Election Law, Politics, Public Interest

The Plight Of The Municipal Lawyer At Election Time

Please welcome new columnist Sam Wright (not his real name), who will be covering the world of public interest law.

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Ed. note: Please welcome new columnist Sam Wright (not his real name), who will be covering the world of public interest law.

It’s hard out here for public interest lawyers. Need is high, funding is low, and it’s not uncommon for a legal services attorney with three hundred active cases to return from a day in court to find herself suddenly and unexpectedly out of work due to budget cuts.

Each day on the public interest beat brings its own set of uncertainties. Will I be able to pronounce the name of a new client when shouting it for the first time in the hallway at family court? Will any clients come in on bench warrants? Will the sheriff unload a can of pepper spray on an unruly litigant today? And, of course, will I be able to make my next student loan payment?

But this time of year highlights an underappreciated cause of sleepless nights for an underappreciated set of lawyers. Last month, a depressingly low percentage of eligible voters went to the polls to elect new public officials, including a whole lot of mayors. Now, come January, many of the at-will civil servants who toil away in local-government law departments will find themselves out of jobs, replaced by new civil servants who’ve hopped from the campaigns of starry-eyed would-be politicians to the city halls run by their newly inaugurated bosses.

I was lucky. I jumped ship two years ago from the law department of a mid-major city to the nonprofit I’d hoped eventually to work for. I worked as a municipal lawyer through a non-mayoral election, an interesting time given that (not shockingly) elections raise a host of legal issues. But I never had to worry that my boss would be unseated. This year, though, the current mayor is headed out the door. My former coworkers are now looking for jobs in what continues to be a brutal legal job market. Some fled city government even before the election, some are trying to do great work in the hope that they’ll be retained, and some have their own unique strategies for dealing with the election results.

These are good people whose work for the city is much more than just defense against slip-and-falls. They believe in service, and their work is mission-oriented. They work to keep the city environmentally and economically healthy. They fight to improve housing conditions for the city’s low-income residents. They work with the mayor and city council members to shape sound policy. They prepare for and defend against litigation by others seeking to overturn ambitious city ordinances. And they even initiate impact litigation when circumstances call for it. These are people who left federal clerkships for much lower salaries and now find time in between taking depositions, drafting interrogatory responses, and other day-to-day requirements of run-of-the-mill litigation to explore how the city might make an unscrupulous lender pay for the damage dealt to a neighborhood by the many multi-year vacancies left behind after an inevitable raft of foreclosures. In this market and in this economy, these people are unlikely to find such broad-ranging, interesting, and public-minded work elsewhere — at least not without fleeing our medium-sized city for a big one.

And this is a tragedy. But what’s to be done? Elections have consequences, as the saying goes. Perhaps the best answer is this: be kind to any municipal lawyers you know, and if a résumé from one of them should cross your desk, give it more than the customary 6 seconds of eyeball time. After all, they might well have cut their teeth in litigation against a white-shoe New York firm while pulling in a whopping $25 per hour. They could use some love.

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Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.

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