In my last year of law school, I was the first student at the legal-aid clinic to take a client to trial.
You wouldn’t call this a “lucky” development, exactly — but it was pretty unusual. Most law students at this clinic went entire semesters without taking a client to a trial. Years, even. It was that rare to be assigned a client whose case was at the proper stage, and who wanted to go to trial.
But my client wanted to go to trial. It was a final administrative hearing — to be contested in a court set up within the Social Security Administration, with an SSA-appointed judge. (So it was an actual “federal case.”) The SSA had proposed to deny my mentally-disabled client $60,000 worth of disability benefits over three years. The trial was her last opportunity to be heard in opposition to this decision.
In the hours before the trial, I was more nervous than I’d ever been. I couldn’t eat for a full day beforehand.
But my client won her case — after bravely delivering a full hour of heart-wrenching testimony describing her disabilities, in response to my direct examination. In the decision, the administrative judge completely reversed the SSA’s decision. The sixty grand was hers.
Having now won a trial verdict, I presumed I could finish out the clinic semester with slightly less stressful assignments. But now it was the turn of my student partner, Amy, to get lucky. Now her client (whom I’ll call “Dina”), wanted to go to trial.
And this was an actual judicial (not administrative) trial. A child custody case — to be contested in state Probate and Family Court, in front of a judge appointed by the governor. It would be a first for all of us.
Everyone expects a child-custody dispute to be bitter, and this one was no exception. Our client was an undocumented immigrant who worked as a house-cleaner and spoke little English. Her ex-boyfriend (whom I’ll refer to here as “OP,” for the “Opposing Party”) was in a similar position, except he worked construction and spoke zero English. Caught in the middle of this dispute was the couple’s eight-year-old daughter.
A previous court order had awarded primary custody of the daughter to OP, in part because Dina had failed to scrape together enough money from her house-cleaning job to move out of her shared apartment and into a place of her own. But through her long acquaintance with OP, Dina could offer plenty of evidence of OP’s bad faith and unfitness to be a custodial parent under the state’s “best interests of the child” standard. (Found in General Laws Chapter 209, Section 38 — a statutory citation that I’ll never forget as long as I live.)
Of course Dina was an undocumented immigrant, didn’t speak English, and couldn’t afford to hire a licensed attorney. But with a couple of law students representing her, she could at least go to trial and have a fighting chance of winning. And she wanted to take that chance.
So Amy and I (and our supervising attorney) represented Dina at trial. It was a terrifying experience. Again I couldn’t eat for a full day beforehand. Meanwhile the OP represented himself, and acted quite erratically both in the days leading up to trial and at the trial itself. Our character witnesses were targeted for intimidation; anonymous threats of violence kept them from appearing in the courtroom. And the entire proceeding was conducted through an interpreter.
But we won the case. Dina gained primary physical custody of her daughter, thus removing the girl from her manipulative, violent, abusive father. This outcome was possible simply because Dina decided to pursue her rights as a mother in this state. And because she was able to retain attorneys — student attorneys — to represent her and press those rights to their fullest extent.
I don’t expect to litigate ever again, except perhaps on behalf of a family member. My strong wish is to retire undefeated as a litigator. The responsibility is just too awesome for me.
But there are zillions of lawyers out there, legal-services lawyers, who do this for a living — who accept these awesome responsibilities on behalf of clients who cannot afford to purchase legal representation. While earning credits at the clinic I watched dozens of these lawyers work, and was taught by some of them. These folks are incredible. Their ability to help clients by protecting their rights is unparalleled. To me, these attorneys are superheroes.
As the charitable-giving season approaches, I ask everyone to consider the fact that no matter where you live, in your community there are multitudes of people who have urgent needs to rely on their legal rights — and yet who can’t afford to purchase legal help at market rates.
These embattled individuals — if they’re lucky — frequently rely on legal-services lawyers, and often wind up doing so in the most pressing, desperate situations. In your community right now, there are people who are getting evicted from their homes, or being denied crucial government benefits, or having their children taken away. And the only option available to these folks — the only help they can find to protect their legal rights — comes from legal services organizations, many of which are run more or less permanently on grants, donations, and good faith. I haven’t made a comparative analysis here, but I would wager that practically no one is more effective than a legal-services lawyer at turning even modest donations into desperately-needed legal protections — and general quality-of-life improvements — for deserving individuals who lack resources to protect their legal rights on their own.
For all of these reasons, when you next devise a budget for your charitable giving, you might consider making a donation to a legal-services organization of your choice. By making such a donation, you will empower a highly effective attorney to dedicate more of her time and skills to helping those individuals who are most urgently in need of legal protection. You might even enable a law student to accept the awesome responsibility of representing a client with literally no other options, and wind up helping that client win a highly improbable but fully deserved victory in which justice is unquestionably and spectacularly done.
