More on Firm Associates Getting Paid Time Off

As a follow-up to my post, here's a piece in the NY Times about Skadden associates being offered $80K to "take a year off." And part of the "taking a year off" for the associate they interview entails "practicing non-profit law" where they can.

It's really hard for me not to say "fuck you, associates." Go coast on the capitalist system you help to prop up during your day jobs. Leave the breaking it down - or at least working with people that the same system is crushing - to those of us who make half of your time off, play money.

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The Economics of Law Firm Deferments and "Public Interest Placements"

There's a storm that's been brewing across Ameri¢a with this economic nuttiness. Law firms have been letting scores of lawyers go, and the once golden opportunities that locked people just entering their 3L years into jobs with fat paychecks when they graduate have all but dried up. The firms this year have been rescinding offers, and for some people, telling them that they can start in January instead of September, or that they can get a stipend for working in a public interest job for a year while the firm waits to see how the economy changes. That has led to new opportunities with all of these new lawyers who don't have anything to do - and many new challenges. First, an aside...

I've had an ongoing conversation with my sister that's spanned the last year or two about the way that there are stigmas that we both have to deal with - as a firm attorney and as a public interest newbie (not respectively). I say sometimes it's hard to convince the firm lawyers that my work is "real lawyer work" because I talk about and try to focus on community outreach, information sharing, non-legal advocacy, and respect for peoples' process rather than buy the line that this is a "nation of laws." For many firm lawyers, that just isn't "practicing law" - litigation is practicing law, or burying the world in reams of paper is practicing law, but what I think of as the most exciting part of this work is something totally else.

My sis tells me that she thinks that public interest attorneys scoff at firm attorneys regardless of their situation because they act as if they are better (i.e. not sell-outs). She (and definitely other friends of mine) have spoken about the privilege that allows many people to go into poor paying jobs in public interest: it's not a shocker that many of these positions are taken up by white women from well-educated, moneyed families. If you're the first attorney in your family, you may not have the full flexibility to just go do whatever you want to do. I buy this for some people, but not everyone. I don't curl my lip up at someone just for working at a firm, but I do if they don't seem at least interested in the other work that's out there, and don't acknowledge the privilege that they have in some way.

This all is relevant because we're starting to get inquiries from graduating students who have been asked to seek a public interest placement while the firms wait for this recession to blow over. Suddenly, students and "bright stars" from the law firm partner fast track seem to need our organizations, because they have nothing else to do. The thing is: we want to help out, but it's a tremendous burden to take someone on just for a year (or worse, 6 months), and it's not clear what the organization gets out of it, save for another breathing (and demanding) body. At a time when resources are so hard to come by, I'm sure that many groups will take them up on these offers. But what does it mean for us and for our work at the end of the day?

I'm worried, because while I want to open up our work and the prospect of doing something meaningful in the community for these new lawyers. But I've seen what they are being offered to work in our organizations for the time being, and even though it may be only 50% or 60% of what they were being offered as first-year associates, it's still incredibly obnoxious, and possibly moreso than even the full amount because it suggests how the firms value working in public interest. Half their worth/earning potential in the private sector, but that's still double what we currently make. What that says is that either the firms and foundations have been keeping us down as full time folks committed to this work, or it's our management. Either prospect is fairly grim.

These are interesting times.

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The Abuse of APA Agencies by Mainstream Service Groups

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Mainstream service organization that's been around for a long time always gets a big chunk of money to work with a large subset of the population - such as children in the City or seniors in the County. Said organization does not have bilingual staff, usually at all, though there are now more Spanish-speaking white folks around, particularly in legal service organizations.

But regardless, they just don't have bilingual staff, and they use LanguageLine or that old AT&T service to call in people with the language ability (but who may not be local, or have any knowledge about the subject matter at all - a critical need in health and legal service provision, let alone mental health). But of course, their actual mandate is to serve all people, often regardless of immigration status, who fit into their slice of the population (women, seniors, children, whatever).

So what happens? Often, they only do one or two outreach events a year in the APA community, in particular. They use community organizations instead of other spaces like libraries because they have absolutely no way of reaching out themselves (and many traditional legal service organizations don't outreach much at all anyway). And here's the kicker: they don't have the bilingual staff and don't hire interpreters to effectively communicate with the community members. For some reason, that's not important enough for these people, and they just don't get it.

These organizations end up asking (i.e. telling) the community-based groups to do last-minute translations and interpretations. You know the groups - those that are hanging on with bare bones budgets, in spaces that are too small, staff that is underpaid, directors who are often first generation and sometimes not the best managers, but groups that the communities trust and that have been there for their community day in and day out.

This is totally unacceptable. Asian American community organizations should be supported to work directly in their own communities - it makes sense in larger cities to have larger, mainstream service organizations that can take care of common problems, and I feel strongly that they should work with all communities, but they have to step up and integrate language and cultural competence across the board - from their staffing to their processes and expectations of clients. Until that happens, it ever will, there is a critical need that organizations serving immigrants fulfill.

Some Asian American community organizations can work with individuals in a number of different languages, which is still better than the mainstream organizations, but the established groups actually have other resources for the smaller language communities (like Ilocano or Thai) that the mainstream groups cannot even begin to understand. But our groups are not interpreter agencies. And our value should not be limited to just filling in the gaps that the big groups don't want to accept are their responsibility too.

This is why most of our organizations should move from just direct service provision to both advocacy within service circles for full and equal community access, and organizing within our communities so that they can create their own solutions and raise their voices against business as usual in the nonprofit-industrial complex.

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To Work (or Not) in the Community: That is the Question

Although I'm studying for the bar, the question about what comes next has been on my mind a lot. With it came the question of whether I should move from working in the South/Asian American community where I have some experience to a more mainstream poverty/movement organization.

The plus for the latter is that there are few Asian American (and far fewer South Asian) groups that have adequate infrastructure to train or even give requisite substantive support for particular poverty law disciplines (public benefits, housing, economic justice). Going to a mainstream organization could be a good place to cut my teeth as a new lawyer, just trying to figure out how things work and trying to learn how to actually be a lawyer (notwithstanding whether or not I want to do that for the long term, or whether I feel that's the best pathway to real change - we'll cross that bridge when I find it).

While it's not always a deal-breaker, one of the things I've felt coming up was that you were basically damn lucky if you found a mentor in the APA community who gave a shit about whether you were, 1) learning anything and growing; and 2) afforded the opportunity to actually develop and take on more responsibilities. Nonprofits as a whole aren't that good at this, but frankly, at least on the East coast, this is a real problem. I've seen so many of my friends and comrades drop away from working in APA organizations in their late 20s/early 30s just because they were sick of the new glass ceiling they encountered in these groups, something I like to call the APA Charlton Heston school of leadership: upper management that won't relinquish control or power to the younger set at any cost... "from my cold, dead hands," as it were.

I've spent a lot of time getting over how I felt about this problem. I've met some West Coast folks who just don't seem to have the same chip on their shoulders. They also tend to be people who were actually active in more radical/community-based activism in the 60s and 70s. There are other issues with APA stuff from the West Coast (namely, where are the South Asians at?!) but this leadership thing is a killer. I don't want to assume control/a leadership position. I just don't want to be shut out because I'm not part of the little clique of revolving EDs in some of the organizations (East Coast locals and nationals). It's time we brought a radical change, son.

But this question of where to start after this course of study really bothered me. It's not about selling out - after all, it's still public interest of some kind. It's not about being uncomfortable amongst clients/co-workers who are not of "the same community" - because let's face it: Asian American communities are more or less a convenient (or necessary?) fiction, at least in the client base/community level. The only folks who really embrace that identity are folks who are community workers - it's safe, it's known, it's necessary to justify the work we're doing, and it helps to orient our work in broader immigrants' rights/people of color/poor peoples' campaigns.

So what is it? I think I still have that sense of selling out the community in some way if I'm not working directly in it. There's a real difference between volunteering when you have time, and being able to do this work full time, no matter how much we want to think otherwise. I'm not as young as I used to be - I still have energy, but the more distractions/disparate projects, the less effective I'm going to be in my primary work and even in my personal life.

I still think the revolution is never going to be funded, and that volunteer/micro-organizing is incredibly effective, but I want my work life and my volunteer/DIY life to overlap in some basic ways. The people we meet/work with in one arena could easily place multiple roles in multiple projects if there's enough resonance between projects for which we're wearing different hats. I think.

At the same time, am I just working in a comfort zone and limiting my ability to do more in my program areas because I'm not moving beyond this space? It's hard to tell (and isn't that what coalitions are for, anyway?).

So we'll see how this pans out.

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The Difference between NetSAP and NASABA

Before I took the law school path, I used to think that of all the second generation organizations out there in desi land, NetSAP was the worst of the bunch. With events that were thinly veiled meat markets, 3-minute conversations that died when you said the word "non-profit," and the infiltration of more suits at Basement Bhangra than a sale at Nordstroms, I guess I had just cause. And I definitely dreaded going to anything where "NetSAP people" would be.

In that vein, the current -- and seemingly perennial -- flurry of vocal disgust/opposition to NASABA in the days before their annual conference has quickly and permanently displaced NetSAP from its reviled position as the most privileged and clueless organization in the community.

However, with all due (lack of) respect, while some may want to just lump together organizations as two sides of the same socially unconscious coin (I'll call it NetSABA to save space), I have a special place I've reserved for the lawyer group. Still, I thought it would be instructive to highlight a few small points where they are clearly different. So humbly, I present to you:

Five Ways to Tell the Difference Between NetSAP and NASABA

5. Over time, NetSAP events have actually become less of a meat market.


4. NetSAP actually does community service as a group.


3. NetSAP's chapters don't think the national board has gone off the deep end.


2. NetSAP leadership seems to understand what it means to be a professional organization, and leaves the policy work to people who aren't blinded by personal agendas or biases.


1. NASABA has an elephant in its logo. (Realize that was for NASALSA, i.e. NASABA's Farm Team)



With NetSAP, it was a stereotype of the membership and the events/activities that drove some of the antagonism. There weren't really specific personalities or even particular issues with the leadership. But with NASABA - it's all about specific personalities and their ability to turn personal worldviews and career ambition (such as entry-level prosecutors and big firm people) into the full-on persona of the organization.

While their events leave little more than a bad taste in your mouth if you have any public interest leaning (not because there aren't people with strong public interest or pro bono commitments in the membership, but because the leadership seems clueless about any of it). Also, the leadership has taken a highly questionable aggressive pro-prosecutor/DEA stance on something like Operation Meth Merchant - a program that so clearly stinks of selective enforcement and racial profiling that even my Mom gets that it's wrong.

The leadership should poll the members and other South Asian attorneys to see how on point their cockeyed stance has been, and how it resonates with their own membership. Hell, they should add a question about whether they really matter at all. Meanwhile, until they do something about their madness, here's the petition telling them they don't represent them. Sign it, and pass it on.

And then keep focusing on work that actually matters.

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Be Careful What You Fall For: The Battle for Public Interest

Hyper-Conservatives have gotten really good at co opting good names for things, in the hope that they can reel in the uninitiated, making them think that they are in a supportive, positive space, before they slam the door and pull out the hoods. Okay, so Ku Klux Klan sounds spooky without even thinking about what they actually did. But these guys are definitely getting smarter.

Take for example, the Institute for Justice. I stumbled upon this when doing some research about eminent domain. An organization called the Castle Coalition was featuring a new piece about the impact of eminent domain on African Americans. I said right on, let me read this. Then I thought, hell, this is interesting as a group that publishes so much on this topic, so I dug further and found that it was a program of the Institute for Justice.

So then I started reading, and realized that IJ supports school choice. Well, that sounds good. But "school choice" is the code for school vouchers. And someone not doing education work, such as myself, could have easily fallen right into that trap. Then you realize that despite the glossy look that speaks of civil liberties and constitutional rights, the place is anti-government regulation to the point of saying clearly that it is against the "welfare-state." But the clincher was when I read this:

IJ sues the government when it stands in the way of people trying to earn an honest living, when it takes away individuals' property, when bureaucrats (not parents) control the education of children, when government stifles speech, and when public institutions classify individuals based on race.

Woah. Great. So in the midst of talking so much about equal protection, these guys are anti-affirmative action, and who knows what else. And avid supporters of First Amendment rights can also take the shade of hate-speech protectors, campaign finance reform opponents, and who knows what else. I definitely almost fell for it. Who knows if their legal interns understand that they are on a different side of "individual rights" than some of the more traditional civil rights/liberties groups. But I could also see very interesting/uneasy alliances between these guys and others, depending on the issue.

But this is definitely a weird trend - the Freedom-Based Public Interest Legal Movement (FBPILM). Basically, right-wing groups have been taking on the guise of public interest with a very different agenda than the standard legal aid/civil rights perspective. I don't know how I feel about this - part of me, from my obvious political leanings, thinks that this is crazy. But part of me feels like we have to delve more deeply into what is actually in the public's interest. I mean, if folks really believe that small government (i.e. decreasing or eliminating the so-called welfare state) is in everyone's best interest, then I guess this is the means by which they are pursuing that goal.

But ultimately, I guess the question is whether the different camps view "public" as meaning individuals, or our shared community as a whole. If there are principles that we believe in that extend somewhere beyond individual rights, or if we can accept that sometimes to ensure that everyone has some basic level of rights we all have to give something up, well, then maybe we can talk. But if it's all about the individual in front of them, and not the invisible many who are on the other side of the equation - if we view it as a zero-sum game with no hope of expanding the pie for everyone, well, then their perspective protects the rights not to lose to someone else (like a militia in Montana, I guess).

Anyway, for more on the FBPILM, check out Timothy Foden's interesting article, The Battle for Public Interest Law: Exploring the Orwellian Nature of the Freedom-Based Public Interest Law Movement, 4 Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal 210 (2004-05). Or you can visit the Institute for Justice, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ - clever, huh?), or one of the many other groups out there.

It's a scary field, once you start clicking around. It's not always easy to sort out which groups are aligned with your interests, and which are opposed. So beware before you click, or worse, write a check.

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Top Five Reasons Why I Hate the Bluebook

Top Five Reasons Why I Hate the Bluebook:

5) It’s not even really a book, but more a spiral-bound manual that sits awkwardly on a shelf because it is spineless and prone to slumping (kind of like law students, sometimes). When shelved horizontally, it is hard to distinguish from the instruction manual that came with your facsimile machine in the mid-80s.

4) The Bluebook is most closely associated with Law Reviews and Journals, a fundamental central column of the traditional (read: white and privileged) law school path. While I have respect for writers, the straight line drawn from having Law Review on your resume and a so-called prestigious job upon graduation is problematic (more below).

3) The Bluebook is the formal codification of rules maintained, updated, deliberated, and propagated by privileged law students at four of the “elite” law schools (Harvard, Yale, UPenn, and Columbia Law Review staff). I have a visceral revulsion towards these schools, the privilege and entitlement inherent in the old guard and the old ways of doing things. Why? Because people of color weren’t allowed into these institutions, they represent an old order hat doesn’t acknowledge my equal standing, looks down upon my public school upbringing, and feels entitled to leadership. I, and the many practitioners who are tired of standards driven by elite students, will take AWLD any day, even through it’s not likely to become the standard for quite some time, if at all. Then again, when I look at the detailed description of the AWLD manual, it’s also not really very different, save in the way that court document citations differ from academic articles. Oh well. Forget the endorsement herein included.

2) I’m a bit of a grammar nut in civilian writing (though you may not be able to glean that from these pages), but I have had the hardest time with the counter-intuitive rules of the Bluebook, and I find myself caring less and less about the placement of commas, the minutiae of where one must underline and what order and in which short configuration one must cite to case law and other references, not to mention signal hell (e.g., like, see, but, see also, as if, whateva!). Frankly, the Blue Book has gotten me to pay more attention to the citation sentence than the actual textual sentence. Oh yeah, and perhaps my biggest pet peeve is that an ellipse in legal writing has to have a space between the periods, or in other words: “ . . . ” instead of “...” Let writers write, damn it!

1) It is embraced by the cream of the nerd crowd as the standard by which to distinguish different legal writing, regardless of the actual content of the work. Whether I underline/italicize the right way is not going to increase access to justice. It will be the structure of my argument, and the content of my discussion. At least, that’s what I have to hope, because if I believe our writing department, it’s not just suspicion of sloppiness that will raise eyebrows, but even the errant ellipse or e.g. will get my case thrown off a court’s docket. If that’s the truth, then forget the fair adjudication of issues of critical concern. I’m throwing in the towel and finding myself a small bar to run on a beach somewhere.

As you can tell, especially the lawyers and law students out there, this list is more about law journals/law reviews and the importance given to them in the hierarchy of law school activities than it is about the Bluebook itself (though I definitely have issues with it on its own). Maybe this is just bitterness because it’s that lovely finals time of the year again.

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Little India and ABC(J)D's

Just received the latest edition of Little India, the free magazine that litters the shelves of restaurants, groceries, and other desi joints up and down the East Coast, although I'm certain that they are shipping boxes of their publication across the nation. The cover story is called "Bar None" and features a triptych of L.A. Law shots of three desi attorneys, in action, with microphones filling the frame of one of them, and a woman with clenched fist and armful of legal briefs in another.

In the pages that follow (8 to be exact) Lavina Melwani, a reporter who has been with Little India for quite some time, and even won a few second place mentions in the Ippies (Independent Press Association - NY Awards) for her ethnic/immigrant journalism in 2004, proceeds to explore the exciting story of how desi attorneys are ripping it up across the United States.

Of course, she takes the boastful auntie angle, parading the best and the brightest as per a very specific set of criteria, and unfortunately, fully missing the opportunity to write about some of the many outstanding attorneys that have been and continue to do really amazing work in the public interest and specifically for desi communities in the United States.

For example, she writes about wunder-barrister Neal Katyal, the Georgetown Professor and lead attorney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the federal challenge to the military tribunals set up by Bush at Gitmo, but she neglects to mention the tremendous work of desi and other attorneys on the front lines of the detention and deportation work, such as attorneys working with CAIR, Families for Freedom, and Desis Rising Up and Moving, who spent years working with clients directly, spending time with the families, fighting each case that they could even though the odds were against the families that they were representing, and taking the fight to the very last moments before the deportee had to fly back to Asia or the Middle East, and then with the broken families that were left behind.

Melwani mentions the NASABA conference in DC, which was reported on and dissected on Sepia Mutiny, and speaks with Vijay Bondada, outgoing president of NASABA (who presided over the decision to name their public interest award after Congressman Saund, as mentioned previously). Bondada (whose name is mangled multiple times in this article, as Little India seems to do with almost every desi name - perhaps hoping to play with the big boys in corporate media by showing "hey - we can screw up these names too!", or perhaps just refusing to shell over any dough for a decent copy-editor), states smartly:

What really is the question is not just the numbers in the big firms - because we have the numbers - at NASABA about 60-70 percent of the lawyers there are at private firms, some of them at the nation's leading firms. the question becomes how many of them are at the top of their game, on top of the food chain?

Brilliant. You have truly captured the essence of the challenge for young and mid-career South Asian attorneys trying to find their place on the food chain of the marketplace. Considering that a decent percentage of the attorneys are themselves vegetarians, it may be tough for them to achieve this goal - aza! is this another instance of institutional racism, keeping the veggies out of the running for top carnivore in the firm?!

I'll drop the sarcasm - but there's no mention of the need for more attorneys who want to work for the public interest, the growing and diverse South Asian communities, or other issues of social justice, and little to no interest from Melwani to push the issue further. She continues with a who's who of government employees as a list of "other Indians involved in public service." Where are the public interest attorneys?

To her credit, Melwani mentions Vanita Gupta, who has shot up in the ranks of desi stardom through her tireless work in Texas through the NAACP-Legal Defense Fund, but fails to mention attorneys in the midst of great social justice work for South Asian and other immigrant communities. Gupta, the recipient of the NASABA Dalip Singh Saund award (who was up against Neal Katyal and Suhag Shukla from the Hindu American Foundation), will also have her role in the landmark case that she litigated dramatized (and changed sufficiently around) with Halle Berry stepping in to add some star power. But nowhere in the article are other public interest attorneys who are doing amazing work, like Amardeep Singh with Sikh Coalition, Saru Jayaraman with ROC-NY, Deepa Iyer with SAALT, or even Mallika Dutt with Breakthrough, or hell, what about Urvashi Vaid? And there are so many folks who have been leaders in this work in the past as well, like Tito Sinha and Chaumtoli Huq, both formerly with AALDEF, the latter also working with New York Taxi Workers Alliance for at least a year. Where are these names, and the countless others who are changing the face of work concerning immigrant communities, and taking a stand to make certain that our community's voices are no longer marginalized in the courtrooms, or in the laws set out for so long to marginalize, exclude, or unfairly single out our communities? What about their contributions?

Don't get me wrong, she mentions some great folks with great accomplishments, but many are the obvious choices for this article (and some have large enough egos without the overexposure). Someone like Melwani, who has spoken with many people working in the desi communities of New York City for one story or another, and written some great pieces about the community over the past decade+, should have reviewed her own articles from the past to come up with other folks to highlight and to balance out the story.

Instead, she missed the boat, and repeated the same tired "model minority" story that is tiring, and not at all inspirational for someone about the begin a legal education. And most infuriating for someone who has actually seen and been inspired by the work of so many community-based lawyers who aren't mentioned in the article at all.

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