Gearing up for influx of associates
June 9, 2009
Even though Emily Garrison was among the big firm associates who were laid off earlier this year, amid the worst economic downturn in decades, she counts herself among the lucky ones.
Garrison, who thought she might spend her career as a corporate lawyer in a big firm after a summer in the Chicago office of McDermott Will & Emery, is reassessing that notion while putting her legal skills to work for clients of limited means at the Chicago Volunteer Legal Services Foundation.
Her nine-month stint in the legal aid arena is being underwritten by the firm that laid her off, with a stipend of $7,000 a month.
“They could’ve just said: ‘See ya — good luck,’” Garrison said.
Instead, McDermott offered the option of a three-month severance package, or the monthly stipend in exchange for participation in a newly created public interest law fellowship available to its laid-off lawyers who graduated law school in 2008.
“They had just joined us, they were just beginning their careers with us, and unfortunately they arrived and we were all hit by this economic tsunami,” said Quentin “George” Heisler, partner-in-charge of McDermott’s Chicago office. “We all recognized these were and are terrific young lawyers and we want to treat them as fairly as we possibly can, while still doing what is prudent in the management of our business.”
Some law firms nationwide, in a new approach to a drop-off in business, are paying their lawyers — at reduced salaries — to work in public interest jobs.
While McDermott offered stipends to the junior associates it let go — so long as they rolled up their sleeves in public interest work — more firms are offering stipends to this year’s incoming associates whose start dates have been delayed, and encouraging them to spend the interim time working in the public sector.
The potential for an influx of lawyers coming to Chicago’s legal aid and public interest law community — at a time when the demand for services is escalating and funding sources are dwindling — is viewed as a positive development. But the ongoing law firm phenomenon that started earlier this year with announcements of deferred employment, layoffs and furloughs also comes with a host of logistical challenges for the organizations that are in the business of helping the disadvantaged with access to justice.
“It’s both an opportunity and a challenge,” said Robert B. Acton, executive director of Cabrini Green Legal Aid. “The opportunity is that we are, daily, contacted by scores of individuals who very much need free legal assistance, and we have limited capacity to serve. The challenge is that we have limited capacity. With each deferred attorney will come a range of expenses.
“At the very moment when we are struggling to raise the necessary funds to meet current obligations, we’re also taking on an additional financial burden to place the deferred attorneys in our organizations.,” Acton said.
Hidden costs of free lawyers
Providing office space and computer equipment, training, supervision, and support for new attorneys can be a difficult proposition for legal aid agencies, many of which are operating with overstretched resources.
“You can’t just throw people into the trenches without training and support, and a barrack they can come back to,” said Diana White, executive director of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago. “The idea that we have the excess space, and supervisory time, and resources to create decent experiences for all these people is kind of unrealistic.”
White, who oversees the operations of the largest legal aid agency in the Chicago area, and one of the largest in the country — with a downtown office and five additional sites scattered around the county — said it’s unlikely that the organization would be able to accept any deferred associates any time soon.
Along with potential problems that could come with placing volunteers in long-term positions at a unionized shop, she said, there are the issues of budget and space constraints.
“I do not have so much as an empty carrel in my whole organization,” she said. “Because of the summer interns we committed to long before this flood of firm attorneys turned up, I’ve got no space.”
But some legal aid entities have greater flexibility than others when it comes to their capability to absorb associates into their organizations.
At CVLS, incorporating volunteers into the practice is “what we do,” said Margaret C. Benson, the foundation’s executive director.
Still, while Benson said she would be happy to take in large batches of “big law firm refugees,” she acknowledged that the issue of space constraints is a main obstacle.
For now, Benson said, CVLS has the capacity to accommodate about four to six deferred associates or laid-off attorneys full time, and additional ones on a part-time basis.
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