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Annette Morris could barely choke back her rage one morning last April when she saw the locked stall in the women’s rest room of the Community Legal Services building in downtown Phoenix. In the legal-aid center for poor people, poor people were locked out of one of the rest-room stalls.
“The staff of the office decided they didn’t want to share a stall with clients,” says Morris. “I found that really offensive. Part of this is that I was reared in the South and I remember separate rest rooms.”
Annette Morris is a feisty lawyer–to some, she’s a pain in the neck. To see her, you’d never think she was once a teenage mom on welfare. But those early years were what prompted her to be an advocate for poor women. “I remember where I came from,” she says.
Annette Morris quit her job as a City of Phoenix prosecutor in January 1991 when she was hired as director of the domestic-violence project at Community Legal Services (CLS), a nonprofit law firm that offers free legal aid to poor people in Maricopa and four rural counties.
CLS helps people with noncriminal legal problems–like collecting wages from an employer who has cheated them or domestic disputes or wrangling with government over discrimination or benefits. The legal-aid center, run for nearly a decade by executive director Lillian Johnson, is primarily funded by the Legal Services Corporation, which doles out federal tax dollars. Occasionally, the feds send bureaucrats to Phoenix to monitor the legal-aid center. These visits set everyone’s nerves on edge.
People at CLS, like most legal-aid advocates, think the Legal Services Corporation wants to trip them up. The corporation is run by conservative appointees of President George Bush, who, the advocates fear, might shut down legal-aid clinics altogether because they see them as federally funded havens for rebel lawyers with a cause. (The Legal Services Corporation denies such an agenda and says it’s shut down only one legal-aid center in the past decade.)
The Arizona Bar Foundation, run by the state’s lawyers, also chips in funding. In fact, it was the foundation that made Morris’ domestic-violence program possible. It granted $82,000 to MD120 Col 1, Depth P54.04 I9.06 pay a couple of lawyers and a paralegal for the project, which was supposed to provide legal assistance to domestic- violence victims in Maricopa, Mohave, La Paz, Yavapai, and Yuma Counties. Things turned sour, however, almost as soon as Annette Morris moved into her office.
Shelter workers for victims of domestic violence told her on her rounds that they no longer refer battered women to CLS because the shelter directors claimed the women had been refused legal aid.
Morris also noticed that CLS seemed to be chronically short of lawyers, even though there was money in the budget to pay for additional lawyers.
Morris wasn’t the first disenchanted lawyer at CLS. Turnover among staff lawyers was high, and those who were poverty-law experts didn’t seem to stick around long enough to act as mentors for colleagues fresh out of law school. Most who’d stayed long enough to become knowledgeable had resigned in the past two years, disillusioned by what they saw as an internal bureaucracy that made it harder and harder for them to deliver legal services to poor people.
“I think the bottom line is that the administration was not committed to lawyering and lawyers,” says Leslie Hall, who resigned from CLS and is now director of the Consumer Fraud Division of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.
Hall and other lawyers did not leave because the salaries were among the lowest in the Southwest for legal-aid work. They did not leave because CLS administrators refused to disclose during bitter union talks why the administrators’ piece of the salary pie seemed disproportionately large. (Current CLS lawyers still make that complaint.)
These lawyers weren’t disenchanted because they weren’t making the big bucks of private practice. Many of them were committed to poverty law, and went on to take jobs as judges, prosecutors, public defenders and public-interest lawyers.
These lawyers were unhappy that, in their eyes, the basic purpose of CLS, helping poor people with legal problems, wasn’t happening–despite the statistics released by CLS administrators.
Few ex-CLS lawyers have been willing to go public with their complaints, fearing that if they did the federal government would cut funding. “It’s like the Peace Corps,” says Jean Col 3, Depth P54.02 I9.03 staffers had requested the private stall so that they could store their toiletries inside. The “bathroom issue,” as Johnson calls it, “was not my insensitivity or unwillingness to listen,” she says. “It was Annette Morris’ insistence that whatever needs to be done with the bathroom must be done immediately at her behest.”
To Annette Morris, locking poor people out of the rest room stall was “the last straw.”
She quit in mid-April, but offered to stay until June.
Johnson told her to get out immediately.
WAS ANNETTE MORRIS merely a professional hothead?
In May, shortly after Morris stormed out of the office for the last time, the CLS board had some visitors at its monthly meeting.
Several workers from shelters for battered women told the board that Morris was telling the truth: Poor women in desperate need of help weren’t getting help.
Women who needed help with divorces, especially those with custody and property disputes, often couldn’t get through on the telephones, the advocates said. Those who did get through were sometimes treated rudely by the bureaucracy’s “intake workers,” or told they didn’t qualify for legal aid when in fact they were eligible. Plus, the advocates said, the domestic-violence project never seemed to have the staff that was budgeted for it.
“Why didn’t these women file grievances?” one board lawyer asked a shelter worker at the meeting.
The shelter workers were stunned. To them the answer was obvious: Women who have just had their heads bashed into the linoleum by angry husbands are not at a point in their lives where they are inclined to file grievances against legal-aid centers.
“For the last two years, we have stopped referring women to Community Legal Services,” says Carol Minon, who supervises Sojourner Center, a major shelter for battered women. “It created more stress for women who couldn’t handle any more stress.”
Minon and others wrote letters to the board. They got answers from Lillian Johnson, who contended that this was the first time she’d ever heard complaints that domestic-violence victims weren’t getting help. If there was a problem, she wanted to fix it. She suggested filing grievances. She also Col 2, Depth P54.02 I9.03 to believe complaints about the way CLS is run.
Napolitano says she’s served on the board for three years and “this is the first time I’ve heard of a problem with domestic violence.”
“If it’s been such a problem,” she says, “how come we heard about it within a month of us terminating Annette Morris? We’re going to look into it. If it’s really true we’re going to fix it, but I have my doubts.”
Johnson says Morris’ allegations that funds have been misused are “absolutely untrue.” But the director offers a muddy explanation of what the domestic-violence project is supposed to do. The goal, she says, is “support to non-Maricopa County offices so they could provide support to shelters and task forces in their community. It was not intended to create a center where only domestic-violence cases were accepted by additional attorneys we hired.”
Of Morris’ letter, Johnson says: “Not all the information in her letter is fabricated. It is shaded to provide a case to hide her own inadequacies. It’s truly unfortunate that she chose to defame myself and other staff.” Johnson adds, “There have never been any financial improprieties.”
Johnson points out that CLS is audited each year, and the results are made public. The legal-aid center is monitored by the federal government and always gets good marks, both Johnson and Napolitano say.
In a letter written last month to Morris, Johnson accused her of neglecting her duties and breaking rules by representing clients who did not qualify for legal aid. She accused Morris of making “false and defamatory claims of fraud and professional misconduct” against her. “Defamation applies to things that are untrue,” retorts Morris of Johnson’s accusations. “I said nothing untrue.”
JEAN BAXTER, a municipal judge in Glendale, says about 700 battered women come to her court each year to obtain orders of protection to keep their abusers at bay.
And several women have told Baxter they can’t get help from CLS. When they tell her that, she listens. After all, she used to work there and is herself disenchanted with CLS.
The women told Baxter they were frustrated by efforts to get into workshops where they could get legal advice for their divorces. There were long waiting lists for the workshops, they complained, and CLS workers on the telephone told some of the women that they didn’t qualify for help when in fact they did.
This doesn’t surprise Baxter, who resigned from CLS three years ago. She says she and other lawyers left because, among other things, “it became increasingly hard to do poverty law at Community Legal Services.”
Baxter says that when she resigned, CLS was in desperate need of lawyers, secretaries and computers. “People who got services got good services,” she recalls. “But we had to turn a lot of people down because we didn’t have time to take their cases. The frustration wears on you, particularly when you know you could be doing more lawyer work if you weren’t spending time typing papers.” What rattled Baxter was that, at the time, lawyers were denied computers, while administrators had them. “It was difficult to accept that we couldn’t get our work done while administrators could get their work done because they had computers,” she says.
“I went to law school to be a lawyer for the poor,” she says. “I don’t know anybody who left [CLS] for salary reasons. Lawyers left because they were disillusioned.”
Leslie Hall, the former CLS lawyer who now directs the Attorney General’s Office Consumer Fraud Division, says, “The focus was on numbers, not on poor people.” Hall quit a high-priced law firm to join CLS, and didn’t mind the salary cut. What she did mind was the way she said lawyers were treated.
Negotiations with the union of paralegals and lawyers who worked at CLS left the lawyers feeling demoralized and undervalued.
The board had persuaded a tough private-practice lawyer to volunteer his services and represent management during the negotiations. The board lawyer wanted to take away vacation time. He wanted to reduce health benefits.
Several lawyers say the board’s negotiator told them, “You guys are only working here because you can’t get a job anyplace else, and you’ve got it too good.”
As Hall recalls the situation, “It was like we were negotiating with General Motors.” She adds, “Why couldn’t they open up their books and be really honest about what they were paying everybody?”
After two years of negotiating, the bitter lawyers reached an agreement. They managed to keep their vacations, but their salaries were still below what others in the legal-aid field were making. A study of salary comparisons between CLS and other legal-aid centers in the Southwest shows that even after the negotiations ended in 1990, CLS staffers were earning substantially less than other legal-aid lawyers–although things did improve slightly in 1991.
No matter where they work, legal-aid lawyers make far less than, say, brand-new associates in major law firms. But in Phoenix, it has been worse. A legal-aid lawyer with five years experience in Phoenix, for instance, earned $24,333 in 1990. A legal-aid lawyer with the same experience would earn $27,985 in Tucson and $41,076 in Dallas.
“It’s a sad state of affairs,” says Hall. “And nothing will ever get better unless there is a total change in administration.”
Hall, who resigned in 1989, says even though the turnover rate among lawyers seemed high, complaints to the board were ignored. “To my knowledge,” she says, “no one ever did an exit interview with a lawyer.”
Anne Ronan, an acknowledged expert in class-action poverty law, recently resigned from CLS after nine years. It’s not that she left for corporate work; she’s still practicing public-service law in Phoenix.
Ronan is critical of Johnson, saying Johnson “focuses a lot of energy in management as opposed to delivery of legal services.”
In the end, Ronan, Hall, and Baxter all agree, it’s the poor people who get shorted.
You wouldn’t think that to hear the statistics CLS likes to throw around. “I have heard management stand up and use those numbers inappropriately,” says Ronan. “When Community Legal Services presents case information to the board or the public, they don’t identify that only a small percentage became active cases taken by a paralegal or a lawyer. That’s a problem.”
Hall says, “Were we really being honest with the amount of work we could do? No. For instance, they might say, `This year we served 18,000 people.’ And nobody on the board would question how eleven lawyers could serve thousands of people. I would just cringe.”
Indeed, very few of the cases that CLS lists as “opened and closed” are resolved in court, or given much more than a telephone call by lawyers. For instance, in 1989, the last year for which statistics are available from the federal government, CLS claimed to have opened and closed 18,768 cases.
But the figures are deceptive. Thousands of cases slip through the cracks. For instance, over one-fifth of the cases were listed as “client withdrew and did not return.” Another one sixth of the cases were “referred [elsewhere] after legal assessment.”
A small fraction, 2,791 out of 18,768 cases, were actually settled in or out of court or in an administrative hearing.
“I couldn’t continually put on a good front, like, `We’re doing a good job in the face of adversity.’ I couldn’t do that anymore,” says Leslie Hall. “The last year I was there I was no longer a cheerleader for Lillian’s way of managing because she wants to put a very good face on it. Like, `We’re serving all these people, blah blah blah.’ Well, we weren’t. And it was unrealistic, if not deceptive, to say we were.”
Lawyers like Annette Morris are voicing the same complaints today. Morris, for instance, says she suspects that some domestic-violence cases have been double-counted to make CLS look better.
Lillian Johnson adamantly denies the charge. She says the federal government, not CLS, requires that cases be counted as they are. And Johnson denies any deception about the way in which the cases are presented to the public or the board of directors. She says detailed statistics are in public reports to the federal government, and the same information is always reported to the CLS board.
Salaries for CLS lawyers are improving. The administration has agreed to pay starting lawyers fresh out of law school $25,000, which is $5,000 more per year than previously offered. CLS administrators also point out that important cases are being handled. Among them are several lawsuits filed by attorney David Dick on behalf of underpaid farm workers. And CLS is taking a trade school to court, claiming it defrauded more than eighty Native Americans. CLS also lists as one of its high-profile cases a suit against the guardian of a brain-damaged man, contending the guardian had no right to start divorce proceedings on behalf of the man.
However, like Annette Morris, former and present employees point out that there are a lot of unanswered questions.
CLS attorney David Dick is puzzled by the fact that CLS is carrying over $421,528 from its 1990 budget.
Some of that money, incoming board president Mark Santana admits, came from salaries for positions that were never filled. Santana says it takes months, sometimes even years, to find a lawyer willing to work for the low salaries. He says the recent pay raise might help recruiting.
“I’d be interested to see a full accounting of how money is spent, line item by line item,” says Dick. “Particularly in the area of salaries.”
MARK SANTANA, an affable lawyer for the law firm Kepner, Jennings and Hall, couldn’t have picked a more tempestuous time to take over as director of the CLS board.
He says he’s concerned about all the gripes, and if they are true he will make sure that they are fixed. If that’s possible.
Santana says over and over that CLS simply can’t take care of every poor person who needs legal aid. The board has to choose what groups of poor people are in the most need of help.
“It is difficult to decide to serve clients who need money for welfare or to get medical care for children as opposed to helping people who are being beaten,” he says. “These are tough calls, and we don’t have the resources to do it all. That doesn’t mean we’re not concerned about domestic violence, for instance, or that we’re not going to do a better job of communicating with people.”
Santana admits he’s troubled that some staff lawyers don’t feel their work is valued and that CLS seems to have a shortage of lawyers and positions that remain vacant for months. But he blames the work, not the administration. Maybe the salary hike will entice lawyers to come–and stay, he says.
People like ex-CLS lawyer Anne Ronan remain frustrated.
“I left Community Legal Services because I couldn’t do any work there anymore,” says Ronan. “There was no one there who had as much legal experience as I had. You can’t get any satisfaction out of doing legal-services work if it is all routine. You have to take on bigger cases. And you can’t do that by yourself.
“It’s pretty frustrating when you’re saying to lawyers on the board, `Doesn’t the turnover rate bother you?’ and they don’t get enraged.”
Shelter workers for victims of domestic violence told her that they no longer refer battered women to CLS.
“It’s like the Peace Corps. You don’t like to say anything bad about it.”
To Annette Morris, locking poor people out of the rest room stall was “the last straw.”
Women who have just had their heads bashed into the linoleum by angry husbands are not inclined to file grievances against legal-aid centers.
“I don’t know anybody who left for salary reasons. Lawyers left because they were disillusioned.
