Legal fellowships program leader discusses guiding young lawyers to public service
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Maria Duvuvuei
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WASHINGTON – Equal Justice Works CEO Verna Williams appears on a new episode of the Legal Services Corporation’s (LSC) podcast, “Talk Justice.” LSC President Ron Flagg speaks with Williams about her prior experience as a law dean, her work engaging law students and young lawyers in public interest work and the inspiration she draws from their passion.
As the nation’s largest post-graduate legal fellowship program, Equal Justice Works deploys students and lawyers to legal services organizations across the country. The fellows expand their host organization’s capacity for legal services that the community needs, while gaining valuable experience and new perspective on the realities of civil and criminal justice in the United States.
Since its founding in 1986, Equal Justice Works has supported more than 2,700 fellows.
“We're working to expand that impact by developing programs to reach pre-law students and lay people supporting the community justice worker movement,” Williams said.
One of the fellowship programs, Rural Summer Legal Corps (RSLC), is managed in partnership with LSC. This year marks 10 years of RSLC recruiting and sponsoring law fellows for legal services organizations in under-served rural communities.
Williams said that the impact of RSLC and other fellowship programs is not only the services the fellows provide, but also the awareness they create among future lawyers about the justice gap.
“I think [RSLC is] the kind of program that is really important for all law students,” she said.
“It's important for us to educate every single law student in this country about the access to justice crisis because people just don't know—and I think that if they realized that 92% of low-income people's legal needs are going unmet, they would be more than willing to step up and do whatever they could to make a difference, and perhaps we could create a groundswell.”
Williams brings to her leadership at Equal Justice Works the perspective she gained from her time as Dean of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Law. She said that “public interest drift” — the disparity between how many students enter law school with the goal of serving the public, and the actual rate of lawyers pursuing public interest careers — is a real problem. She cited the American Bar Association’s research which found that of 1.3 million attorneys in the U.S., only around 1% are full-time legal services attorneys.
There are many reasons for this drift, Williams said. These include economic barriers, the fact that there are less resources for recruitment in public interest compared to big law firms, and a lack of clarity for law students about what public interest careers really look like.
“[We need] more resources for public interest advising and career advising, more resources for public interest employers so that they can pay people better, and I also think it's important to educate students that the arc of their careers is long and that they can plot a path for public interest work,” she said.
When Flagg asked Williams what she finds most inspiring about working with young lawyers, she said she finds the “fresh rage” that new lawyers feel about the inaccessibility of legal help “exhilarating.” She explained that it gives her hope to see how passionate they are about access to justice.
“Their rage is nice and fresh and they're ready to get out there and they want to make a difference,” said Williams. “You can't help but get swept up in that…I'm all for it, and I'm going to do what I can to help [them] make the difference that [they] want to make.”
To hear more of Williams’ thoughts on legal education and approaches for promoting public interest law, listen to the full episode of Talk Justice online, on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Podcasts. The podcast is sponsored by LSC’s Leaders Council.