Coup Reshapes Legal Aid Programs:
One Directors' Path is Smooth While Another's is Rough
By Gina Keating Daily Journal Staff Writer
LOS ANGELES - A government-sponsored coup last year made Bruce
Iwasaki and Neal Dudovitz the kings of Los Angeles County's
federally funded legal aid community.
The two men emerged atop a changed landscape that resulted from
a decade of begging for a share of shrinking public dollars doled
out by an unsympathetic GOP-controlled Congress. That era was
capped in 1998, when the Legal Services Corp. forced 275 legal aid
providers nationwide to combine into 179.
To comply with the orders from their main funding source, a new
species of poverty lawyer emerged - a tech-savvy and button-down
breed who swapped neighborhood walkin offices for toll-free phone
lines, self-help kiosks and Internet access to legal advice.
While some organizations made the dramatic change look
effortless, for others, it did not come easy. And few programs
provide more dramatic illustrations of the promise and pitfalls of
government-funded legal services than Los Angeles County's two
largest providers of federally funded services - Legal Aid
Foundation of Los Angeles and Pacoima-based Neighborhood Legal
Services of Los Angeles County.
From his offices in Koreatown, Iwasaki, a soft-spoken former
O'Melveny & Myers attorney, quietly engineered a merger between
a much smaller Legal Aid Society of Long Beach and his program, the
Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. The merger was completed
peacefully within a year of the federal order.
Today, the programs operate seamlessly, offering new innovations
- including toll-free multilingual phone advisers, expanded hours
for domestic-violence clinics, and renewed immigration and consumer
aid - built on the foundations of the old program. The organization
is Los Angeles' largest government-funded group, with a budget of
$11 million leveraged into $40 million in legal services to the
poor.
Iwasaki's careful respect for the Long Beach program and its
lawyers earned him the political capital he needed to complete his
takeover in a matter of weeks.
"The Long Beach program had strong support in the community so
in a situation like that, one has to recognize that it's not like a
takeover where I have all the answers and I know best," Iwasaki
said. "The people in the community who are working there have the
contacts and the knowledge that will allow service to
continue."
Things have gone less smoothly across town. There, Dudovitz, a
longtime poverty lawyer and executive director of the San Fernando
Valley's 36-year-old legal aid program, continues to struggle with
his hostile takeover of the neighboring San Gabriel-Pomona Valleys
service area one year after it was accomplished.
On the bright side, Dudovitz has extended his respected program
to clients in the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley, and he now operates on
a much larger budget, $6.5 million last year. However, his clash
with the old San Gabriel program resulted in litigation, bitter
feelings and a mission that some say is not clearly focused on
serving poor people.
"It was a difficult situation that was probably mishandled by
everyone," a longtime observer of the public interest community
said of the San Fernando Valley-San Gabriel-Pomona Valley merger.
"There are very few people who come out as the heroes.
Personalities got involved when they shouldn't have. Things were
said that caused bad feelings and couldn't be unsaid."
Iwasaki's merger with the smaller, 48-year-old Long Beach
program was friendly and fast, and no one - not even Long Beach
board members - lost a job.
When it was over, Iwasaki had $1 million more in federal dollars
and two new offices. Long Beach clients regained services they had
lost years ago when federal budget cuts and dwindling grants
reduced the staff of 15 lawyers to five and cut immigration and
consumer law programs.
Iwasaki said, "[I judged the transition] better than I could
have hoped for."
Former Long Beach Executive Director Toby Rothschild, now a
policy wonk in Iwasaki's outfit, agreed.
"To some extent, I did look at it and say, 'We are the littlest
kid on the block, and we don't want to get beat up so we need a
bigger protector,'" Rothschild said. "Once we got past that, it
became a real positive for the Long Beach program and Long Beach
clients."
But to the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley legal aid program, the
positives of merging with Dudovitz's program, San Fernando Valley
Neighborhood Legal Services, were never obvious.
A meeting in late 1999 between Dudovitz and the San
Gabriel-Pomona Valley program's board showed how little the two
programs had in common and how difficult bridging the gap between
their ideologies would be, Dudovitz recalled.
Although no merger plans were discussed, board members at the
smaller program knew of Dudovitz's preference for impact litigation
over direct services.
"We had a discussion about what our separate views were,"
Dudovitz said. "The message we got was that they wanted their
program to stay as it was."
Lauralea Saddick, former executive director of the San
Gabriel-Pomona Valley program, said her board simply did not share
Dudovitz's desire to spend money influencing social policy and
participating in high-profile litigation over poverty-related
issues.
"Our board's philosophy was that the money given by the federal
government was to help people with basic everyday needs," Saddick
said. "It might take a little bit of humility to take those kinds
of cases. Impact work is very important ... but what was the good
of getting the law changed if no one is there to help the
individual?"
Before the San Gabriel program was subsumed by Dudovitz's group,
it offered to merge with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County.
The boards of both organizations eschewed impact litigation in
favor of the 1960s model of providing direct client services.
Supported by resolutions from the Pasadena, San Gabriel, Eastern
and Foothill bar associations, the two programs drew up plans to
merge and submitted them to the Legal Services Corp.
Dudovitz won Iwasaki's backing to oppose the deal, and Legal
Services Corp., the national funding source, overruled the proposed
San Gabriel-Pomona Valley/Orange County merger. On Jan. 27, 2001,
the federal agency awarded the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley service
area to Dudovitz under the umbrella of an expanded San Fernando
program, citing the location of both programs in Los Angeles, which
would allow "better coordinated and more effective advocacy on
county government policies."
The San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program sued Legal Services Corp.
to stop the takeover, claiming the federal program based the
decision on favoritism for the politically active Dudovitz and the
politically powerful Iwasaki.
Though the federal suit accomplished little, it effectively
suspended the end of the old program and the start of the new one
for nearly a year. Hundreds of case files, as well as two offices
in Pasadena and Pomona, remained under the old program's control
until the litigation ended in August 2001.
"We weren't being uncooperative in the matter, they were not
reasoning [the transition] out like lawyers," former San
Gabriel-Pomona Valley board President Jerome Applebaum said.
During this period, Dudovitz did what he could to claim his new
territory - a huge area bounded by the Ventura, Kern, San
Bernardino and Riverside county lines and state Route 60. He
renamed his program Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles
County.
He set up a temporary office in El Monte, advertised his
toll-free phone line through the radio, local elected officials and
the courts. He sent paralegals and staff attorneys to conduct
several daylong educational clinics at local churches, schools and
communitybased organizations. And he accepted city officials'
invitations to analyze and comment on a low-income housing
ordinance in Pasadena along with other housing advocates.
Neighborhood Legal Services participated in several cooperative
efforts with homeless advocacy and health care agencies in his new
territory.
Dudovitz said that he is halfway to his goal of reorganizing his
new territory.
Still untaken are several steps that required goodwill from
local bar associations and others who had opposed the
combination.
"[I am] not a fan of Neal's," admitted John Peck, a former board
member of the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program and a Pasadena Bar
Association board member.
Peck says bad feelings still linger among allies of the old
program who feel left out.
"They really screwed us. We had a good program," Peck said.
An observer familiar with the reconfiguration debate who
requested anonymity wondered why Dudovitz had not spent more time
mending fences.
"He ought to be bending over backwards for reconciliation, but
if you want to do impact work and people in the San Gabriel Valley
want direct services, you have to accommodate that or change your
approach," the observer said. "Neal would never consider doing
that."
More than a year after he officially incorporated the San
Gabriel-Pomona Valley, Dudovitz had not placed a local resident on
the board of Neighborhood Legal Services or made the rounds of the
private legal community to recruit the volunteer lawyers.
"Our emphasis has been on having our potential clients know
about us and deliver services to them," Dudovitz said. "We have
done that spectacularly."
He did not hire any of the old program's nine lawyers and has
yet to permanently place any of his 18 new hires in the San
Gabriel-Pomona Valley. The lack of a legal aid presence in Pomona
prompted the bar association and court officials to start their own
once-monthly family law clinic.
After learning of the effort, Dudovitz sent personnel to staff
the clinic for three hours per week and is helping to write a grant
application to fund a self-help kiosk for Pomona patterned on the
center he pioneered in Van Nuys.
The help, although late, has earned Dudovitz some
appreciation.
"There has been a transition and [the clinic] has helped to fill
some void," said Deni Butler, administrator for the Eastern
District Superior Court. "But we are working together quite nicely
contrary to what the other side issue is."
Scott Wheeler, president of the Eastern Bar Association of Los
Angeles and an ally of the old program, said he mobilized his 200
members to staff the clinic after watching the ranks of unserved
poor grow over the past year.
"We felt we needed to take care of something that had
disappeared. We established the program because we were concerned
about the changeover," Wheeler said.
While acknowledging that building the new program from the
ground up has been slow going, Dudovitz expects to serve up to 30
percent more clients in the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley than his
predecessors.
Of the 700,000 to 1 million people who are eligible for legal
aid services in his combined area, Dudovitz estimated that he will
serve more than 30,000 annually. During his first year in the new
territory, he served 25,000 in the program - a 20 percent increase
over his caseload for San Fernando alone, Dudovitz said.
"The reality is we have to make the transition step by step,"
Dudovitz said. "We need to establish some infrastructure before we
go out. One of the worse things that you can do is promise services
that we can't deliver."
During his 29-year tenure as a public interest lawyer, Dudovitz
has proved that he can deliver on some of the Legal Services
Corp.'s key objectives.
By 2000, he had diversified funding sources for his then-$5.2
million budget so that just 32 percent came from federal programs.
He got the rest from private funds and state and local government
contracts and grants.
He hoped to do the same thing for the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley
program, whose $1.8 million budget was derived almost entirely of
Legal Services Corp. grants.
He had learned the importance of reputation to private sector
fund-raising after the Federal Emergency Management Agency cited
his program before Congress for excellence in cases stemming from
the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
"After that, we were able to raise funds," he said. "People
generally want to give to programs that do quality work because
they get results. We are creative and effective advocates."
Competitive bidding also became easier with a reputation to back
up his grant proposals, and Dudovitz soon was raising enough to
develop slick promotional materials and to share funds with other
public interest programs to cement collaborative efforts on health
care, policy advocacy, homelessness, domestic-violence assistance,
self-help and technology development.
He developed a reputation as an innovator with a
multimillion-dollar grant from the California Endowment to fund a
countywide health advocacy program called Health Consumer Center of
Los Angeles.
The 3-year-old program connected 10,000 poor people with health
care and earned Dudovitz entrée to legislative committees and
elected officials grappling with how to provide medical services
for the poor.
Long before Legal Services Corp. advised legal aid programs to
recruit more privatesector attorneys, Dudovitz in 1992 established
domestic-violence clinics in four San Fernando Valley courthouses
in a partnership with the local bar association.
He tapped that relationship again in 1999 to create two
self-help legal access centers -one at the Van Nuys courthouse and
the other at James Monroe High School in North Hills - where legal
magnet students assist pro per defendants.
"One of the things that is clear is that we could throw 50 or 60
lawyers out there, and we could never approach the need in regards
to providing one-on-one service," Dudovitz said. "But we can be
effective if [we are] thoughtful about how we employ staff and the
balance of the service we provide."
Dudovitz acknowledged that the acrimonious transition may not
have been ideal for clients but said the range of services now
available to them will more than compensate for any lapse of
services.
Although he lauds his counterpart, Iwasaki, and the Long Beach
community for their ideal marriage, Dudovitz had no regrets about
his own stormy rise to power.
"They were one of probably a handful of places in the country
where that happened," he said. "We have an opportunity to grow a
program based on 30 years of experience - we aren't stuck with the
old way. That's an opportunity that very few people have had."
