The Face of Public Interest Law

For some lawyers, providing legal services to unrepresented or underrepresented individuals or groups is exactly the kind of legal work they always wanted to do.

By Dianne Molvig

few years ago Madison attorney Bob Peterson appeared before the State Bar's Board of Governors to advocate for creating a new Bar section for public interest lawyers. A debate ensued. Some board members questioned whether a new section was warranted. Others pointed out that public interest attorneys already were members of other Bar sections in their specific areas of practice. And one attorney posed a question to Peterson that perhaps was on the minds of many in the room: "Just what is public interest law, anyway?"

"The room burst into laughter," Peterson recalls. "My attempt to present a definition was halted in its tracks."

Another board member piped up, chiding his colleague, "It's not what you do!"

Public interest law does have a certain "you know it when you see it" - or don't see it - element to it, Peterson acknowledges. Nevertheless, he's willing to take a stab at defining it. "I think it's the legal representation of unrepresented and underrepresented groups and individuals," he says. "It's for that part of society that generally has a difficult time getting the services of an attorney."

Peterson ultimately prevailed in winning Board of Governors' support for creation of a Bar committee, which later became the Public Interest Law Section. Peterson is section chair. Among his fellow section members are law students and attorneys who work in diverse settings: government offices, legal services agencies, other nonprofit advocacy organizations, and private practice. Their fields of practice are even more diverse: elder law, consumer law, family law, environmental law, Indian law, public defender work, and more.

Working for agencies that rely upon government funding, grant support, and what little fees clients may be able to pay usually translates into salaries that are at the low end of the spectrum. Lawyers who choose careers in public interest law know they won't realize the earning potential of their colleagues in traditional law firms. What motivates them to head down this career path? What are the drawbacks and rewards? What advice would they offer to others considering public interest law as a career? Here several attorneys present answers to such questions.

Opting for a different pace

Eleven years ago, Bob Peterson wrote a short story that opened with a description of lemmings racing toward a cliff's edge. It was no coincidence that Peterson also was nearing his law school graduation. He looked around him and saw his classmates driven by a competitive frenzy. "But no one knew where they were going," he says.

Despite the peer pressures and the usual now-what-are-you-going-to-do-with-your-law-degree questions asked by relatives and friends at graduation ceremonies, Peterson decided to step back and out. He bought a one-way ticket to Europe, where he traveled for six months, living out of a backpack and a tent - and thinking about what to do next. "I ended up in London," Peterson says, "and wrote a letter to a friend and law school classmate, saying if I could be a staff attorney at the Center for Public Representation, I'd be happy." While in law school, he had worked at CPR in a clinical program assessing the medical needs of the rural uninsured in Polk and Barron counties.

He also knew job openings at CPR were infrequent. When he got back to Wisconsin, he took a job delivering plants. Many a time on his delivery routes he walked through the doors of law firms, wondering if law would ever be his career. His resolve to wait for the right job was being tested.

Then one day Peterson stopped by CPR to say hello. Director Louise Trubek greeted him with the news that CPR had just received a grant to follow up on the project he'd begun as a law student. She encouraged Peterson to apply for the job; he eventually was hired. "I've never felt such a sense of fate," he says. "The pieces just fell into place. I tell that story to law students who are discouraged, because what I learned is to maintain your passion and be patient. Wait for your door to open. If you hang in there, it will."

Today, Peterson is executive director of ABC for Health Inc., a nonprofit public interest law firm based in Madison, which he established five years ago as a spinoff of his work at CPR. His agency focuses on health care access issues, such as appealing insurance or HMO claim denials, for families across the state. "We pulled together this organization for a lot less than people thought it would cost," he says. "I had contacts with funding sources, and I used some of the resourcefulness I learned living out of a tent and a backpack."

He is, he says, where he belongs. "I have down times when I feel discouraged," he admits, "such as when you work hard on a grant and get notice it wasn't funded. But then you have a day when you represent a client before a hearing with an insurance company. The client needs a transplant, and later you get a call from the client saying the insurance company is going to cover it. You've changed that person's life. That's very rewarding."

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Changing people's lives for the better is one of the key rewards Jennelle Joset cites about her job. She knew she wanted to be a public interest attorney before she entered law school. "I saw that people who can't afford attorneys very often don't get justice," she says. "But everyone is entitled to the same justice."

After finishing law school three years ago, Joset became staff attorney for the Center Against Domestic and Sexual Abuse in Superior. "The pay is low," she says, "but we don't have the hectic rat race of a large law firm. It's almost like a family atmosphere here. It's a very supportive environment."

The job does, however, bring a harried tempo of its own. Joset and a paralegal make up the entire legal team, representing clients in four counties. The agency has a long waiting list. While there's no push to accrue billable hours as in a private firm, the pressure is still on. "You have to spend this many hours because all these people need services," Joset explains. "And you're the only one here to serve them. So it's hectic in a different way."

What's more, the work itself is draining: dealing with cases of domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual assault. "It's the worst of the bad," Joset notes. "But we have a relaxed work environment, which helps. And as an agency, we spend time taking care of ourselves. We do a lot of stress management and healing-type things." Yoga, massage, retreats, and ample vacation allowances are some of the wellness techniques Joset and other staff use to fend off burnout.

Besides the supportive work environment, Joset points to another key benefit of her job. "I've been running the legal program here since I started," she notes. "It's experience you wouldn't get in a large firm in your first two years out of law school. You'd be buried in the library doing somebody else's research. You wouldn't see clients or a courtroom. So this is great experience."

Plus, she knows she's giving clients what they couldn't get anywhere else. "It's very difficult in our system to file an action (against an abuser) without an attorney," Joset says. "When you can't afford to hire an attorney, and you don't qualify for legal aid, you're left with no options. You're stuck in a relationship that is emotionally, verbally, physically, or sexually abusive with no way out."

The gratification for Joset is helping people find a way out. She thinks about one of her recent clients, a severely physically disabled woman who was regularly beaten by her husband. So was their child. "The divorce will be finalized shortly," Joset says. "She and her son have gotten out. They're able to live abuse-free lives, which otherwise they would not have been able to do."

Practicing "real" law

Three hundred miles to the south, in Dodgeville, Chuck Kreimendahl works on survival issues of a different sort as managing attorney for Western Legal Services, where he's worked for 10 years. His core areas of practice include housing issues, family law, public benefits, and consumer law. "It's essentially about keeping a roof over people's heads," Kreimendahl says. "We cover six counties and have two attorneys."

Kreimendahl was drawn to public interest law even before he enrolled in law school. With a science background, including graduate studies, he initially did volunteer work in environmental law for the Department of Natural Resources and Wisconsin Environmental Decade as a law student. But a poverty law course at U.W. Law School steered his interest to doing legal work for poor people. He, too, had to wait to find the right position. After graduation, he worked for a year in a small firm in Park Falls before landing his current job.

"I have days probably all lawyers have when they wish they weren't lawyers," Kreimendahl says. "But to me there's a satisfaction in getting results for poor people. They don't get evicted, or they get the public benefits they're entitled to, or they resolve some sort of crisis custody dispute."

He finds as much, or more, satisfaction in that as he would landing a big client in a private firm. "There's this chasing-the-big-dollar thing that's evident in law school, in competing for jobs, and in law practice," Kreimendahl says. "It's refreshing not to have to contend with that kind of picture."

"And frankly," he adds, "this job offers opportunities a lot of general practitioners in small firms don't get a chance to do. We deal with elaborate, or at least interesting, legal issues - constitutional issues - that have to do with administrative law or public benefits."

Still, the attitude pervades the legal profession, say many public interest lawyers, that they're not practicing "real" law. Kreimendahl's response to that is two-fold. "First, our clients see what we do as the practice of law, and they're grateful," he says. "And the other thing is that if you do this type of practice for a while, you find other attorneys turning to you with questions they get. They don't practice in the areas we practice in. Judges and hearing examiners also see us as being somewhat expert in the fields we handle. So that counteracts any general sense that we're a different class of attorney."

The image of public interest lawyers as a separate breed is understandable, says Cindy Haro of Wisconsin Judicare in Wausau. "I'm not an attorney other lawyers see around the courthouse very often," she points out. "When I go to a local bar meeting or social function, they have no idea who I am or what I do."

Not only does her work differ from what private practitioners do, but public interest lawyers themselves have diverse jobs, Haro says. "What I do in my job probably bears little resemblance to what an attorney for a mental health project in Madison does," she says. "I doubt our days are much alike at all." Nonetheless, Haro values her connection to colleagues through the Bar's Public Interest Law Section. By meeting other public interest attorneys, she sees commonalities between the problems of her clients, who live on rural Indian reservations, with those of people living in urban areas.

For eight years, Haro has worked in Judicare's Indian law office, serving 10 reservation communities in 33 counties. She came to Judicare after running a similar program in northern Minnesota for more than four years. "One of the good things about a public interest law career," she says, "is that it's easier to find role models and mentors. And you get immediate experience. In the part of our office that does regular poverty law, if you want to go to court the first month you're on the job, the supervisor will make that happen for you. And work with you."

Haro's attraction to public interest law predates law school, back to when she was working as a claims processor for the Social Security Administration. "I saw that clients who had attorneys tended to get better results at their hearings," she says. "When I was trying to figure out what else to do with my life, I decided to go to law school and work for legal services." While a law student at the University of Montana Law School, she worked in the Indian Law Clinic. "That solidified my career choice," she says.

It's a choice she's never regretted, even though she says on this particular day she's had one of those "bureaucracy mornings," her least favorite part of the job. Much of her time goes into special projects, such as setting up a training program for tribal court advocates, or developing a tribal-specific juvenile justice system - "infrastructure building," as she calls it. "But I always make sure I also have at least a small client caseload," she says, "because that reminds me why I went to law school and why this is a great job. I would definitely do it all over again."

Going private

Jennifer Wertkin always knew she would be in public service someday, but she thought it would be as a social worker. After earning a master's degree, she took a social work job in Philadelphia. "I saw a lot of people's rights being infringed upon," Wertkin says, "and I had no ability to advocate for them legally because I was part of the system. I decided to go to law school to become someone who could advocate for people who didn't have a voice."

After graduating from U.W. Law School in December 1997, Wertkin set her sights on a legal services career and sent out "a million resumes all over the country," she says. She ended up, however, in private practice, working in a Madison firm that exclusively practices Indian law. Much of Wertkin's work is with the firm's public interest clients, plus she holds a Judicare contract to serve members of the Ho Chunk Nation in Dane and Sauk counties.

Now with a year of experience under her belt, Wertkin acknowledges that a major portion of her paycheck goes to repay law school and graduate school loans. Has that stirred second thoughts about pursuing a public interest career? "Nope," she says emphatically. "Not in a million years would I want to work in a large firm. I can't imagine being comfortable in that environment. I don't want to burn out."

Granted there's a certain burnout factor, too, in struggling to repay student loans while holding down a lesser paying job. "But," Wertkin maintains, "I enjoy what I do. That's the big difference." Even as a first-year lawyer, she's able to plunge into hands-on legal work and deal directly with clients. "I knew when I got out of law school that any job I took would have to involve a lot of client contact," she says. "One of my strengths is working individually with people, making a connection, and helping people feel that things aren't hopeless."

Like Wertkin, Darcy Haber aimed for a public interest law career when she graduated from U.W. Law School in 1995. But, thanks to Congressional cuts in legal services funding, job options were slim. "Not only were there no jobs," Haber says, "but some of my friends who'd graduated the year before were being laid off."

Instead of seeking a legal services position, Haber set up a sole private practice right after law school, emphasizing consumer and tenants' rights law. "I try very hard not to turn anybody away on the basis that they can't pay," she says.

Haber knew many fellow law students who felt drawn to public interest law careers. "But I can't name a handful who are doing it now," she says. The primary obstacle? Heavy debt load from loans for law school, perhaps also for college. The lower salaries in public interest law scare off many new lawyers who face loan repayment bills of several hundred dollars a month. "That's why," Haber emphasizes, "we need loan forgiveness programs," in which students get a portion of their loans repaid in return for entering public interest law work.

As for Haber, she says she was lucky to graduate without building up debts. Otherwise she may have abandoned her chosen career. "I wouldn't have been able to sleep at night not knowing if I was going to be able to pay an extra $500 a month in loans," she says. "Your sense of security goes right out the window."

Fortunately, Haber didn't face that dilemma and was able to pursue her passion for public interest law. She says she can't imagine doing anything else. "I remember why I'm in this," she says, "when I get another attorney on the phone and say I'm representing so-and-so. They say, 'What?!' They never expected this person to get an attorney. Then I think, 'Okay, I'm doing the right thing.'"

Editor's Note: Members interested in joining the Public Interest Law Section can do so simply by checking the appropriate area on the State Bar dues statement, to be mailed in June. For more information about the section, please contact Bob Peterson, chair, at (608) 264-6950; or State Bar staff liaison Jennifer Roethe Kersten at (800) 444-9404, ext. 6171.

Dianne Molvig operates Access Information Service, a Madison research, writing, and editing service. She is a frequent contributor to area publications.

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