A Matter of Honor:
Meeting the Crisis in Legal Services
By James L. Baillie

This year we face a greater challenge in the delivery of legal services to the disadvantaged than at any time in the past 23 years. This year, it is not an exaggeration to call this situation a crisis.

Since January 2001, the number of full-time legal services attorneys in Minnesota has declined from 178 to 122 and is likely to reach 118 when the effects of recent state funding cuts are felt. This is a decrease of more than one-third.

For the coming biennium, the total reduction in funding to the seven regional programs serving all Minnesota that are comprised in the Minnesota Legal Services Coalition (Coalition) will be more than $4 million. Federal funding for Coalition programs is down significantly because of reallocations based on the 2003 census. Funds available through iolta (which in March survived a constitutional challenge by a 5-4 vote in the United States Supreme Court) are down because of reduced interest rates and increased service charges from banks. Total iolta funds, the bulk of which go to legal services, will have plummeted from about $2,336,000 in 2000-2001 to about $1,393,000 in 2002-2003. State funding for civil legal services was cut by 2.3 percent in 2002-2003, suffered a 5.8 percent one-time unallotment for 2002-2003, and now will suffer a 3.09 percent reduction each year for the 2003-2005 biennium.

Based on the average costs of serving clients, the cuts mean that services will be available for about 7,000 fewer families. (This despite the fact that studies consistently estimate that only about 20 percent of the legal needs of this client population are met). Of these, about 1,800 will be families for whom the lack of services will mean not obtaining orders for protection from domestic abuse, child custody, and family law representation. Another 360 will be senior citizens who need protection from victimization and to be able to live independently.

Things are no better on the pro bono side. Volunteer Lawyers Network in Hennepin County, the state's largest pro bono program, expects its budget to decline more than 20 percent.

These challenges hearken back to 1980 when the legal services programs were almost wholly dependent on funding from the federal Legal Services Corporation. Newly elected President Reagan threatened to eliminate that funding altogether. Although eventually Congress intervened and a 25 percent cut was the compromise result, that threat of a total loss of funding galvanized the bar in many states, with Minnesota at the forefront, as well as the American Bar Association.

The partnership that was forged then between the legal services programs, the organized bar, and the judiciary strengthened the legal services programs statewide through deep bar support, more pro bono programs, and a broader range of funding sources. The strengths of that new partnership have enabled the legal services programs and the pro bono programs to meet the challenges of the intervening years.

We need to see the challenges of 2003 as a renewed opportunity to strengthen the legal services and pro bono programs. This should be a matter of honor to our profession. Working to ensure access to legal services for everyone is not ancillary to what we do, it is central.

We need to look at how legal services are delivered and be more innovative with hotlines and other experimental methods of delivering legal services.

We need to work to maintain bipartisan support for continued and increased federal funding. Jon Duckstad, Sue Holden and I delivered that message to each of our Representatives and Senators in Washington on May 1 and 2 of this year. We all need to keep delivering that message.

We need to work to maintain bipartisan support for funding in our state legislature.

We need to make iolta more effective with new "sweep" products and local bank support to make the return on iolta accounts as high as possible.

We need to strengthen all of our funding areas and we need to find new ones.

We need to look again, and we will, at the structure of our programs and how well-coordinated and efficient they are. We need to be willing to restructure if necessary to make these programs stronger in the long run. A new commission -- with representatives to be selected by the legal services programs, the msba, and the Minnesota Supreme Court -- will be charged with developing recommendations on these topics by the end of the calendar year.

We especially need to step forward and fill the breach with our voluntary pro bono services. I am working with our msba Legal Assistance to the Disadvantaged (lad) Committee to come up with a comprehensive plan for highlighting and increasing pro bono services in Minnesota in the coming year. A part of that will be a new program that will enable business lawyers to use their business skills to help nonprofits and very small businesses strengthen our communities. Increasing pro bono effort and strengthening our pro bono programs will be a major theme for the coming year and one that I will detail in a later column.

Every strategic planning exercise begins with an evaluation of strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats (or challenges): a process sometimes called swot. One thing I like about this exercise is that it reminds us that challenges also present opportunities; we need only rise to meet the challenges and look for the opportunities. In these President's pages, I intend to address some of the challenges facing our association and our profession and to point out some of the opportunities that these challenges present. I look forward to working with you to seize some of these opportunities.

JIM BAILLIE is president of the Minnesota State Bar Association. A shareholder in the firm of Fredrikson & Byron, P.A., he concentrates his practice in business bankruptcy and insolvency law and related litigation and business transactions.