Co-sponsored by the American Bar Association and the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, the Equal Justice Conference “brings together all components of the legal community to discuss equal justice issues as they relate to the delivery of legal services to the poor and low-income individuals in need of legal assistance.”

The conference is a terrific coming-together point for legal services attorneys, judges, pro bono attorneys, and  many other public interest advocates who share an interest in access-to-justice issues.The 2010 EJC takes place in Phoenix, AZ from May 13-15.  Registration is now open.

Today’s Expert: Barbara Moulton is the Assistant Dean for Public Interest Programs at Georgetown University Law Center, from which she also graduated in 1989.  Since 1995, Dean Moulton has directed the Office of Public Interest and Community Service (OPICS) at GULC.  OPICS provides career advice to students pursuing public interest legal careers, and runs the school’s extensive pro bono program.  Dean Moulton formerly served as a staff attorney with the Alliance for Justice in Washington, DC.

New Year’s Resolutions for Your Summer Job Search:

1. I will be proactive in finding the right position for me. Public sector job searching should never be reactive!  If you wait for specific positions to be posted on PSLawNet, on your school’s internship database, or through a formal recruitment fair, you will miss hundreds of opportunities that might be better suited for you.  Remember, many public sector employers never formally advertise positions, and not being pro-active means you could miss the perfect beginning to your public sector career.
   • TIP: Do an organizational search on PSLawNet rather than an opportunity search.  Doing so will help you identify more organizations that fit your particular subject-matter and/or geographic interests.
2. I will not assume that “unpaid” means “low-quality.” Too many law students believe that unpaid internships offer less value than paid positions.  This is categorically untrue.  Ideally, all public sector summer positions would be paid, but unfortunately only a small number of them are, and many of the most competitive and prestigious ones are not.  If your plan is to pursue a public sector career – or even if you just want an excellent public sector position for a summer – you shouldn’t conduct your summer search on the basis of paid vs. unpaid.  You should be looking at how a position will help you down the road.  Will it help you break into a particular geographic location?  Will it get you a foot in the door with a specific employer?  Will you develop practical skills that will be of interest to future employers?   Financial considerations aside, these are much more important questions to consider than whether a position is paid or not.
   • TIP:  Check out PSLawNet’s Summer Funding page; many outside sources of funding exist for public interest internships.  Even if your school offers some summer funding, you can often supplement that with outside funding.
3. I will spend more time on my cover letters. Cover letters are the key to successful public sector applications.  But they take a lot of time and effort, and many law students give them far too little attention.  Employers seek candidates who are genuinely interested in them and committed to the work they do.  Your cover letter is the vehicle for convincing them that you are such a candidate.  It should address convincingly why you are interested in that organization, providing specifics about how your background, skills, and interests dovetail with its mission and work.
   • TIP:  Highlight unique skills and background.  Listing basic law school coursework or legal research and writing skills is fine, but neither will make you stand out among your peers.  Relevant language skills, work experience, or even undergraduate coursework are more likely to differentiate you from others.
4. I will be persistent. If you don’t hear back immediately from an employer, do not assume it means the employer is not interested.  Instead, follow up with a short, polite email or phone call inquiring about the status of your application.  It is perfectly appropriate to do so unless an employer has stated it does not want inquiries.  Be persistent!  Sometimes it makes all the difference.
   • TIP:  If you get a vibe from an employer that it does not want additional follow-up, trust your instinct and back off at least for a bit.  Your career services advisor can help you determine when it’s appropriate to contact the employer again.
5. I will persevere and not get discouraged. Thousands of public interest summer opportunities exist, but unfortunately there is no one-stop shopping for them.  Employers have different timing and different requirements, making the process sometimes seem drawn-out and discouraging.  If your first round of applications doesn’t yield positive results, meet with your career services advisor to come up with a plan for round two.  Many organizations do not hire until later in the spring, so perseverance is important.  Remember, it only takes one positive response to put you on the path to a rewarding and reinvigorating summer!
   
   • TIP: Have both ‘reach’ and ‘safety’ employers in your round-one applications.  If your preference is to be in a major metropolitan area for the summer, be mindful that positions in those areas are likely to be the most competitive.  You might think about also applying to some employers in less popular locations where you would be willing to spend the summer.

As reported by the New York Times on December 31st:

Youths detained in some of New York’s juvenile prisons have suffered bruises, cuts and a host of other injuries from aggressive physical restraining practices that violate their legal and constitutional rights, according to a federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday.

The Legal Aid Society filed the class-action suit against the state’s Office of Children and Family Services.  The agency was already beleaguered by Justice Department scrutiny of its detention policies, including a possible federal takeover of state-run juvenile facilities.  Read the New York Times article: Treatment of Youths in New York Prisons Spurs Suit.

Welcome to the PSLawNet Blog, launched on January 4, 2010. Our goal is to serve as an information clearinghouse for law students and lawyers on public service career paths. To that end, our content will include:

• legal news affecting the public interest job market (including government);
• updates on resources for job-seekers of all experience levels;
• information on developing news stories and policy debates affecting the public interest community more generally; and
• guest columns from public interest practitioners and career services professionals, offering career advice and insights on legal issues.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Post on Monday reported on the impact the recession is having on a major funding source for civil legal services providers.  Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts (IOLTA) programs have been a source of revenue for many legal aid organizations in the United States since the 1980s (see IOLTA.org for more on the history and details of the programs). As the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates in the face of the economic recession, revenue from IOLTA programs has plummeted –  “from $371 million in 2007 to a projected $93 million this year” nationally, the Post reports.

This means legal aid providers have seen their budgets cut substantially, forcing everything from service cuts to layoffs and office closures. However, this is in the face of rising demand for civil legal services. The Maryland Legal Aid Bureau has seen a six percent increase in their case load while dealing with an eleven percent budget cut in 2009.

The Brennan Center also has a great analysis of the situation from last February that you can check out to learn more.

A Sunday, Washington Post op-ed by two longtime opponents of welfare reforms enacted in 1996 argues that the reformers’ early self-congratulatory behavior regarding the new welfare system was, to say the least, premature.

A summary of the piece:

As welfare rolls across the country decreased and some former recipients found work in good economic times – the late 1990s boom – even some early skeptics called it a success.  But what went largely unnoticed was that even in prosperous times many who left the rolls did not find enough work to lift themselves from poverty; and others slipped into more abject poverty as the old safety net was, by design, left in tatters.  The 2001 economic downturn exposed, to close observers, more of the new saftey net’s vulnerabilities.  But it is now, during the so-called “Great Recession” that the failure of the American welfare system to work for the swelling numbers of families who most need it are cast in stark relief.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is the federal government’s cash welfare program, supports about 5 million Americans.  This one third the amount of people it supported in 1994, even though the country is presently enduring its worst economic crisis since the 1930s.  The number of homeless Americans has risen by 61% in the past two years, and in 2008 alone the number of Americans in poverty rose by 2.5 million.  Still the TANF system, unlike the food stamp and unemployment insurance programs, has not expanded to catch Americans falling into poverty.

The op-ed is partisan in tone, and is critical of conservatives and centrist-Democrats who once touted a slash in the welfare system as being the best medicine for the nation’s poor.  But the apparent failure of the system to support so many of the country’s impoverished families during a severe economic downturn does raise nonpartisan questions about how well crafted the reforms were.  (Unless, as the authors point out, alleviating national poverty was never a reform goal: “If the real purpose of welfare reform was simply to reduce the rolls, it’s been a smashing success.”)

Just a quick note here. In case you’re looking for more online reading opportunities, Laws.com put together a list of the “Top 50 Justice Blogs.”  Aaron over at Equal Justice Works blogged about it earlier this week.

Georgetown and UC Berkeley plan to “dovetail their forgiveness policies” with the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 for eligible graduates who commit to public service careers, according to the National Law Journal.  Essentially, the schools will cover the graduates’ payment obligations through the CCRAA’s Income Based Repayment (IBR) program for 10 years, at which time their remaining debt could be forgiven through Act’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness provision.  Students who are able to reap the full benefit of these programs should be able to finance their legal educations for free.

Since the CCRAA’s passage, there has been much discussion about the interplay between its repayment and loan foregiveness provisions and those of other programs, whether law-school based, employer based, and so forth.  GULC and Berkeley are placing CCRAA at the center of their LRAP solar systems, and other LRAP programs will revolve around it.

Google has been known to jump headlong into new web-based initiatives in search of the next big success.  Some do succeed (Google Maps = Super Cool) and some do not (“Orkut,” Google’s social networking site which has not quite established the brand recognition of myspace or facebook).

Now, Google has leapt into the world of computer-based legal research via a searchable case database on its Google Scholar site.  Here is an announcement from the Google Blog.

Will this free offering knock the fee-charging West and Lexis up against the ropes?  Not anytime soon.  A blurb in the ABA Journal points out that Google Scholar, while easy to use, does not include a statute/code database, and does not offer a case citator a la Shepard’s.

Nevertheless, and as with all of Google’s undertakings, this initiative is worth watching.  And it may prove a useful arrow in the quivers of public interest lawyers whose access to the fee-charging databases is limited.

The New York Times reports on the growth of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, a/k/a “food stamps”) as more families who may not have thought of themselves as “poor” struggle during the economic recession.  The piece highlights the remarkable diversity of food stamp recipients, ranging from the chronically impoverished to the working poor who are unable to cobble together enough paid hours to keep their pantries full.  Astoundingly, 1 in 4 Philadelphians benefit from food stamps, in addition to their wide distribution in more rural, poverty-stricken locals.

But the real story is the emergence of food stamps as a vital resource for those who were once economically secure, but whose incomes took a downward turn when the recession hit.  Families struggle now to maintain basic living necessities, letting alone the idea of keeping up with their old standards of living.  Those who once would have been embarrassed to receive government handouts now count themselves among those saved by the economic safety net.