Episode 35: Leigh Ferrin
Director of Litigation and Pro Bono at the Public Law Center
00:34:37
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Show Notes
Many people lack access to, or funds for, a lawyer. This makes public interest work an essential part of our legal system. M.C. Sungaila delves into the public interest space with Leigh Ferrin, the Director of Litigation and Pro Bono at the Public Law Center. Leigh shares how and why she chose to work in the public interest arena, and how she leads and coordinates both the team of staff attorneys at the Public Law Center and the attorneys who volunteer their time pro bono to help the Center's clients. She also shares her insights on the need for volunteerism in law and the importance of finding your passion.
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Leigh Ferrin
Leigh Ferrin is the Director of Litigation and Pro Bono at the Public Law Center. Leigh works with the attorneys, staff and volunteers in all seven of PLC’s units to ensure that services are provided efficiently and effectively. She oversees impact advocacy and litigation, and recruits volunteers to participate in PLC’s efforts to serve its clients. Leigh works with advocates throughout California to identify opportunities for change through legislation, regulatory advocacy and litigation.
Prior to her current position, Leigh was the Directing Attorney of the Consumer Law Unit at PLC, where she supervised consumer cases including debt collection, bankruptcy, student loans, home equity scams and identity theft. She also supervised two courthouse-based self-help clinics. After graduating from Pomona College in 2002 with a B.A. in Psychology, Leigh then received her J.D. in 2008 from Loyola Law School of Los Angeles. Leigh’s article, “Pencil Me In: The Use of Title IX and Section 1983 to Obtain Equal Treatment in High School Athletics Scheduling” was published in American University’s The Modern American in 2007.
Transcript
I'm very pleased to welcome Leigh Ferrin, who is the Legal Director and Pro Bono Guru all-around at the Public Law Center in Orange County, California. Welcome, Leigh.
Thanks, MC. It's so nice of you to have me here.
You work at a significant public-interest organization that does a lot of meaningful work in the county and beyond. How did you get interested in going to law school or being a lawyer?
I didn't grow up wanting to be a lawyer. I was a Psychology major. I was working at a small company that shipped flowers and plants for big companies. I knew I needed to go to graduate school, but I wasn't sure what. One of my dad's friends said, "You can go to law school and get a good education that you can use in any way you want. You could start a business. You could do this and that." I said, "I will consider it as long as I don't have to be a lawyer."
I started going to law school and figured out that whatever it was I wanted to do, I wanted to "do good" with my Law degree. I figured out I could do something with my Law degree that would feel positive, but then I didn't have to practice law if I didn't want to. That was how I initially decided to go. I was looking to crossover between lawyering and psychology, the study of people, decision-making, and all of those types of things, but I didn't know what my path is going to be.
Did you go directly into public interest work when you came out of law school?
I did public interest work. Once I got into school, I figured out what public interest work was. I had a variety of externships and jobs throughout school. My first job out of law school was with the Public Law Center, where I work now. I have worked for the same organization for my career, which is a little bit unusual in law generally, but in public interest too.
In law, generally, that's an unusual thing. In the public interest, generally, that's unusual because often, there are funding issues for particular positions.
I was in a fellowship to start. It was a two-year fellowship. After those two years, I was lucky enough that there was funding to keep me. There was a lot of luck involved with that, and some hard work too that I made myself invaluable or whatever the organization felt. It's a little bit of luck too to make sure that there's enough money at that point to pay.
Over that time at the Public Law Center, have you focused on different kinds of clients or needs at different points?
My fellowship was bankruptcy and foreclosure work at the height of the recession from 2008 to 2010. Those are two topics I knew very little about. I knew nothing about bankruptcy and a little bit about foreclosure but not much in the practice of things. That was my introduction, and then I stayed in consumer law. I expanded the work that I did. Mostly, I'm doing debt collection and some student loan work. I continued expanding our bankruptcy work. I got more into civil litigation generally throughout the practice. I don't do as much casework anymore now. I do more supervision. I get to advocate and work with all of our civil legal projects now, which is fun. It's a huge learning curve but I'm working on it.
What a time to be working in that area because there was a deep need at that point. It was a good thing that you were there.
It was a learning curve for everybody. Few people had experienced that type of housing crisis with the different types of foreclosure tools that were available, and the new programs and such that were being rolled out. People were confused, scared, misinformed and being taken advantage of. It was a bit of an eye-opening experience. I knew what I was getting into, having done public interest work.
I took a few years off before law school. When I graduated, I was about 28 or 29 years old. I'm a 1st or 2nd-year lawyer, hoping I'm saying the right thing, doing the right thing, and doing my best to keep up. I had a gentleman sitting in front of me. He was in his 50s. They were losing their house. They were very near the end of the foreclosure period. It was unlikely that I was going to be able to do a whole lot to help him. He broke down in tears in front of me.
I sat there like, "I don't know what to do." I'm supposed to be the adult in this situation. I'm twenty-plus years his junior and feel like I'm lost. The best you could do at that point was to give people accurate information, make sure they don't get taken advantage of or pay money unnecessarily, and sometimes negotiate things. There were a lot of emotions. Some of the learning curves were as much the substantive law as it was navigating people's emotions and my emotions and reactions to theirs too.
That's a good observation that they are emotional but then it’s your own response. You are in it because you want to do good and help people. It must be frustrating when you are like, "Unfortunately, at this stage, there's not very much I can do to help these people. My help is limited." That’s frustrating and that creates your own emotional melee of what is going on.
There are two things to that. One, legal services folks have to learn early on in their careers that you have to be able to say no to people. It has to hurt. It has to be hard to do it because if it's easy to say no, it's not the right business. You have to be able to say no because you are only one person or you are a team of people. The exciting part about it is you start seeing people saying, "My hands are tied because the law doesn't let me do this or this program doesn't exist. How can I fix that?"
You start looking slightly bigger and say, "What if we change this law? What if we got the county to change this policy?" Those questions don't come up right away. Any of us in law, you start to see certain patterns and practices and you think, "There's a way that we might be able to fix that if this word or phrase said something different in the law." That part is also exciting but I wouldn't have realized it when I first graduated.
It’s that concept of stakeholders too. There are a lot of different stakeholders in the system. When we think about changing things, we think about having some piece of impact litigation in the Supreme Court that changes something or having a legislator add a new law that addresses an abuse or something that you have seen. There are also other things like, "Can we adjust procedures? Can we work with agencies on how they do things?" That can make a big difference for people too?
Many of our clients will never see a Supreme Court anywhere in the United States. They will never see the inside of a legislative building, but they do regularly go see a county agency. Sometimes those are almost more impactful because it's a day-to-day issue for clients as opposed to an unthought-of body.
There are two areas that I know you most about in terms of having an impact. One is working on setting up the various self-help clinics at the different courts to help access and guide people through the court system. Also, shepherding a number of pro bono attorneys who are at law firms, who work with PLC and do a lot of good work together with your teams. Maybe you could talk about those two aspects of what that looks like from your perspective.
PLC has 5 or 6 courthouse-based clinics. They are self-help clinics. I supervised two of them when I was doing more direct services work. I was in the bankruptcy court and district court. They are challenging clinics because you might imagine, anyone thinking that they are going to represent themselves in a case in district court is a lot to take on. It also means they are probably convinced that they were wronged in some way or another.
Our goal with all of our self-help clinics is to make sure that folks understand the procedure. As lawyers, knowing the Code of Civil Procedure is half the battle or sometimes more than that. When you are litigating, it's knowing not just the Code of Civil Procedure but also the local rules, judge's preferences and judge's procedures. I shouldn't say we always succeed but we try. Our goal is always to make sure that folks get their cases determined on the merits.
We want clients or litigants who come before at the clinics to feel like they were heard and they got to make their arguments. The judge made a decision not because they couldn't understand how to file a certain document but because they were right or wrong on the law. It's one way or the other. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes that depends on us or the litigant.
More often than not, we get folks farther than they would have if they hadn't come to us. A lot of times, especially in some of our state court clinics where we are working on more discrete topics, we get people to the finish line through domestic violence, restraining orders, guardianships and adoptions. They are form-based.
It sounds like it would be easy because it's form-based but it's not.
You know from sitting down and looking at the court forms. There's language in there that makes no sense sometimes even to lawyers. We could put blame wherever we want to put it but ultimately, it's hard for self-represented folks to get through it. Especially when they don't speak English as a first language, there are many barriers that come up.
As lawyers, knowing the Code of Civil Procedure is half the battle and sometimes more than that.
Those clinics are valuable. It makes such a difference to have people where the clients or litigants are as opposed to asking them to try to find our building or make appointments. They can come in and we will answer some questions and get them on the right path. They are rewarding. They can be challenging but they make a difference. I hope they make a big difference for the judges, clerks and court staff because they are, hopefully, getting better products, more accurate forms and fewer rejections.
The courts too have an interest. You want to be able to decide a case with the merits of that case instead of saying, "We didn't get the right form,” or the procedural hurdles that are necessary to get to the merits was not crossed by a self-represented person. You want to at least get them to the point where you can properly present your issues in a format that the court can understand to rule on it. That at least eliminates some of the issues that self-represented litigants have.
I remember when we had the self-help clinic and the appellate court. I was struck in that setting by the wide array of people who came to that clinic and were representing themselves. It made me realize there's a broad swath of people who could not find or afford lawyers in cases, especially maybe by the time they got to an appeal, having been in the trial court. Some of whom would have qualified for PLC or for some help in that regard. Some of them were small business owners who wouldn't have qualified and wouldn't have had even the procedural help for them. It opened my eyes to where we are at in terms of access to the courts. It's a little bit depressing, but it was good to see because it helps you see where things still need to be done.
That's where the self-help clinics come in. They are so valuable because they generally don't have income limitations. Anybody can access them. It doesn't always provide representation. Sometimes part of the goal of the clinic is to connect folks with places where they are more likely to find representation. I don't know if people use Yellow Pages anymore or Googling are not always the best place to find someone. Maybe we can connect them to a lawyer referral service or a local trade association where they can look up attorneys that are more tailored to the type of cases they have.
Some of that work is connecting folks to resources too, whatever they may be. We are sending them to the law library or connecting folks. There are some folks who are self-represented by choice and some who are not. When folks tell us, "The lawyer quoted me however many thousands of dollars," I don't charge. I have no idea what going rates are. I'm surprised sometimes at how much it would cost to litigate some of these things. It's eye-opening. That also reminds you why we are there because there needs to be something. At least it's something, if not the perfect solution.
You have your own staff attorneys who work on cases, but then also you have this large army of law firm lawyers who partner with PLC on cases. Maybe you can talk about how that works and what things you are able to do from those partnerships.
We are at our heart. PLC is a pro bono organization. We rely heavily on our volunteers. When I first started, there were some lawyers who didn't have much of a caseload. I don't think that's the right answer. We had many volunteers and so much support that we provided that there wasn't as much time for our caseload. Now, all of our attorneys carry a caseload in addition to supporting volunteers. We are lucky. We have great relationships with lawyers throughout the county at big firms, small firms, solo practitioners, mid-sized firms, some in-house counsel, law students and paralegals.
I don't know what the exact number is. They double at least the amount of work that we can do in a year, if not triple or quadruple it because there are many cases that are out there for people that need help. From the self-help clinics, there are many people. We can't take on every case but because of the volunteers, they may be able to put a team of six lawyers on a case and handle a large litigation place for multiple 9th Circuit appeals or something like that, that maybe our staff wouldn't be able to do because of capacity.
It's a huge benefit to us but also to our clients and the community when we are able to bring in volunteers to staff up some of our work. People take cases in all areas of law. It's not just litigation but immigration, family law and transactional. We have a small business project that works with some of those small business owners to help with their transactional projects. There are lots of areas that people don't always realize that they can get legal help in.
How is it that you decide substantively which areas or units you are going to have at any one time? It sounded like it was the perfect intersection when you first came into the fellowship in terms of what was happening with the recession, bankruptcy and all of that. Some of that might have been planned. It might have been fortuitous as well. Do you foresee needs and then you grow out different substantive departments from that?
We do when we can. Similar to our conversation at the beginning, a lot of it is dependent on the funding. Some of our funding is restricted and it will say, "This funding is for immigration services or housing services." Generally speaking, those are responsive to the needs of the community but oftentimes, funding follows a little bit behind the needs of the community. The community will show up and then 6 to 12 months later, the funding for the services will show up. It's how we navigate those in-between times.
Some of our work is flexible enough that we can shift. An example in the consumer unit is when the Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech closed. We didn't have specific funding for that work, but it was clear that we needed to take on some of those cases. Our consumer unit shifted. We pulled back on a couple of other cases, got up to speed, and started working with those students.
Similarly, with our immigration unit, as various things have changed with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and unaccompanied minors work, we are able to shift to an extent and be responsive. Many of our funders are flexible and will allow us to make those shifts. At other times, we just make it work the best we can, as you do with any nonprofit.
Do you have any tips for those who might be interested in a public interest career, whether they are in law school or a newer lawyer, in terms of how to get experience or succeed in that particular role?
Volunteering is not always available to everybody but it's a great way, especially when you are in school. Even if it's a few hours at a clinic, it's showing that interest and understanding of what it means to work with clients. As we mentioned with the clinics, it's eye-opening to sit down with someone for the first time and hear their story. Our clients don't just have legal problems. You are going to hear more than just the legal issues. It's getting exposure, even if it's before law school, working at shelters or getting involved with your community.
We work with many students. I tell them all the time, "You are likely going to find out what you don't want to do before you find out what you do want to do." That's true in a lot of law, honestly. Every once in a while, you find your passion. You are able to stick to it and it's your path for life but not always. I encourage students to try out different things. As new lawyers, now is a great time. If you are a new lawyer and you want to get into the public interest, lots of people are hiring.
The biggest tip is to find something that you are passionate about. If you care deeply about the community, either the subject matter or the community, preferably both is ideal. It's clear and it shows in your work. We take a lot of pride in our work. We want to make sure we are doing the best job we can for our clients and that's important to us. It's exposing yourself and trying new things in the area of law that you are in and connecting to folks. I'm always happy to talk to people and share my experience, the pros and cons because there are both in any job. Those connections make all the difference.
It's volunteering early, both to see whether that's something you want to do but also to meet people and become known within the organization, "I would like to maybe do this work here after graduation." It's very helpful.
Self-help clinics are so valuable because they generally don't have income limitations, so anybody can access them.
We have at least one person on staff who was a summer clerk with us before. We have another summer clerk who is hopefully going to be a fellow with us in the future. If we have got connections with you, we are going to stick with you as long as we can.
If someone is a known quantity who you enjoy working with or you know is committed to something, you would much rather have a place for them and have them join the organization long-term. What about tips for those who are in law firms and are interested in doing pro bono work and may not know like, "How do I find out about that or make that happen?"
Most firms have some pro bono person. It may be a partner or specific pro bono coordinator. It depends on the firm. Usually, there's somebody at the firm who is in charge of that. Always reach out to them. I joke a lot of times or I don't know if it's a joke. I characterize the work that I do as a matchmaker. My job is to talk to volunteers and then figure out what their goals are, "What areas of law are you interested in? What skills are you trying to build? What experiences do you want? Let's see what work we have on our end that fits with that."
I can't make up cases. The cases I have are the cases that the client needs, but someone may come and say, "I want to do housing work." What they are interested in doing is a different type of case. We can talk through that and connect them with the right case. A lot of folks will start off as a clinic. It's a great way for people to get started. You spend 2 to 3 hours. It's limited. You get to know some of the clients or topics that we cover.
Once you are hooked, then maybe you will find a client, a case or some time in your schedule because that's always the challenge and say, "I want to do something a little bit more. I want to take on a case. I want to review a set of bylaws for an organizational client." We talk through, "What are the options? What time commitment can you have?" It's reaching out. So much of our life is connections. It's talking to people and getting more information.
Internally, there are always procedures. Externally, it's finding the organizations that do the work and finding out something that you want to do. About half of my volunteers do work in the area that they practice in their private practice. The other half work in areas that are totally different from their private practice. Many of our immigration cases are taken by non-immigration attorneys.
That's an important point not to be too narrowly focused on the subject matter because you can learn and grow in new areas in doing that work. I think of you as being a great matchmaker for people. If you want people to continue to do work with an organization or to partner with you, they need to have some kind of meaning or satisfaction from what they are doing. If there isn't a match between what it is they want to do or how they want to help someone with the work that you have, then they are not going to continue to volunteer for you.
It's a good long-term cementing the connection between the person and the organization to do that, but there's such a huge temptation not to do that because you say, "I have got this fire hose over here of work that I need to find somebody to do. I have this. Why don't you do that one?" It can be off-putting when somebody says, "These are my skills. This is what I have to provide." That's not going to match. It's an important service for the organization to keep that connection of volunteers to the organization to continue to do the pro bono work, which helps you make more of an impact.
It's something that I noticed that you do very well. Other organizations also do well but some of them don't. That can be a little challenging for those who volunteer. I have never worked through a pro bono coordinator at any firm that I have been at. It has always been direct. Organizations have reached out to me or I have reached out to them saying, "I'm interested in your area and what you do in your work. I like what you do and how you do it. Here's what I have to provide. If you have something that fits that, I'm happy to do it."
The easy on-ramp is through the firm pro bono or looking at the list that you and other organizations send out saying, "Here are some needs that we currently have. These are the clients that need something. Would you be interested in doing that?" There are both routes. You can go off on your own and find an organization that you want to work with too, even if the firm isn't doing it in a systemic way.
Lots of times, firms encourage that. It's all dependent on the firm and how they operate. For the most part, most firms are encouraging folks to go off and find their own opportunities, and then go through whatever proper procedures they need to go through on the back end. To the point of making sure people feel comfortable, one of the projects was one of the most interesting we did with a local firm. We had a bunch of transactional attorneys that were interested in getting involved in housing cases but didn't want to go to court, which you are like, "I'm not sure how I'm going to make this work."
There are a lot of forms. Some of them have answers on the forms. There are ways to do it. Internally, with the firm, we partnered a litigator with a transactional attorney. They handled the case together internally. You had to find transactional attorneys who are willing to do it. It turned out to be a great opportunity for those folks because they both got a little bit of experience on the other side.
We did that once with conservatorship or guardianship cases too because those are form-based. Even more so, there are twenty or something judicial council forms that you need. While I'm conscientious of folks that say, "This is what I want to do and this doesn't fit," I will sometimes throw in the odd opportunity and say, "This is almost like a transactional case and we can help with the court part. You don't have to make the appearance."
That's an interesting idea because that cements relationships within the firm too with best practice areas. It does a great service to the firm, the collegiality and culture within the firm. It builds relationships there. That's a win-win on a number of levels.
It's fun to be creative. We do get to be creative, even in volunteerism. It's not just black and white. It's, "Let's come up with something. Let's make it happen somehow or another." The pandemic has been a clear example of that and getting folks to be involved remotely, which has been great.
I'm glad you talked about that because that's an outside-of-the-box part of what you do and the various skills that you need to have when you are working at your level in a public interest organization. You are working with all the different stakeholders, including the clients and the community needs, and trying to figure out how to have a win-win all around for all of those different folks. That is certainly a level of management and leadership that I don't know people always think about in terms of public interest organizations. You have needs. You help those people, but there's a lot of bigger picture that you are involved in terms of building relationships. That's very important.
How you get more resources for your clients is by building those relationships. It's not just legal resources. We need to have relationships with our social services, providers, organizations and sometimes financial planners because our clients may get a lump sum settlement and we need to find a resource for them. They may have never had a real financial planning education before. It's much broader than what you might initially think. I'm thinking of the narrow traditional legal aid type of work.
That's the part where you get to use your creativity. You get to sometimes do cold calls or warm referrals, talk to folks and share what we are doing. The key for those of us in the public interest is we love what we do. We are lawyers, so we wanted to talk. Also, we want to talk about things that we love doing. Sharing our client's stories is one way that we do that. It's fun to get to be able to do that.
What we all aim for in our lives is to do the best that we possibly can at whatever it is that we're doing.
When you are passionate about what you do, you can share that passion with others and they want to help you accomplish that. You are talking about listening. It's listening to things, being conscious and listening to people on all sides with the different stakeholders so that you can bring people together. That's good.
It's the difference between hearing somebody and listening.
I wanted to end with the lightning round of questions. I will ask a few of them. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained one quality or ability, what would that be?
I would have the ability to fly, honestly. I want to be able to travel quickly and then get back home again. I have three little kids. I need to get places and get back again. I will take them with me sometimes but sometimes not. That's what I would do.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself, and then what is the trait you most deplore in others?
In myself, it's a little bit of the imposter syndrome that comes up. You don't quite always have the confidence in yourself that you should. In others, this is what gets me in trouble, is the lack of attention to detail. I'm a detailed person and typos drive me crazy. I make them so I'm not saying that I don't, but when there are a lot of them, it starts to grate on me. Sometimes I have to let it go and I'm working on it.
I have the same challenge in that regard because, it makes me think, "If you didn't catch that, then what else is there that's going on here that is an issue?" That was like, "What care did you take with this thing overall?" I'm guilty of the same thing, but that's what I see when I see that. I usually tell the people I work with, associates and staff. I'm like, "Please make sure this is good because that's something you have control over. You can check that." For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
It's my kids. That's easy. They challenge, teach and humble me but also lift me up on a regular basis.
Who is your hero in real life?
This is going to sound weird, considering the job that I do. It's someone like Sue Bird, who is a WNBA basketball player. She played at UConn and now plays for the Seattle Storm. I'm from Seattle, so I'm also biased because of that. She is the same age as me, if not maybe one year younger, and she is still competing at the highest level. She has got a commitment to justice and things that are bigger than she is. She still comes out and plays at the highest level.
I feel that's what we all aim for in our lives. It’s to do the best that we possibly can at whatever it is that we are doing. Always compete but also recognize that there's always something bigger than us. We are not at the end of the road when it comes to that. There's always something more that we could be doing. It's to look for that and then take action, not just watch it.
To act is as important. Sometimes people don't get to that point. They will see things but not act. Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you like to have as a dinner guest?
I want to sit down and have dinner with the Obamas.
Both of them?
I probably would pick Michelle first. I'm so intrigued. There's so much that we didn't know about their experience in the White House. I read both of their books. I felt like there was more that I would like to hear. There's a lot of creativity and thoughtfulness that goes into their ideas about the future.
What is your motto if you have one?
My sister and I had a bunch of silly ones growing up. A real-life motto that I try to instill in my kids too is not anything very articulate, "Don't give up and believe in yourself." If you can do those two things, you are going to find a path. It will be your path and that's what it should be. You will find a way.
That's great advice and motto. You have certainly made a significant difference and have contributed so much to our community here and to so many people. I appreciate you joining us, Leigh.
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. I'm grateful to get to talk about the things that I love.