The "Perfect Storm" Hitting Legal Services…Outlook for Jobs Poor
The National Law Journal just ran a well reported but very sobering (at best) piece about the funding woes confronting civil legal services programs throughout the nation. This passage aptly sums up the circumstances:
Law firms may be benefiting from the slow economic recovery, but legal aid groups face the most dire circumstances in decades. The problem is a perfect storm of IOLTA funding declines, cuts in state and local funding, uncertain federal support and a tight private fundraising environment. The situation is exacerbated by steep increases in demand for free legal services as millions of low-income Americans face long-term unemployment, foreclosure and other serious problems.
The article offers a detailed, data-driven review of the funding cuts plaguing the nation’s legal services programs, and is well worth reading. Very troubling for us are the numbers concerning staff constrictions and layoffs:
- Texas RioGrande Legal Aid “stopped filling open lawyer positions in 2010 to prepare for cuts and may close offices, institute layoffs and roll back its caseload in 2011…”
- The Legal Aid Society in NYC “eliminated 30 staff positions in its civil division” and “can help only one of every nine people who ask for assistance.”
- Legal Services of New Jersey, an umbrella for Garden State legal services programs, was forced to “eliminate about 200 of its 700 positions since 2007, and President Melville Miller Jr. anticipates cutting another 50 to 70 jobs in 2011 if more money can’t be found.”
- New Mexico Legal Aid’s “employees agreed to a six-day furlough in 2010 to save money, but it may need to close one office and lay off four or five workers in 2012.”
This is in keeping with what we’ve heard from other legal services executive directors, who have been struggling to make budgetary ends meet without cutting staff. This situation is distressing for at least two reasons. First, we know that many law students and recent grads have invested time, effort, and money in preparation for serving clients on society’s margins. And while so many would-be advocates around the country want nothing more than the opportunity to serve as legal services lawyers, the opportunities to do so are increasingly few and far between. Second, and more importantly, fewer lawyers means fewer clients served. As noted in the NLJ piece, demand for services from the swollen numbers of low-income clients has skyrocketed in the recession’s wake. It’s alarming, and positively disheartening, that the legal services community has been so hobbled by funding cuts at a time when it is needed to protect and assert the rights of so many vulnerable people and families.
