DISQUS

Jeff · 1 year ago

All I can do is relate my experience. You can judge it as you will. But I spent many hundreds of hours working on pro bono cases I didn't believe in, fighting against other poor people who were largely in the right, and more right than my clients. My heart went out to many of the people on the other side of these cases . . . people I would have gladly represented for free. There's nothing fun about representing a tenant who has trashed his apartment, who hasn't paid rent in 18 months, who is destroying something that belongs to someone else--someone who is not rich, who is not a slumlord, who is a nice and decent person who can't afford a lawyer to protect his property. Not every pro bono experience is like this, I'm sure. But this is what mine was like. This doesn't mean that I hate poor people . . . I don't believe that my clients were representative of poor people at all. I wish I had the authority to reject some of the cases I brought, but I didn't. At Legal Aid, you can. That's why Legal Aid works better than the program I was stuck supporting. This discretion makes al the difference.