, for the past nine years, a judge at Fulton Juvenile Court.

"I've spent 15 years of my 21 as a lawyer in crisis intervention mode. My response was always to think of a systemic solution. Why keep doing the same thing over and over again?" she said over coffee and a raisin bagel with cream cheese at the Colony Square food court, in the heart of Midtown's law firm district and across the street from her office at Kilpatrick Stockton.

Hill said Georgia Appleseed is different from legal aid groups such as the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation and Georgia Legal Services Program Inc. because those

groups help individuals with problems, while Appleseed takes on the system.

Georgia Appleseed is organizing volunteer teams of big-firm lawyers to research public policy issues and shape legislation. Its paid staff consists only of Hill and Theresa Brower, who is both development director and project manager.

Appleseed's national office provided $100,000 in seed money, which was matched by $25,000 each from four local sponsors: Kilpatrick Stockton, Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, King & Spalding and Southern Co. Georgia Appleseed held its first fund-raiser last week.

Although Appleseed's focus is shaping public policy, the group is determinedly nonpartisan. The board includes Republican stalwart Chuck Clay, a former state senator and a former chair of the Republican Party of Georgia, as well as former Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes.

I met Hill at Colony Square earlier this week to find out what Georgia Appleseed has been up to since its launch last fall.

Hill told me teams of attorneys at Kilpatrick, King & Spalding and Holland & Knight have been working on the local piece of three national Appleseed projects: increasing Latino immigrants' access to banks and other financial institutions, improving legal representation for people with mental illness and improving public education by revising the No Child Left Behind Act.

Hill's office is at Kilpatrick because A. Stephens "Steve" Clay, a partner at the firm, is the chair of Georgia Appleseed's board. He and the firm's pro bono partner, Debbie Segal, helped bring Appleseed to Georgia.

Kilpatrick first got involved five years ago with a project for Alabama Appleseed amid calls to reform the state's judicial selection system.

To this end, the Kilpatrick lawyers researched judicial selection methods nationwide. It made sense for a firm outside of Alabama to do the work, Segal said, since "it would be hard to get an unbiased study in the state where that is the hottest topic."

The firm then did a second 50-state survey on nine landlord-tenant law questions. Alabama did not have a landlord-tenant code and Alabama Appleseed needed background on what other states were doing so it could propose one to the Legislature.

"It was an enormous study that took hundreds of hours of work, and they just got a landlord-tenant law passed-a really, really good one," said Segal.

For Georgia Appleseed, Kilpatrick is working on a report on how to encourage Latino immigrants to use mainstream financial services. The firm contributed research to a national Appleseed report in December on what it costs to wire money to Mexico from Atlanta.

Hill told me that $20 billion was wired to Mexico from the United States last year-in average increments of $300. One of Appleseed's goals is to get federal legislation that would require money transfer businesses to give customers clear explanations of the fees charged.

Georgia Appleseed shared that research with the state Legislature as it considered a 5 percent wire transfer fee on all remittances to Mexico. The proposal was tacked onto the Senate immigration bill but dropped at the eleventh hour before the bill became law.

Local projects

Also, a team of King & Spalding attorneys is writing a manual for Georgia lawyers representing clients with mental illness. The aim, Hill said, is to help lawyers-who are often representing these clients pro bono-navigate treatment options as well as the criminal justice system.

And Holland & Knight attorneys are working on a report on parental involvement in public education, part of a national Appleseed project to reshape the No Child Left Behind Act, which is up for renewal in 2007.

"Real opportunity in our society is based on strong public education for everybody," said Hill. The act's emphasis on school choice, standardized testing and outside tutoring have not worked well, she said. In an effort to make the law more effective, Appleseed wants to increase parental involvement in public schools.

"No one is focusing on how the act is impacting parental involvement," she said. "They can make a difference."

Holland & Knight lawyers are finishing up interviews with school officials and parents in three Georgia counties-Mucsogee, Dougherty and Cobb. Pricewaterhouse-Coopers accountants are handling the data collection on students' performance. Their work will be part of a national Appleseed report to be published this fall.

From crisis intervention to systems

Hill told me that when she first heard about Georgia Appleseed last summer, she was interested in its systemic approach-but was concerned that the new group might compete for funding with Atlanta Legal Aid or other legal aid groups.

Conversations with Appleseed's national director, Linda Singer, convinced her that Appleseed's work complements what legal aid groups do and could appeal to lawyers who might not be interested in litigating cases for individual pro bono clients.

It's up to each Appleseed-there are 18 nationwide-to decide what projects it's going to take on, but most get involved in policymaking instead of litigating.

"There are lawyers who are hungry to do pro bono work-who are often more transactional-oriented-and through Appleseed can go into an area they don't know about and learn everything about it and then distill all that in a persuasive document ..." she said.

Hill understands this group, since she was one of them back in law school. At that time, she told me, she wanted to be a corporate lawyer and had no intention of ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.

After receiving a joint law degree and MBA from Emory University in 1985 she joined Sutherland Asbill & Brennan as a corporate lawyer. But an interest in public service led to a six-year stint at Atlanta Legal Aid.

When she decided to return to big-firm law, it was as a business litigator for Troutman Sanders. Hill explained litigation made sense after all the litigation experience she'd gained as a legal aid attorney. But she soon found she was not passionate about complex business litigation and wanted to get back into public service.

She quit her job at Troutman in 1997 without knowing what she would do next. Returning to legal aid work did not quite fit. "I loved being a legal aid lawyer but I wanted to do something non-adversarial," Hill told me. "I could see both sides too much."

She learned of an opening for a judgeship in Fulton County Juvenile Court working on the Truancy Intervention Project under former chief judge Glenda Hatchett. TIP is a partnership where court personnel, employees from public schools and volunteer lawyers work with truant and delinquent kids to get them back in school.

"It was the intersection of children and poverty-it was where I needed to be," she told me.

Hill's work on the project was the beginning of her interest in systemic responses to individual problems. "I was hearing cases for children with more than 100 unexcused absences in a school year. My question was, 'Why? What were they doing? Why weren't they going to school?' "

At the end of 2003, Hill's court launched the state's first family drug court to help kids whose truant, unruly or delinquent behavior stemmed from parental drug use. By then, Hill said, she "was beginning to desire to move into some area where I could do more systemic kinds of change"-which has led to Georgia Appleseed.

Staff Reporter Meredith Hobbs can be reached at mhobbs@alm.com.