How Can Legal Aid Hold On to Good Attorneys?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dori Rapaport:

Every time you turn over another staff person, the number of people that you help goes down the amount of time it takes to have somebody come back to working at that capacity, you’ve lost so much productivity and that happens over and over and over again when you can’t pay people what they deserve to be paid.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice, an An LSC Podcast will explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders’ Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Ron Flagg:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. Today we’re talking about recruiting and retaining attorneys at civil legal aid programs. When freshly minted attorneys come out of law school, they may feel that they stand where Robert Frost put it, two roads diverge in a yellow wood. They see private law firms on one path and they see public interest work on another. And to extend this metaphor, the world of legal aid attorneys is perhaps the road less traveled by. It’s no secret that this type of legal work does not lead to the highest salaries in the profession. Currently, the median entry level salary for legal aid attorneys is about $64,000 compared to the median entry level salary for a mid-size private law firm at $110,000. These are obviously nationwide averages, legal aid starting salaries, even lag behind the starting salaries for public defenders and other public interest attorneys for the legal aid programs that LSE funds.

We know that recruiting and retaining a staff of highly skilled lawyers and other service providers is vital to their mission with limited resources. How do legal aid programs compete? As I travel around the country, the challenge most frequently mentioned by Legal Aid senior leaders is recruiting and retaining good people. In our conversation today, we’re getting to hear about how a Minnesota legal aid program secured funding to raise attorney salaries and how benefit initiatives employed by an Arkansas legal provider help boost legal aid attorney recruitment and retention. I’m excited to introduce our two guests, two longtime colleagues of mine. Dori Rappaport is executive director of Justice North, a civil legal aid provider serving 11 counties in northeastern Minnesota. And Lee Richardson is executive director of Legal Aid of Arkansas, which serves 31 counties across Arkansas. Now to kick off our conversation and to set the table, could each of you tell us how many attorneys and other staff you employ and the historic challenges your organizations have faced recruiting and retaining attorneys and other staff? Lee, why don’t we start with you?

Lee Richardson:

Well, thank you Ron and thank you for having me here today. Historically, well, I’ll back up and tell you first that we have around 30 attorneys. We generally fluctuate between 27 and 34 attorneys depending on funding and depending on fellowship sending or starting and such things as that. But about 54 staff members overall saw about half of the staff as attorneys generally. Historically, recruiting’s been a problem. It’s been more of a compensation issue, but more recently, over the last decade or so, it’s turned more into supply and demand, rural versus urban Arkansas as second lowest in the nation. In attorneys per capita of South Dakota and North Dakota, we have 2.2 attorneys per every thousand residents in Arkansas. So we already start off way behind and as you know, back in 2011 12, we had a much higher rate of people coined to law school than we have now. I know by 2018 that number was down 16% and then you compound that with 25% of the attorneys in the country living in either California or New York, and you see a problem in the rural parts of Middle America supply and demand problem.

Ron Flagg:

Dory, what have you seen?

Dori Rapaport:

Thanks Ron. So at Justice North we have 45 staff, but I feel like what’s really important to look at when we’re talking about the landscape in Minnesota is really the ratio of civil legal aid attorneys to the people that are potentially eligible for legal aid services. And when LSC was just in Minnesota in July for its board of directors meeting, we were lucky enough to have Chief Justice Hudson of the Minnesota Supreme Court speak and she gave a great visual metaphor to really drive home just how few attorneys there are in Minnesota to provide civil legal aid. She said, think about the US Bank Stadium fill up the entire US Bank stadium. It’s at 12,000 people and there’s only three lawyers to help that entire crowd of people. And something like that just really drives home that this justice gap is massive and we have to start thinking creatively about how we’re actually going to provide better services to people of all income levels to access the civil justice system.

Ron Flagg:

Dory Lee mentioned the factor of being a operating primarily in rural areas and your program likewise has extensive rural areas. How does that affect the challenge of attracting and retaining attorneys and other staff?

Dori Rapaport:

Being a part of such rural communities has its pros and its cons. It allows for more relational connections and people knowing who they’re going to work for, which can be a really positive thing. But there are a lot of people that are looking for a more metropolitan place to grow up and raise their families. And so sometimes it’s hard for us to attract candidates to some of our more rural areas. We live in one of the most beautiful places in the entire country in my opinion. And I think I don’t like to talk about how great it is. I kind of like it being a secret, but it is really challenging when we post an attorney position, for example in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, sometimes we will get three viable attorney applicants. And that’s really hard when you’re trying to make sure that you’re hiring great people to represent those who need our help the most. And so there are rural challenges to recruitment and certainly trying to find things like housing and options and ensuring that there’s diversity in your staff too is really impacted by being in rural areas.

Ron Flagg:

In a prior life, I was president of the DC bar and I once spoke to the conference of Chief Justices in Washington where they were meeting and I welcomed them on behalf of the a hundred thousand members of the DC bar and the chief justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court came up to me immediately after he said, could you send some of them to South Dakota? We have, I don’t remember the precise number, but it was like 20 or 30 counties where we have no lawyers other than maybe the county court judge and the county prosecuting attorney. So there’s not just a dearth of legal aid lawyers, but a dearth of lawyers as Lee mentioned in rural areas throughout America. Now we’ve got both of you here to talk about ways to overcome the barriers to attracting and retaining people, and part of it is money. And Dory, you were able to substantially increase your attorney’s salaries last year. Could you explain where that funding came from and how it all came together?

Dori Rapaport:

Happy to. I just want to start by saying that when I started at Justice North, which was formerly known as Legal Aid Service of Northeastern Minnesota in 2017 staff attorneys, their starting salaries was $45,000. And at that time we had about 30 staff and across the state of Minnesota, that was really the starting salary. That wasn’t that long ago. That was seven years ago. And turnover, I’d say during that time was anywhere between 20% to just in 2021, we hit a peak of 37% for turnover. I mean we were bleeding, it was like crisis mode and Minnesota’s unique for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is we have the Minnesota Legal Services Coalition where programs who receive by statute 85% of a state appropriation towards civil legal services programs, the executive directors of those named programs work together to educate the state legislature on why civil legal services needs those funds.

And we are the ones that are coming forth and asking for funds each year that we’re able to. And that year we had a champion in the house, representative Jamy Becker Finn, and she was the chair of the judiciary committee that was making decisions about what was happening from Minnesota then was a surplus. And her priorities were the public defender and civil legal services, which was phenomenal. But she asked us, what would it take to fully fund civil legal services? Now how do you answer that? It was complicated math. It was an art to figure out that math, but we did and we came back to her, we a massive number for us and she said, okay, this is what we needed to know. And so we as a coalition started working on a six year plan for how could we incrementally get to this fully funded number where we’re prioritizing salary parody but simultaneously building capacity so that we’re able to help start to close some of that justice gap.

But working on the salary parody was really what helped us stop the bleeding because every time you turn over another staff person, the number of people that you help goes down because that person leaves. You have to hire the amount of time it takes to have somebody come back to working at that capacity. You’ve lost so much productivity and that happens over and over and over again when you can’t pay people what they deserve to be paid. And so we agreed as a state that we were going to prioritize putting these funds towards salary parody and then incrementally, like I said, start working on building capacity and hiring more staff. But that’s more complicated than just hiring more staff, right? It’s making stronger infrastructure. So as of July of 2024, we are now at starting salaries for staff attorneys at $80,000 and that’s huge. We started at 45 in 20 17, 20 24 we’re at 80.

We are chasing a moving target though, let’s be real because the other public sector opportunities, public defender and people at the attorney general’s office, county attorneys, city attorneys, they’re still ahead of us and they’re still growing, but we have to keep up. We have to continue to keep up. We have to advocate for why salary parity is so important. And so having a champion in the house made all the difference for us and having someone pose to us what would it take? And then developing that plan was critical when we talked to both the House and the Senate and we were able to get that funding. And so it was huge for us. This was an 84% increase in our state appropriation. There’s not even a great ward to describe just how huge that was for us.

Ron Flagg:

I know it’s still relatively early days and obviously the numbers, the starting salary numbers in and of themselves are impressive and one can imagine that they have to have an impact if you post a job that previously might not have gotten any applicants or two or three as you say, presumably, and hopefully you’re getting more, but what have you seen any impact yet?

Dori Rapaport:

The turnover has gone down dramatically. So we actually did a legislative update for our state legislature earlier this year and the data we had statewide was able to demonstrate that turnover. So in 2021, we were bleeding at that 37% turnover rate and we are now down as of beginning of 20, 24 to 20% for turnover. That’s still higher than we want it to be, but that’s been cut in half thanks to the beginning implementation of this salary parody. But anecdotally, it’s just made such a difference in the lives of the staff that commit career is to this work and we’re able to recruit new and more talent when we have openings. My colleagues at other organizations in Minnesota are talking about how their hiring pools are better than they ever have been and they’ve been there for many years. And so really we are where we need to be right now.

Ron Flagg:

We all know that salary is critical, but it isn’t everything. There are many other aspects to a good working environment, and Lee, I know legal aid directors, including yourself, have to be really innovative and creative to think about those other factors and how to make your work environment attractive even where you don’t have as much money as you’d like. I understand that you’ve implemented a sabbatical program at Legal Aid of Arkansas. How did that come to be and how has it benefited your organization?

Lee Richardson:

That’s one thing. There’s several things we’ve put together including the sabbatical program that I think has led us to, in the last 12 months we’ve had a 4.3% turnover in attorneys. And the 12 months before that, it was less than 10%. So I believe this sabbatical program and some other things I mentioned went a long way in doing that because here in the south we don’t have a legislature that’s going to be inclined to give us the kind of money. We don’t get any state money and give us any kind of money to significantly increase salaries. But the sabbatical program, like all executive directors, I’m on list serves and look at what other programs are doing around the country. And in April of 2022, I saw where the Legal Aid Association of California had just implemented a sabbatical program that was in April and by July had pretty much stolen everything they had and tweaked it a bit.

And we had deployed our own sabbatical program where after five years you get three weeks of paid sabbatical leave and you can add three weeks of vacation to that to make it six, and then after 10 years it moves to eight weeks of leave and you can add four weeks of vacation. So that gives you 12 weeks and then every five years thereafter it repeats. And we’ve had several employees take advantage of this so far. Not everyone that is eligible because you have to find the time to be able to do that consistent with program needs, but I think it’s had a big impact not just in people being able to do it, but people knowing that it’s available when you’re trying to hire people that along with cost of living increases that have kept up with the Colas. We’ve increased salaries 18% over the last three years and we started a little over 56,000 now, but we have it fast tracked to we’re about year eight or at about 90,000, which is pretty good for a program in the south, pretty competitive with what the state does at this point.

Flexible working arrangements, which we’ve probably all started implementing in covid, we rolled out a policy prior to that, in fact, where you had compressed work weeks, you have flex time, you have telecommuting and all these things together make us more attractive than some other places where attorneys may be recruited to come and work and then benefits just looking at your benefits again. For example, we had a antiquated vesting requirement with our retirement where you had to be here so many years before you vested in what the legal aid of Arkansas matched 5%, but you didn’t get the full benefit of that until you had been here a good number of years. We changed that to where you immediately start vesting in a hundred percent in what legal aid of Arkansas matches in the retirement system after 90 days. And I think if you combine all these together, none of them still have the same impact as the ability to come in and do impact work that you’re not going to be able to do coming out of law school and going elsewhere. We’ve had attorneys with three years or less experience at the US Supreme Court arguing before the eighth Circuit Court of appeals doing work that impacts tens of millions of people around the country and other people in law school and then the community see those opportunities and they want to be a part of that. And I believe that’s, you combine all of that and that’s where the high retention rate comes into play.

Ron Flagg:

Well, you’ve made a lot of great points and one of ’em is you mentioned that you’d seen reference to the sabbatical programs in California and being in the senior management of a legal aid program is such a challenging job. I mean, you’re trying to serve thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands in some cases, millions of people with just a handful of staff. And so you really have to be creative and innovative and nobody can do it on their own. You may be a genius and innovative, but you really need to get the best ideas from your colleagues around the country. So there are national conferences and regional and statewide, and I know people in your positions, you get great pleasure out of helping your colleagues in other parts of your state and regions and country, and that’s one of the things that makes the legal aid community so wonderful and so effective legal aid work is you described Lee can of course be very rewarding, but it can also be stressful, stressful to on a daily basis, grapple with life impacting hardships faced by your clients, whether they’re family issues or housing issues or employment issues.

I mean, these are the most significant issues that people face. They’re really bet the company issues that people who are experiencing poverty have to deal with every day. What are your thoughts on how legal aid providers organizations can help their staff weather the tougher times in their careers in terms of this day-to-Day stress and the risk of burnout? Dory,

Dori Rapaport:

That is something, I mean I remember really seeing that during the pandemic, the stress of the pandemic on top of the nature of the work we were doing was just so much for staff and it was really important to name that wellness is something that is part of our culture and something that we value and that we want our staff to take time to do. And so at Justice North we actually implemented a wellness hour every week. Staff is able to document their time and call at wellness and we don’t define what they do for wellness. They get to choose what they are going to need to do to take care of themselves. And that investment in our staff and the message that it sent them meant so much to them and continues to be an option that our staff utilizes the majority of all staff utilize and they utilize it every week.

In addition to that, I know Lee touched on this, and Ron you touched on this as well. It’s so important to have options. It’s so important to not get stuck in doing the same work and the continuous exposure and secondary trauma exposure that are happening for all of our staff. From intake to staff attorneys, it’s important for them to have the opportunity to be part of new initiatives and to look at solutions that are bigger than individual casework. For example, in Minnesota, leadership on our staff helped develop the Minnesota Paraprofessionals project, which is an opportunity for expansion of who can help people in court and who can provide direct services to people. That has been a huge improvement for feeling like we are empowered when we’re empowering people that were paralegals to now do more and they can be in court with folks. I mean, that’s just been a game changer. But also knowing that they have the opportunity to do things like preventative legal care or disaster preparedness work or making the justice system in general more accessible to lay people by being part of reform on the forms that come from the courts, for example. There are so many opportunities for us to improve the justice system and we are injecting that energy and that drive to stay with it. If we give folks those outlets to find solutions, it really helps keep them feeling fulfilled in their work.

Ron Flagg:

Lee, your retention rates, your success at retention tells me that you’ve come up with some strategies for helping people deal with the stress of that they share with their clients or they share as a result of the challenges faced by their clients. What strategies have you come up with?

Lee Richardson:

Well, we always try to be cognizant of vicarious trauma, empathy, fatigue, and make sure we provide staff regular training opportunities and forums to address those issues. Generally, we have substantive work group meetings every week, and that’s always a topic at each of those work group meetings, particularly if you get in the domestic violence realm or something like that. We even give those attorneys opportunities from time to time to rotate to other groups just to get a break because of the intensity of that work. But we try to make sure everyone knows that it’s not wrong for them to be feeling the way they’re feeling. They’re not broken or anything. It’s a real thing and we all feel it from time to time. So we try to make sure and reinforce that. And then we had a year long diversity, equity and inclusion training with an outside contractor, which was basically a monthly thing for all staff.

We did not require the training, but 95% of the staff participated in the training. And I believe that addressed some other issues that we may not be thinking about in this realm. But I know that whenever I’ve interviewed attorneys recently, new attorneys seem to ask about where our program is in that regard and we’re able to talk about all the efforts we’ve made in that area. But that’s an ongoing thing now with a internal working group of 10 or 12 staff members, basically almost 25% of the staff to try to keep those efforts ongoing and presenting trainings at least once a quarter that are related to both the empathy fatigue, the vicarious trauma and the DEI type issues. So you put all that together and I think it’s made a big difference in our ability to recruit and retain.

Ron Flagg:

And again, one thing that resonates with me from both your sets of comments, all of this is intentional. It doesn’t just happen if you don’t sort of recognize these issues as real and think collectively with your colleagues about how to address them. They’ll either be completely unaddressed or not addressed nearly as well as they need to be. And obviously both of you have spent a lot of time thinking about and dealing with these issues intentionally. Now, both of your organizations have hosted interns from the Rural Summer Legal Corps program, which is an LSC program that places law students, Ruth Rural Legal Aid offices for internships. What do you hear from law students who have had that experience and what advice would you offer to law students who are considering pursuing a career in Legal aid? Lee

Lee Richardson:

And I think every year of the program’s existence except one, we’ve probably hosted one or two students in that project and it has paid off. We’ve actually had a couple of those students come back and be staff attorneys at Legal Aid of Arkansas and do high level work for us. So that’s a very, very exciting opportunity every time we see it come up. But the students generally give very positive feedback about the ability to come in and do the work and have hands-on one-on-one work with clients and attorneys in the field, in the rural areas that we serve in Arkansas. We have to do a lot to ramp up and be ready for that because they’re here for a short period of time and they’re generally somewhere where we don’t have a lot of staff and the staff we do have is busy. So we have to be intentional about how we handle those things to make sure everybody gets a good experience.

And at the end of the day, the clients we serve benefit and the student benefits as well. We take that a step further and have a spring break on the Road to Justice project that we’ve done every year now for probably 15 years with the law schools in Arkansas. And we’ve expanded that to the law school at the University of Memphis where we take six to 10 law students into rural areas for spring break and do a day of training. And then we do three to four days of clinics where we either seal criminal records or do wills in the estates, Eric’s property type things, or we do fair housing testing, but then that generally pays off by them going back and talking at the law schools about the experience they’ve had. And it’s also helped in our recruiting. So I believe that’s also helped maybe place a few people in the rural areas where we’re starting to have legal deserts across Arkansas.

Ron Flagg:

Again, intentionality. You really have to think strategically about these issues. Dory,

Dori Rapaport:

I agree with most of everything that Lee said about this. It’s been a phenomenal program. It’s definitely one tool that is consistently helping the areas of Minnesota that have rural legal deserts. Our service area, justice North Service area is definitely one of those. The opportunity is really, yes, it’s an investment of time because you have them just for a summer. However, it’s a pipeline. It is the pipeline to ensure that people get a real experience and a window into what it’s like to work for legal Aid, what it’s like to work for an organization that will prioritize their wellness and want to help them grow professionally and develop their strategic skill sets. And they get to come for a summer. And like Lee said, hands-on work. We have virtual courts still in Minnesota, so it really gives our law students an opportunity to practice in many courthouses, not just one. And so that’s an excellent experience for them as well. And then they leave and often we see them reapplying to come back and there are a number of individuals that work for us now that came to us through this pipeline. And so we’re really fortunate to continue to be recipients of this program.

Ron Flagg:

Well, Lee and Dory, we’ve been talking about recruiting and retaining great legal aid staff, and you are both shining examples of the tremendous impact successful recruiting and retention and leadership building has in a community. I’d like to ask each of you to tell us how long you’ve been working in legal aid and what has kept you there. So long, Dory.

Dori Rapaport:

I’ve been working in legal aid since I was a one L and I knew I wasn’t going to do anything else really. I mean, this is why I went to law school before I went to law school. I was in AmeriCorps and I had the opportunity in Colorado to be a casa, a court appointed special advocate. And I knew this was the work that I was meant to do. And I was fortunate to start my career by doing a lot of direct services in civil legal aid and just, I think it’s just who I am, but I was looking for how can we make this better? How can this system improve? I can’t accept that this is our status quo no matter what the topic was. And so that led me to be in an executive director position. I was executive director of the then standalone pro bono program that serves the same service area as Justice North where I learned how to be an executive director and work to actually hand in hand with the legal aid organization that I now lead.

And so I can’t imagine doing anything else. And I am so fortunate when I wake up every day and know that I get to work with this incredible, I’m feeling a little over clumped when I say it, but this incredible team at Justice North, I can’t even tell you what wonderful people I get to work with. And my colleagues, the other executive directors in Minnesota are fantastic, so collaborative and even in the Midwest, our Midwest directors and all the legal aid programs there. I look forward to getting together with them twice a year. It’s just such a wonderful world in civil legal aid.

Lee Richardson:

Lee and I started working for Legal services of Northeast Arkansas on January 7th, 1991. So I guess I’m coming up on my 34th year anniversary. And during that time, I’ve been a staff attorney, I’ve been a managing attorney, a litigation director, deputy director, executive director, back to deputy director, back to executive director. So I’ve served in nearly every role you could think about. And of course, the one that I cherish the most and wish that I could do most days, I wish I could do it again and again and again, is just simply being a staff attorney. That’s been the most rewarding. Being an executive director is much more challenging, but at the same time, someone’s got to do it so the other people can do the good work, good work that they do. But I grew up, my dad was a executive director of a community action program, so it was kind of in the DNA that I was going to do something like this and wouldn’t change any part of it after 34 years. But yeah, the most rewarding thing is to be able to see people thrive and have the ability to do the work they do without having to worry about other things. Because as management, we have their backs and take care of those issues so they can focus on helping the clients. And part of that obviously, is making sure they can make a comfortable living. So we’ve been talking about that here today and making sure they have all their needs met, they can focus on doing the work.

Ron Flagg:

Dorian Lee, thank you both for coming on this podcast to talk about your initiatives and thoughts around recruiting and retaining legal aid lawyers. But far more importantly, thanks so much for your years of devoted service to your communities in Arkansas and Minnesota, and to the countless benefits that service has provided to your communities. And thanks to our listeners for tuning into this episode of Talk Justice. Please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. Stay well.

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