Law grads headed for public-interest work

Legal-services groups that represent Philadelphia's poorest citizens are readying themselves for an unexpected windfall - the arrival of newly minted law school graduates whose start dates at big law firms have been pushed back and who will spend a year practicing public-interest law.

Leaders of these organizations say the arrival of the new lawyers could not have come at a better time. Foundations have reduced their grants, as have other supporters, in response to the nation's economic downturn, so legal groups have been scrambling to staff cases.

During the next several weeks, a half-dozen or more new law-school graduates will be joining their staffs.

Effectively, they will be compensated by the law firms that hired them and then pushed back their starting dates. But their paychecks will be far less than what they would have earned had they started on schedule at the firms.

The firms are seeking to trim their costs in response to a decline in revenue after last fall's economic collapse, and that has been a boon to public-interest legal groups.

"We have taken a tremendous hit in terms of lost funding," said Catherine C. Carr, executive director of Community Legal Services Inc., of Philadelphia. "We are not in a position to hire anyone new, so getting a young attorney, even for a year, is fabulous."

At the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, executive director Jennifer R. Clarke said two new first-years, deferred by law firms in New York and San Francisco, would start in a few weeks. One other lawyer on a public-interest law fellowship from Columbia University Law School and another lawyer who plans simply to volunteer also are joining the staff.

"From my perspective, it is a very real blessing," said Clarke, a partner at Dechert L.L.P. before she took over at the law center. "We always live hand-to-mouth."

Two years ago, all of this would have been unimaginable. Law-firm revenues were on an upward arc, and there was much hand-wringing among firm managers about the ever-escalating bidding war among firms for top law-school graduates. In Philadelphia, the top starting salary was $145,000; in New York and Washington, it had reached $165,000.

But the salary wars came to an abrupt halt.

The sharp decline in legal revenue last year forced firms to reengineer not only practice groups, bolstering some and downsizing others, but also their financial models. They let go thousands of associates, and then they told hundreds of young law-school graduates that their start dates would be delayed. Many were offered stipends of $65,000 for this period provided they signed on with public-interest legal organizations, other nonprofit groups, or government.

Elaine Petrossian, an assistant dean at Villanova University Law School, said the terms had differed from one firm to another. In all, nearly a dozen Villanova graduates will work for public-interest legal groups or in government jobs in the coming year as part of a deferment, she said.

While this was an unexpected benefit for public-interest legal groups, it also posed challenges. Public-interest law is a world apart from the typical practice at both large and small firms. The clients typically are very poor and have little knowledge about how to negotiate court and government bureaucracies. They often are lacking the most basic paperwork - titles, deeds, even birth certificates.

Sara Woods, executive director of Philadelphia VIP, said a challenge for her organization as well as others would be to provide guidance and training to the new arrivals despite already thinly stretched staff. Public-interest lawyers face unique ethical conflicts, she said, often representing one poor person against another, who might not have a lawyer.

Properly representing such a client, while not placing the opposing side at an unfair disadvantage, can require subtle approaches only lawyers with long experience representing the poor would know, she said.

Woods said that several public-interest law groups had organized weekly training sessions to focus on such ethical issues, legal writing, and other matters.

Even so, the young graduates can expect to be thrown into cases at a far more accelerated pace than if they had gone directly to employment with their law firms. Clarke said she expected her first-year lawyers would take depositions before long, a critical litigation task that at big firms usually is reserved for more senior lawyers.

While the anticipated arrival of the new lawyers has generated senses of optimism and excitement among public-interest lawyers in Philadelphia, the law-school graduates themselves say they are grateful for the opportunity, even if they had not imagined a year ago that they would take this route.

"I and other law students are big planners, and this maybe sets back those plans for a year," said Lisa Bolotin, a graduate of Duke University Law School, who had been planning to start at Center City's Ballard, Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll L.L.P. this year. "But at this point, I am really excited about the work that I am going to be doing."