A Life in Public Law: Personal Dilemmas, Practical Problems, and the Creation of Belonging

This paper focuses on the lawyers and employees of a legal service nonprofit in the Bay Area, analyzing the ways in which the lawyers experience everyday tensions within the nonprofit as a result of their interactions with their clients and with the larger nonprofit and justice systems.

Other research has studied the nonprofit and public service sector, with a focus on the difficulties of nonprofit work given our country’s greater focus on and support of private industries. However, less research has been done on law in the nonprofit sector and I hope to use this study to explore how legal services function in the nonprofit sector.

My research was completed over the summer of 2014, with some work continued during the fall of 2014. The research incorporates formal interviews and informal conversations with the lawyers and other employees of La Institución de los Servicios Legales, a nonprofit in the Bay Area (), along with some of my own observations and experiences throughout the summer. This work was funded by a grant from Stanford University and is being used in an honors thesis that I will submit for the Anthropology department at Stanford in May.

Through my research, I found that the nonprofit lawyers faced both financial and psychological hardships through their interactions with their clients. The lawyers engaged with their clients, by trying to build trust with them, but the legal system set things up so that there had to be a power dynamic between the lawyer and their client. This dynamic, along with the legal system in general, created some psychological tensions for the lawyers. Additionally, the structure of the nonprofit sector meant that financial struggles were also a concern for the lawyers on a daily basis, making it harder for them to do their job consistently and continuously. Although the lawyers and employees spoke positively about their jobs, they all also expressed anxiety about their jobs, noting financial and psychological stressors as their main concerns. Concerns over supporting themselves and their families financially were most prominent for these employees, particularly for those who lived within the boundaries of the expensive Bay Area city that we were in.

I started this project in part because I am interested in practicing law in a nonprofit setting. I think that those clients who visit organizations like La Institución de los Servicios Legales are deserving of high-quality legal advice and services, and I would like to offer that kind of support at some point in my future professional career. However, it is quite apparent, particularly based on my research, that lawyers and employees in this kind of a nonprofit, and many other nonprofits around the country, are not receiving the kind of financial and emotional support needed for them to be successful in their jobs. Though this research has not deterred me from seeking a career in the nonprofit field, I hope that it can contribute to further research concerning what can be done for these employees, in order to alleviate their everyday adversities.