Interview with former NLADA civil legal aid director.
Oral history details
| Storyteller: | Don Saunders |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Houseman, Alan |
| Date of interview: | Jun 24, 2024 |
| Where relates to: | National and North Carolina |
| Topics: | American Bar Association (ABA), Civil legal aid: Funding, LSC: Restrictions, NLADA, Support centers, and Technology |
| Law type: | Civil |
| Collection: | CNEJL |
| Georgetown Law Library link (possible video): | |
| Length: | 1:28:00 |
Full text of transcript
Download PDF: TranscriptFull transcript of oral history:
Consortium for the National Equal Justice Library
Oral History Collection interview with
Don Saunders
Conducted by Alan Houseman
June 24, 2024
Alan Houseman:
This is an oral history of Don Saunders on June 24th, 2024. We’re doing this through Zoom. Don has been a national leader in civil legal aid for many, many years, including the latter part of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century. So Don, let’s begin with an overview of your life and your work, where you grew up, where you went to high school and college, and the jobs you’ve held. then we’ll come back and focus on those.
Don Saunders:
Alan, thank you so much for doing this. I have been able to conduct a few of these oral history interviews myself. I’ve been privy to the work that you and the library have done, to be scriveners for this great movement. Without your constant commitment to it, we would’ve lost so many important voices in the past. So it is a real honor to just share a few thoughts with you today.
As you can probably tell easily, I grew up in the South in Morganton, a small town in western North Carolina. Not known for much. It had its moment in the seventies, for better or worse, when Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), who was from there, held a national stage during the Watergate events. I grew up there but have not really returned other than to see my family, who still resides there. My mother has turned as very spry 97 this year. So I get back to see her quite a bit.
It was interesting when I was there. As I was deciding to go to college, I knew Senator Ervin pretty well. He reached out to me and tried to interest me in attending one of our service academies, the Naval Academy in Annapolis. I thought I was a really good jock in my head, but probably not good enough to play college ball or anything. But I was intrigued by the Academy for a number of reasons, not only its reputation, but for a chance to participate in athletics. When you’re 18, you don’t exactly know what the future is going to hold. So I began my academic career at Annapolis. I stayed there for a couple years. I’ll talk a little bit more about my decision to leave, but the time period was 1968 to 1970.
You’ll remember, many others might too, what was going on in the United States at that time. The war in Vietnam was really spiraling out of control, with unauthorized bombings and rampant wartime atrocities . It was just a very politicized time. I guess my political chops were sort of cut during that period. I also decided I wanted to go to law school. Once you’re in one of the academies, if you go to graduate school, you end up essentially spending your career there. I wasn’t ready to make that decision. So I left the academy after two years – two very good years that I certainly don’t regret. I learned a lot there, but it really didn’t meet my longer term goals. So I enrolled as an undergraduate, as a junior at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where I graduated. I think the first month I was there, I went from the academy and being looked at by interesting people at the FBI, to college demonstrations in Chapel Hill.
It was about as big a sea change as one could imagine, to use an old Navy pun. I followed up on my goal to go to law school and graduated from UNC law in 1976, I think it was. Right out of law school I spent a year and a half working for the state legislature. I was what they called the enrolling clerk. I was responsible for communicating legislative and policy developments between the House and Senate. So I further whetted my political appetite and it brought me to the world of legal aid in the early seventies.
Alan Houseman:
What jobs have you held in legal aid?
Don Saunders:
Lord, that’s a loaded question. Quite a few. You’ll know this time very well. It was the late seventies really when I got going in legal aid. It was during the time of the Carter expansion from what was mostly an urban structure in legal aid, certainly in North Carolina. Charlotte, Raleigh, Winston-Salem, and Durham as the cities in North Carolina had legal aid programs, but the vast majority of the state was unserved. So I was able to get on with one of the new legal aid programs in Wilmington, which is down on the coast, an area of great beauty and unfortunately great poverty. I was able to jump right in as a staff attorney and work there for several years. I moved around a lot early on.
Again I took advantage of the expansion of legal aid across North Carolina when an opportunity came to me. Back then, you could really move up the ladder of management quickly. You didn’t have to wait for an old fart like me to retire. You could move up quickly. So I was offered a position as a co-director of Legal Aid of the Blue Ridge, which was near my home in the area that I grew up in. I really loved the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Mountains. I was hired by Denison “Denny” Ray. I don’t know if we have an oral history of Denny or not. It would take much more time than we have to even begin to draw an outline of the figure of Denny Ray and what he meant in the legal aid community.
I got to know Denny very well, and he had this very interesting idea. He came from the Cravath law firm in New York and went into legal aid in Mississippi. So he brought some private practice models to his conception of how to run a legal aid office. The Blue Ridge was his laboratory, and so he was going to run it with a management team, like a law firm with a managing partner and things like that. So I fit into that, and it was quite an interesting experiment. I would say it didn’t really work out all that well, but we did bring a lot of different views to the table and a lot of different perspectives.
Appalachia is one of the poorest parts in the United States and was pretty conservative even back then. I don’t want to talk about it now, but there was a lot of suspicion and a lot of concern among the judiciary and the bar about this legal aid program. So I spent a lot of time going around and discussing who we were, what we did with judges across the big service area. That was very engaging work. I got into many, many things on the substantive level. But primarily what I was doing there was really selling the program, which I think a number of folks all over the country did back in the late seventies as we spread out and theoretically covered every county in the United States.
I did one other thing that really came back quickly to move me in another direction. Again, I’ve always been a political junkie. I’ve been very much aware of the importance of legislative advocacy in legal aid programs. Poor people are more impacted by legislative and administrative bodies than anybody else in our society. Certainly in North Carolina, but in many parts of the country, there was no realization that legal aid could play a role in the legislature and should be playing a role. So what we did under Denny’s leadership and his umbrella is a handful of us would go to Raleigh, the state capitol during the legislative session. We would do legislative advocacy during the sessions and we would live together in a safe house. That was quite a fun time. It is nice to remember it today, how we would sit around and really learn as we went along. So that was a real opportunity for me. I was not a legal aid director in the context we think of one today. I was an experiment of Denny’s on three or four different levels. I figured he was sort of a sculptor molding where I was going to go.
We finally created in North Carolina a statewide backup center. This was the last stretch of what was then state support grants where LSC had a number of federal grants to create statewide backup centers. North Carolina was one of the last ones to get a state support grant. I was hired in 1980 to be the founding director of what was in the North Carolina Resource Center and is now morphed into what is the North Carolina Justice Center, although it’s providing a much broader role than we were able to do then.
There are quite a lot of stories in terms of the creation of it. For those who knew the players, Denny was instrumental in setting it up. Victor Geminiani was the head of the LSC office that also was responsible. Denny and Victor spent a lot of energy over how the resource center would be set up and ran. That was a very challenging time. We don’t have time to discuss it, but you know those personalities and you can imagine how it worked. What was good about it? One, it sort of solidified my version of my vision of legal aid and what it could be. In its best instance, like I said earlier, it has a meaningful presence in the legislature. I am not of the opinion that you can be a lobbyist part-time. I believe it’s the practice of law. If you’re a lawyer, you have the same duties and responsibilities to your clients that you owe in a courtroom. We were able to sit up a very, very effective legislative operation there.
We also supervised litigation. Interestingly enough, the first case that came across the table when I was hired was Lassiter vs. Durham Social Services, which we all know is a real barrier to the civil right counsel concept. The interesting thing was that we had a young lawyer who had the case and who would not listen to anyone about handling the appeal or anything else. As it went to the Supreme Court, it was a really difficult process as it turned out. I’m not blaming the lawyer, but it just showed me what some of the challenges were to cooperative litigation. Of course, the court did not enter a judgment that any of us particularly liked.
But I do think that what I learned from that, and I think still lives today — and Lord, you had a lot to do with creating this vision — is I think of the legal aid system as one of the largest law firms in the United States. At the local level, it should be engaged in all levels of advocacy to the extent it’s got resources. The state should be organized. At the national level, where I went with most of my career, we need to coordinate and train and work together and help each other. I think I acquired that vision setting up and running the statewide program in North Carolina for a decade. We really learned what an impact you could have with just a few people learning the process, dealing with the appropriations bills and the like.
North Carolina back then was a much different state. We could do things you could never do in North Carolina now. I mean, it was pretty progressive for the South. There were no legislative staffers. The legislators would depend upon us for information, for many, many issues that low income people had to live with. There was nobody [lobbying] on the other side. We dealt with employers, we dealt with farmers, we dealt with that whole group, but there were so many things we could affect and have an impact on without any organized opposition. That leads to the last thing I would say about that. Jesse Helms was the senior senator from North Carolina at that time.
Because we were having a noticeable impact in Raleigh, a state senator from Charlotte by the name of Ivan Mothershead filed a complaint with the Legal Services Corporation during the height of the Reagan era. You would have a better sense than I, but I think our program in North Carolina and California Rural Legal Aid (CRLA) were sort of the poster children for being under the gun by the Reagan Administration. Because there was a direct request from the state senate for LSC to do something about it, they hired a former prosecutor from San Diego and another government inspector to really come after us in a big way. In a two week process they ran all over the legislature interviewing people about who we were and what we were doing there, trying to get them to say bad stuff about us. All of our friends, Republican and Democrat, would call us and say, “Who are these feds down here looking into you guys? You guys are fine.” So they wrote a letter to LSC on behalf of us saying, this guy’s totally off base. Of course, LSC took it on. That’s where you (Alan Houseman) and Linda Perle were so critical in representing us and supporting us. After two weeks of intense scrutiny, they couldn’t lay a finger on us. I don’t think they ever issued a report, if I remember correctly.
Alan Houseman:
That’s right.
Don Saunders:
Right. They never even issued a report. So that was an interesting time and thankfully we got through it. If anything, it strengthened us. I imagine it sent shivers around some folks to have it all talked about. But we weren’t really threatened about it. I think it probably did strengthen us in the legislature.
Alan Houseman:
I remember coming down and assisting you guys one day. You flew me in for some hearing it with that senator who was an idiot.
Don Saunders:
Well, he was. It was sort of a very early prelude to the world we live in now. But back then there were so many Republicans that believed in what we were doing. It really didn’t go too well for the the LSC hit team.
Alan Houseman:
By the way, before we go on too much, why did you go into legal services in the first place? What led you to that?
Don Saunders:
Yeah. Well, some of it sort of fits in with what I’ve been saying. Like I said, I grew up in the South, the very segregated South in the early fifties. I have very direct memories of segregated restrooms, segregated businesses, segregated facilities everywhere I looked. I was just outraged at the injustice around me. I know saying that from a privileged background, I didn’t quite get it all. But I was very much unlike anyone that I knew growing up. This was before I was as political as I later became. The only person that I was simpatico with was Jane Perkins from the Health Law Center. She grew up 10 miles from me at the same time. We exchange these stories quite often. We were very close. So really I had an anger that I know a number of other young white people, or my contemporaries in the South, shared about the stark injustice and discrimination that we saw all around us, particularly being a part of the ruling class that was implementing the prevalent racist policies of the time.
Then, when I went to the academy and added the politicization of the Sixties, I was ready to go. I knew that, when I went to law school I had no doubt that public interest and social justice was where I would end up. Again, I think given the particular circumstances of the time, that it’d be hard to repeat my path right now because legal aid programs are so much more mature and entrenched. But back then it was the Wild West. Honestly, I could go from a field program to running a program to directing a really wonderful staff at the Resource Center. We had Abdul Rashid doing community economic development. We had so many wonderful people. I knew then that this is what I wanted to do. I felt like the work that we were doing made a huge difference and really could get at the underlying reasons for poverty if we were just smart about it. I don’t have great personal stories of why I was drawn to this, but I was just totally enmeshed in the work.
Then, as you know, I had a very lucky break. The opportunity to come to Washington, I thought temporarily, presented itself in 1990. Legal aid has had so many pendulum swings over time, one can hardly imagine it. Nobody would believe it. We went from Carter to Reagan. Then here we go back again.
In 1989 or 1990, Congressman Charles Stenholm (D-TX), a yellow dog Democrat from Texas, and Congressman Bill McCollum (R-FL), a Republican who actually wanted to run a legal aid program in Orlando, put together a series of amendments with the direction of the Farm Bureau to restrict the legal aid LSC dollars, a lot like what we live with today. You were there, I was not. As I understand the vote, the Dems were kind of just not paying much attention. When the clock ran out, Stenholm and McCollum had the votes to do that. Then, at least as Julie Clark would tell the story, they did an old legislative trick, which is to officially stop legislative time. The Democratic majority suspended the clock as a few Democrats changed their votes, and we survived. We survived what back then seemed like an existential threat because those were really bad restrictions. But I think you and other leaders in Washington said, well, we got to get our political act together. The Farm Bureau had two full-time lobbyists going after legal aid when I started. So I was given the opportunity to come to Washington to work with the Project Advisory Group and NLADA and you at CLASP to coordinate and organize a grassroots network. It was called the education campaign, the idea being to educate Congress so this wouldn’t happen again.
To make a very long story short, what we did was we recruited contact people in every state. Back then you could bring in legal aid directors. It was before the restrictions we have now, so many of our contacts were legal aid people. What we asked them to do is bring in bar leaders and other key supporters to support directly LSC votes in Washington. We realized we were way too isolated and we wanted to bring in much stronger state and local support. We wanted to bring in others in the community and create the kind political grassroots network that could really be effective. Back then there were 325 legal aid programs, so there were a lot more structures and other groups that could participate in that network. So we would develop fact sheets. We must have written 20 of them on all the big issues that were involved in Stenholm-McCollum. We would send out regular mailings about developments. We did that throughout the early period of the last couple years of George H.W. Bush. Then going into the Clinton years I was really focused on grassroots work and boy did I walk the halls. I, along with Julie Clark, went all over, particularly at the House level,along with Dwight Loines and Gordon Deane from the UAW, and Bob Evans and others from the ABA. We were really on the Hill a lot then, much more than we’ve been probably before or since. So that was sort of my introduction into Washington, and that sort of evolved into an opportunity in NLADA that I’ll talk about in a minute.
Alan Houseman:
Before we go on, why don’t you describe the 1992 legislative campaign, the Barney Frank bill and all of that?
Don Saunders:
It was kind of funny because my first two years I was focused on, “God, we can’t lose another vote. We can’t do that.” Then we had Clinton elected and Hillary was deeply involved in appointing the LSC board and we were, you remember — I guess we can say this now, the statute of limitations must have passed — we were vetting board members, we were mooting board members. It was the dream. Talk about the pendulum shifting from Reagan to Hillary. So we were feeling our oats and you and Linda were drafting like mad. We created, I’ll never forget the number, H.R. 2039. This was a LSC reauthorization bill. We still haven’t been reauthorized since your early one, which was in 1974 or, whatever.
Alan Houseman:
1977.
Don Saunders:
Yeah, that’s right. LSC was one time reauthorized. Back then it was overdue for reauthorization. It still hasn’t been reauthorized, but we had this window of opportunity of two years. We thought it was going to be Valhalla or something. It was just going to be great. So we worked hard on drafting the model legal aid bill that dealt with the restrictions, increased appropriations, and did a lot of things. Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) was our leader in the House. We couldn’t ask for a much more supportive, although eccentric, leader. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) led the Labor and Human Resources Committee, I think it was called then. So we had quite the pathway to actually reauthorizing and the kind of vision that we thought was important.
But again, because of the great work of our farm worker programs, the migrant programs, the Farm Bureau, like I said, they had hired full-time lobbyists. They were all over the hill. Once Clinton came in, the former acting president of LSC, Ken Boehm, joined in and they all created a cottage industry of going after legal aid. So we were really excited about the chance to pass an authorization against all that organized opposition.
The strongest memory I have, and this is where we would have our bar conversation, the bill went to the House floor. Barney Frank and a wonderful man named Paul Drolet, who was his chief staffer on legal aid, were on the floor of the House. They had this huge Judiciary Committee office, and they just turned it over to us. They were on the phone as amendment after amendment, all the McCollum-Stenholm amendments, were offered to our authorization bill. Every time one came up, they’d call us for talking points. Howard Dana, who was on the LSC board, and a Republican, happened to be there. He was lobbying and he thought we were the gun lobby. It was the one time we felt like the gun lobby. We had the bill on the floor, we were giving them arguments. It was really the way the legislative process should work. You see those little bills going across the capital lawn. That was really our moment in time. So we knocked down every amendment from McCollum-Stenholm — and we’ll talk about them when they end up getting passed — and the bill passed the House with some significant Republican support. This is where your memory might do better than mine. Once we got into the second year, this is the time the Tea Party was getting going, and I think Senator Kennedy had other things — I know he did — other priorities that kept the Senate from taking the bill up. We thought, well, what the heck? We’ll just do it in the 104th Congress. That brings us to another step along the way. But I know you’re not supposed necessarily to give thoughts, but that’s a moment in time that I remember so much. I’d be curious about your ideas about it.
Alan Houseman:
Well, I think part of the problem in the Senate was there was difficulty getting support from key Republican senators. We finally got Senator Nancy Kassenbaum (R-KS) on board after a tremendous amount of work. But then we could never get the thing moved. I think Kennedy was trying to move it, but there were a lot of other things going on at the time, and
Don Saunders:
Senator Jim Jeffords (VT) shifted parties somewhere in there.
Alan Houseman:
Right. Jim Jeffords was a Republican. Then he shifted to the Democrats. But the only sort of solid Republican we could ever get was Nancy Kassenbaum from Kansas. She wanted some amendments, which we could live with, but we could never get the thing moved. I can’t remember exactly if it was. It might’ve been that Kennedy was too busy. But I just think it was one of those very difficult things to move out of the committee to the floor, and it was almost impossible to get floor time then.
Don Saunders:
And then it got caught up in the election year and things like that. But yeah, it was a much different Congress. I mean, they actually worked. It was hard to get floor time.
So in any event after that,
Alan Houseman:
Go ahead, then you moved to NLADA, right?
Don Saunders:
I moved up. Well, what happened was very interesting. The Clinton Board [of LSC] came in. Doug Eakeley hired Alex Forger, who immediately hired Martha Bergmark, who was the civil director of NLADA. So that position came open, and I was probably headed back to North Carolina. Well, we had all sort of changed our working habits. They weren’t going to replace me as a temporary person. But I was lucky enough — again, I have been lucky throughout my career — I was lucky enough to be hired by Clint Lyons to succeed Martha at NLADA. It was an impossible task, but I did my best at it as both the civil director, but much more than Martha because of the politics of it, I was also involved on the political side too. I worked with our very good friend, Julie Clark, who was NLADA’s director of government services or government relations.
Then things got real interesting. We had the 104th Congress elected in 1994, and boy did things change. That was the Gingrich revolution and I think you see a lot written about it now. That’s where our politics of today started. Gingrich was such a flame thrower, and there was a package he the Contract with America. It had 10 platform positions, one of which was eliminating the Legal Services Corporation. How the hell did we become such a popular target? The reason was because we did divorces for people. So I guess we got in the way of a man’s biblical right to beat his wife. It was a very odd circumstance. Ralph Reed was our original boogeyman, I guess you might say. At that point, it gets really messy because most people who might listen to this probably now think of John Kasich (R-OH) as one of the last moderate Republicans left standing. But back then he was a true believer in the Gingrich revolution. He chaired the House Budget Committee and he came up with what he called the “glide path to zero” for LSC in keeping with the Contract with America. In other words, he was going to cut overall funding one third, one third, one third until it was gone in the third year. We were gobsmacked, if that’s the right word. You went through both of these. I’m not saying Reagan wasn’t a big challenge, but I think we were really worried in that beginning time of the Gingrich revolution that we might lose the federal component of legal aid in this country. I think Republicans had the Senate then too. If Congress wouldn’t go there, Reagan couldn’t eliminate LSC on his own. But we had Senator Warren Rudman (R-NH) and we had all this support in Congress so they weren’t going to defund legal aid. In fact, they took away the ability of Reagan to regulate legal aid. But Congress funds legal aid. In the Gingrich era, we didn’t exactly figure out how Bill Clinton was going to veto us into continued funding.
So we were very worried. You talk about gearing up a nationwide grassroots campaign. The bar came into the fight in a big way. The ABA and our grassroots network really stepped up. I credit a congressman named Jim Ramstad from Minneapolis, who was a Republican on the Judiciary Committee. He was a lawyer and was very supportive of the local legal aid program in Minneapolis. He really fought back. It wasn’t today’s Republican Caucus. There were lots of people who didn’t agree with Gingrich, and we lobbied the heck out of the House. I think when the budget was presented to the House, we had a hundred Republicans stand up and say, no, we’re not going to eliminate the Legal Services Corporation. That was really a watershed moment in my view, to have Ramstad and a number of other Republicans come up and say in the House where this was being driven, that ain’t going to happen. On the Senate side, we had the strong support of Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) due in large part to a wonderful Republican supporter from Albuquerque, New Mexico. John Robb, who’s a former board chair of NLADA and leader of the ABA, really lobbied Domenici. He said, yeah, it ain’t going to happen in the Senate either. So it became pretty clear early on that we weren’t going to be defunded immediately.
However – and this is where it gets kind of complicated – and I don’t think there’s still clarity across the community of what happened in the appropriations committees appropriate for legal aid. A congressman named Frank Wolf (R-VA) from northern Virginia was the chair of the House Appropriations Committee. The way appropriators worked then, and still do, is that the chair of the committee writes the bill, and if you want any of your things funded, you better not challenge the chair’s bill. So as we get ready to mark up the House Appropriations bill in committee – bam – we see it the night before. There were most of the McCollum-Stenholm restrictions, or most of them incorporated in section 504 — I’ve been retired for a while, whatever that provision was — it’s 504. It’s been continued since that day as the restrictions that were put on legal aid. We didn’t have any great meeting with committees or any chance to testify and say, these are bad or do what we did on the House floor just two years earlier. It was given to us. We fought our butts off over it. But there wasn’t any real vote in which we could challenge it in the appropriations process. The restrictions only applied for those two years. A number of my colleagues said, “You should walk away from the money before you accept a second class system of justice.” Even though we fought the restrictions with all of our hearts, we couldn’t see walking away from that kind of federal appropriation. We did have a significant cut, but those restrictions were an absolute quid pro quo, at least to get the appropriation through the House, and I would say probably through the Senate. They passed this appropriations bill in one of those omnibus conference ways at the end of the year. So there was never any real chance to affect the provisions we so strongly opposed. That was done very much behind closed doors, very much as a concerted effort.
Alan Houseman:
Domenici played a major role in the Senate, if you remember. Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) wanted to block grant the program and Domenici made sure that never happened.
Don Saunders:
Absolutely. Domenici was the key person in the Senate to do that, but I don’t think he ever fought the restrictions.
Alan Houseman:
No, that’s true.
Don Saunders:
I can’t remember him ever saying, “I believe that programs ought to be able to these things.” Most people know what the restrictions on LSC funds are. The key ones are class actions. You can’t do lobbying. You can’t do any political work, at least as in terms of LSC funding. There are onerous provisions on representing non-citizens and prisoners. Just a whole series of terrible restrictions, which remain to this day. I mean, there’s no question about it. It did have an impact. I mean, you, Linda, I, and others, we tried to work hard and have worked ever since with the community to tell them, “Yeah, the restrictions suck. We’ll try to get rid of them if the chance ever presents itself. But you can still make a lot of difference. You can still do impact work. You can still figure out ways to do this. The other thing you can do is you can plan at the state level to figure out how to get a capacity to do non-LSC work.”
That’s the other thing about all of this that I think is worth noting because there were only a few of us there. But it was during that period when we thought LSC may be eliminated that a few people at the national level — ABA, LSC, certainly CLASP and NLADA — we started to think about what happens the day after the LSC is eliminated. We realized clients don’t go away. Legal aid doesn’t go away. The feds go away. How are we going to govern this? How are we going to organize it?
The idea of a state justice community sort of percolated out of that. As it turned out, it was adopted by the Legal Service Corporation as sort of a funding strategy. Once we won the appropriations battle, state planning was the most dominant theme for programs other than getting over the restrictions. During that period of time, LSC was making its funding decisions based upon a state planning process. They very much were substituting their own judgment in terms of how programs were organized within a state. So one of the good things that came out of this, and some people wouldn’t call it good, was the states really stepped up and created in most states an effective access to justice presence that allowed for state planning that was real, and it was owned locally. It was a very, very contentious time, and I got myself caught in the middle of it in most places. It was interesting that the Clinton Board hired a very prominent Republican, John MacKay because of the changes in the Congress. They felt they had to do that to survive. They hired him over Martha Bergmark, who was a hero of mine. But MacKay and lead staffer Randy Youells, they decided that LSC had too many individual grantees.
We had 325 programs, I believe at the time, and that’s correct. When all is said and done, we now have 131. Well, we didn’t get from here to there very easily. One of my jobs as civil director was to go to various NLADA-member meetings and tell them what was going on with the Corporation – regional meetings and the like. At every damn one of ’em just about, we would have to have an off agenda meeting where we had to kick LSC out of the room. In the rooms were people, many of whom were founders of their legal aid program, who opposed their program being merged passionately and deeply. The decisions were made without a great deal of data. It was kind of who do they think is doing well, who’s not. Bunches of changes were decided just like that. It was a very difficult process with a little bit of litigation. One of the McCollum-Stenholm provisions that got put on, the idea of competitive bidding, was applied. So programs lost any right whatsoever to refunding, which they had before. So that led to real upheaval in the community. Those who were around then remember it very, very well. I will just say this about it, it was painful. I don’t think it was necessarily managed as well as it could be, but we had too many programs, 325 programs. Imagine the duplication of administrative costs. Now we have a third of that. We have more mature statewide programs. There was a fear we would lose political support when a state went from eight to one program. Eight boards who were engaged directly suddenly lost their corporate structures. But that loss hasn’t really proven to be really harmful to LSC’s support at the state and local level, I don’t think.
But that’s a very short story of the state planning process, the restrictions process. The whole time of the Clinton Administration did not turn out to be the halcyon period that we were anticipating or hoping for, that’s for sure.
We still have H.R. 2039 and I guess we’re going to get back to it here in a minute. I better not talk so much.
Alan Houseman:
No, you’re fine.
Don Saunders:
Okay. Anything you’d like to add about that? You certainly have a lot to do then.
Alan Houseman:
Well, I have my own oral history, so I’ll leave it there. This is yours. Alright. Just tell a little bit about some other work you did as VP of Civil Legal Services at NLADA, like the Equal Justice Conference and what it is and how it became that as opposed to the Pro Bono Conference and anything else like that you want to get into.
Don Saunders:
All right. I just got a few things to talk about, really the things that mattered the most to me. Jim Sandman, when he took over LSC, used to say that he had the best job in American law, and probably he did. But I always thought to myself, no, you don’t, Jim. I’ve got the best job in American law. I don’t have your bullshit with Congress and I get to work with this wonderful community on so many different things. My job at NLADA and all of our jobs really at the national level were like the Platte River. We were mile wide and an inch deep. We’d covered so many different areas. First of all, we had governance. We had our civil policy group, which sets direction for the civil community, both in terms of policy, funding priorities and things of that nature. It’s very important to us because even with the most friendly Corporation in the world, which we probably have, there are important policies for us to advocate. I mean one time we had Martha Bergmark and John Tull running LSC. Even then the role we play as advocates before LSC is critical. Having a group of field people who set those policies is really important. They also came up with initiatives to improve the delivery of civil legal assistance. We created a program that we called at one point strategic advocacy for lasting results, or SALR. I like the name, of course. That’s the Navy in me I guess. But people didn’t like the name. We changed it to something else. But we would do technical assistance visits and we created a whole standard of things for how a good program could do impact work. We would put together teams of advocates to go around the country and spend a week with a program, meeting with them, really talking about how to be more impactful, how to better do strategic advocacy. That was all led by our volunteers. There were a number of other initiatives like that.
I thought another thing I did that was really important, and I didn’t start it. God knows Martha and you and others were doing it for a long time. I tried to put legal aid at as many tables that were important at the national level as I could, whether that be the ABA with SLCAID or IOLTA or in a whole array of issues with the ABA, or with the Congress and an array of congressional staffers. We met regularly with them on legal aid issues. One of the things I think we accomplished that still is really important is working with the administrative agencies, putting legal aid at the table. It ultimately became the Legal Aid Interagency Round Table under the Obama Administration. What we were doing then is working with our friends in government as advocates to create other federal sources of revenue beyond LSC. That exists today. It’s been…
Alan Houseman:
Very effective and it’s been very successful.
Don Saunders:
It had a little bumpy road during the Trump Administration. It had a little bumpy road there. But even then it continued to exist and that was important. It wasn’t just an Obama initiative and it certainly is flourishing again. Kathleen Welch and I worked early on in the national service legislation and the Clinton Administration to create the National Legal Corps, which continues to exist and I think has really created another federal resource that has really been effective in terms of our advocacy. So one of the things I thought about as I grew older in this job is it ought not to be me at all these tables. I ought to recruit other folks and put other faces and voices at those tables. I tried to do that, and I just think that was a critical part of the job. What you talked about, our training agenda or our conference agenda, however you want to do it. I think that needs to be part of a coordinated strategy to create that kind of movement concept of legal aid being one big law firm. That was the approach I tried to bring to it, both through our annual conferences and our litigation director conference, which was my favorite and I think your favorite.
Let’s talk about the origins of the Equal Justice Conference. During the Gingrich years, we had a time when the ABA used to have their pro bono conference and they had a whole array of private attorneys from all over the country talking about what are we going to do about legal aid now that Gingrich is out to get it? We were doing a delivery conference at the same time with the Management Information Exchange (MIE) saying, “What are we going to do now that Gingrich is out to get us? How are we going to solidify with the private bar?” At their conference they’re saying, where’s Legal Aid? And at our conference we saying, where’s the ABA?
So Steve Scudder, who is a dear friend of mine, who ran the ABA Pro Bono Committee at that point -, working with his colleagues, Terry Brooks and Cheryl Zelinsky – and I sat down and decided, with a great deal of turf getting plowed up in the process, to have the first joint Equal Justice Conference sponsored by the ABA and NLADA in 1999.
Alan Houseman:
I think Esther Lardent was involved in that too,
Don Saunders:
Esther was definitely involved in that as well. She ran the Pro Bono Institute, which participated in developing the EJC. Again, there was turf all over the place. It was tricky in the pro bono world. There was lots of turf. But in legal aid there was too. I remember a lot of NLADA folks were saying, well, this is going to compete with our annual conference. We can’t do that. But Jo-Ann Wallace — bless her for doing it — just said, this is the right thing to do. Over time, I don’t think it competes. I think it strengthened the ABA’s presence and it certainly strengthened legal aid. It’s the largest purely civil legal aid gathering in the country now. It has well over a thousand people every year, focusing on effective partnerships among all the players delivering legal assistance to poor people. That remains the theme of what we had in mind — how do we work together? In fact, in looking over all the proposals, for most of them you’ve got to start with how do you talk about partners? How do you talk about IOLTA? How do you talk about the bar working with legal aid? I had no idea it would take off as well as it has, but I am very, very proud of that work. It was fun. I loved the people I worked with. Again, it was creating more tables where legal aid is discussed. I tell you what, the ABA president and people in the ABA who never thought about legal aid had to get drug into the Equal Justice Conference. I think politically that helped us quite a bit.
So the only other thing I would add about my job there before we talk about the last political stuff would be, particularly as I grew older in the job, and I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, it became more and more important to me to be a mentor to others. It took a while, but we really underwent an enormous generational shift in legal aid and leadership. That went in many instances from primarily male to primarily female, primarily white to more diversity in our leadership ranks. I feel like we have so many strong people in new leadership positions and I really spent a lot of time trying to be friends and mentors with particularly women leaders and people of color. I think I did that pretty effectively.
We have a lot of work to do. But given the chance to meet with newer leaders at the Equal Justice Conference and the NLADA annual conference and on local visits and the litigation directors being able to do that with advocates, I am so psyched about the future in terms of our advocacy community and who’s getting into legal aid and those sorts of things. I believe that the role that NLADA has to play is really to hold the community of legal aid together.
We are not nearly as dependent as we used to be on federal funding. We try not to be nearly as directed by LSC as we used to be. One of the fears that I always had in NLADA, because we have a defender side as well, the defender side never really identified why they need a national presence. They’re all locally based and locally funded, and they’re very much isolated. One of the things I’ve always harped about and been so happy to see is even though programs may have only 20% LSC funding now, they still strongly believe in a national vision, a national program, a national community ready to help each other any way they can, be it through management support or advocacy support or through direct peer-to-peer assistance. That’s again part of my vision that we are just one big law firm achieving our best results for the client community. I do think that’s a really important role that I tried to play and I know NLADA and Radhika Singh are playing, in terms of being a national organizing entity for the civil system, both LSC-funded and non-LSC funded, certainly not the only one, but the only membership one that brings probably all those people to the table.
Alan Houseman:
Very good. Before I get to the final question about the future, let’s just do a few minutes on President Obama, the Levy board, Jim Sandman, now Ron Flagg, the current LSC and appropriations, just a few comments on that. You played a role in all of that.
Don Saunders:
I did. I’ll start with the LSC board before the appropriations process. As you know, we’ve always been involved from George Wittgraf and the George H.W. Bush Board to Doug Eakeley and the Clinton Board. It was always a rite of spring for us to vet and push for good LSC board members, until the one and only John Levy came on with the support of President Obama. I’ve really been privileged to work with so many good board members. I mean, one thing about all the LSC boards I’ve worked with is you don’t see too many Republican and Democrat. You can’t tell that much. Even people we worried about, we opposed the woman from the Pacific Legal Foundation, I forget her name. We’ve opposed some members that turned out to be supportive. They get on the board and they’ve seem to become supportive.
Well, John Levy changed that game. I mean, he came in early in the Obama Administration. He’s still there. Essentially the same board that Obama appointed is still there. I had some questions about the idea of having kind of a permanent board. They’ve argued about the benefits of having continuity and I guess I agree with that. It’s hard not to agree with it when their appropriation requests this year was $1.75 billion. We never would dream of that without John Levy’s passion and vision and everything else. So I think the world of him. I think it’s been strategic. I know Vic Maddox worked for Senate Republic Leader Mitch McConnell. Boy was he ever in a role that was critical. Vic, although a lot of people consider him the most conservative member, when we’ve really needed him, he was always there. He’s never gone out of his lane, so to speak, to go to the Congress and say, “Oh, they ought not be doing this impact piece.” He has kept it inside and his support has been important. It was a little challenging when John Malcolm was appointed, as he ran the division at Heritage Foundation named for Ed Meese, who tried to kill the LSC program during Reagan. I met with him right after he was named and he told me, “I really support legal aid, even though Heritage does not.” And darned if he hasn’t voted for the billion plus appropriations request. Having Heritage there, it is very strategic. I know John has had a lot to do with that. His energy, his outreach. He has taken LSC from somewhat of an insular program that was really so focused on the field. They still are, but you got to yell sometimes to get them to think about the grantees because they’re thinking about this group or this issue. They’ve got all these task forces on disaster relief or pro bono or whatever.
I mean, the energy level that John has brought to this is really, really remarkable. We had the chance when I was there, when Biden was elected, I guess to discuss those issues with Biden. Usually a president comes in wanting his own people. Trump didn’t know we existed, so that doesn’t count as a time. Thankfully, Trump didn’t know we existed. So they made it through the Trump years. I think there was no interest in my part, and I don’t think on NLADA’s part, of trying to advocate to do significant changes in the board or changes in the chair. Normally in the past you’d have somebody who was really close to the president who wanted the legal aid job. I don’t know if Biden had that person or not. I’m not in those circles. But I think John got to know him very well during the Obama Administration.
They have done so much — $570 million! I mean, that’s a lot of money given the ups and downs we’ve been through all these years. To have Republican support at the board level for a $1.7 billion appropriation. All credit to them now. I’ve had problems with certain policies the LSC has had. We always will have that. I mean the NLADA wouldn’t have a reason to exist if we didn’t have problems with some of the LSC’s policies. But for the most part, that’s been such a dedicated board. I’m so surprised that so many of ’em have hung around so long. It has been a sea change again, to use another Navy term. But I do think his role as communicator and politician and cheerleader has been a remarkable. And Jim Sandman coming in as their president, he really brought a level of respect and seriousness to the Corporation. No bad meaning for any of his predecessors, but Jim really just has something about his charisma, his role with Arnold Porter, his ability to inspire people. I clashed with him a little bit over style. He was not a big process guy, but he really gained a lot of support for LSC during his time.
I will just say that Ron Flagg has picked up where Jim left off. The first time I met Ron is like the third day that he had been on the job as general counsel, for which Jim had hired him. We had been having this huge debate about whether or not they’re going to refund the migrant program and how they were going to fund it, at what level they were going to fund it. We raised $10,000 from the migrant community, which wasn’t easy to do, to commission a report about the continuing importance of the work and how the money should be distributed and who should be represented. I handed it to Ron and Jim, and it really helped that we had paid $10,000. It gave us credibility. That’s how private law firms work. Ron immediately said, when I started my spiel, Ron said, save it. I’m with you. We’re going to fund you. I mean, it was just off the bat. He’s been a long time chair of the, I don’t know if still is or not, the Veterans Law Center. He is much more out there in terms of aggressive advocacy probably than Jim ever was. But he is also been a very good manager though with a distinctly different, style. But we’ve been very well served by both of them.
Alan Houseman:
Let me just add one thing to that. I’ve known all the LSC presidents. I worked under the first one, Tom Ehrlich, who I think was very much like Jim Sandman. That is Tom had been the dean of Stanford Law School. He came in as the first president of LSC and brought a whole different level of political support and of, what’s the right word, substance. I think that’s the wrong word, but a political support and substance to the job. I think that’s what Jim did in a lot of ways. Let’s move on to the future question.
Don Saunders:
I probably should say a minute about appropriations. After all the stuff we talked about in terms of the Gingrich attacks, a sort of nuclear winter has set into Congress in terms of legal aid. The Congress has not passed an appropriations package by the end of the fiscal year since what, 1995? The system is clearly and dramatically broken. Look at this year. But what we’ve managed to do is work very carefully with committee chairs, both Republican and Democrat, to get a pretty good deal out of appropriations. There’s no vote. We’ve only had a few amendments offered over the last decade to cut the LSC appropriation. Some back bencher would throw in an amendment, move $10 million here or there. But there have been no real big elimination fights in Congress since that time. This is the other thing I’ve got to say about John Levy, Carol Bergman, the whole Corporation, and all of us — but they’ve led it. Who in the hell would think that legal aid would be the last bipartisan issue in the United States or one of the last ones? I mean, it is. When I started, the Farm Bureau had two lobbyists. Emilia Disanto was writing letters on behalf of Chairman Grassley attacking the Frank Strickland LSC Board and staff. Part of this is just luck. But now we’ve got Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) supporting legal aid. We’ve got such bipartisan support, and that is really how the appropriation processes should work. Now we’re getting significant increases.
I would just say one word of caution, as I know you would. This doesn’t have to always be the way it is now. It is so easy for any issue to blow up. Lord knows we’ve got enough history in the legal aid world to have it blow up. So don’t think because things are going so smoothly in a bipartisan way that it must continue. I congratulate all the work that has been done to ensure support across both aisles. NLADA has been getting 200 of the major corporations in the United States to sign a letter to Congress every year – talk about the establishment being there to support equal justice. But we haven’t had a cottage industry like Ken Boehm had working to make money off of eliminating LSC. I don’t know where the Farm Bureau went. It’s not like the farm worker program went away. It’s just a word of caution. We should always be thankful in this environment to be under the radar screen and to continue to do that, but always be prepared for that pendulum to switch back to some of the other things we talked about. Okay. That was my soapbox.
Alan Houseman:
Well, that was good. So how do you envision the future of civil legal aid and what would you like to see? What is your vision and how do you deal with some of the currents that are in the community now and this kind, I don’t mean just to focus on that. I’m just saying how would you set out your vision? That’s the issue.
Don Saunders:
Yeah. I have blurry vision, but not on this one. I’m an Edgar Cahn, Earl Johnson, Alan Houseman subscriber to the notion of how our legal aid system should be focused. The heart of it should be staff-based, full-time legal aid programs funded adequately at the federal, state, and local level. That’s my view of the past and the future. I have not as much experience as you do working internationally, but I sure talk to a bunch of groups, international groups, talking about their legal aid systems. What comes out of most of those conversations is that we love our system and their level of resources. We’re not a welfare program for lawyers in this country. Imagine legal aid suing the government in certain countries you’ve worked in or having the independent judgment to do those sorts of things. I mean, I just feel like to make the biggest difference, we need an independent system that has representation in the state capital, that has the capacity to outreach to clients where they live and deal with the issues that really affect them, and that we have professionals who can make a career of it — debt notwithstanding, we’ve got to deal with that issue — and really become good at what they do. Not use legal aid as a training school to go to a firm or government practice or whatever. That’s my firm vision. It’s easy to say it. That being said, I live in Montana now and what they’ve done out here with technology is impressive. It’s a tiny little program, but where I live, golly, we have broadband now on top of a mountain. There’s not a person within a mile. But thanks to Joe Biden, we now have broadband and on that broadband a client can do a hearing or have an interview in an area where they couldn’t possibly be served otherwise. I think that legal aid’s creativity in using new delivery methods, mostly out of necessity, has been at the forefront of the profession in developing ways of using these technologies to expand the reach and impact.
Richard Zorza, who I loved to death, he and I had some interesting conversations. I thought he was a genius. I just didn’t think he thought enough of the legal aid program’s role in the broader system of delivery of legal assistance to people living in poverty . So that was what I tried to do.
The idea of getting information to people in ways they can use it, those who will never be able to get a lawyer, of course that ought to be part of any system. The Public Welfare Foundation funded a process that I worked on with Richard and others and the network there. We developed a vision of what each state should have, and it’s really worth looking at now — the capacities they should have, the bar, working with the programs, dealing with opportunities presented by self-help and by pro bono.
I think we could do so much more in the area of pro bono, and of well- regulated non-lawyer advocates. That’s an interesting one. I am on the board of Montana Legal Aid. We’re discussing that issue here as it’s being discussed at the national level. As always, the idea of regulation and overreach has to be a part of that equation. I mean, there’ve been a lot of very aggressive efforts, Utah, Washington State, others, to really expand services by creating this category of non-lawyer services. I would say it’s a great concept, but a lot more work needs to be done in terms of how it’s structured and how it’s overseen. We’ve just seen too many cases of abuse and our clients are people who are very susceptible to that kind of opportunity for abuse. So like I say, I don’t think legal aid ought to put its head in the sand like maybe we used to way too much. We ought to be part of a vibrant state justice community, if you will. But every system ought to have, and the ABA standards go to this too, every system ought to have certain things in place and they build off of a strong independent legal aid program. There’s my spiel.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. We’re about to end here. You’ve won some awards. Which of those awards that you’ve won do you find the most rewarding for you?
Don Saunders:
There are two or three come to mind. One, and it is the only one I have on my wall out here in my limited space in my little house here, other than my Coltrane picture for a bill I did honoring John Coltrane – North Carolina native. I was really lucky to be honored by California Rural Legal Aid (CRLA) with the Jessie Lopez De La Cruz Community Activist and Service Award. It’s named after a wonderful activist in the farm worker community in California. One of the things that mattered most to me in my work was to ensure that the special population programs we have — as scattered as that history might be — for farm workers and Native Americans were respected, well funded, and were protected and enhanced every way they could be. This award from CRLA really meant a lot to me because they have been under such attack since Reagan and Meese and everyone else. But if you know anybody that ever worked at CRLA, you’ve seen a burning passion and commitment for what we do and the dignity of the clients they represent. They recognized me for supporting CRLA’s advocacy and the farmworker movement in general. So that meant a lot to me and still does. I do have that up on my wall.
I was also lucky enough, and part of that’s just getting old and retiring, but I did get the Nan Heald Innovations in Equal Justice Award, which was the award we created for NLADA for the Equal Justice Conference. It was recently named in honor of Nan Heald, who was your dear friend and mine and one of the great leaders of our community, particularly when it came to innovation. Thinking of all Nan meant to me and our community and all the innovation she stood behind, I really appreciated their doing that. The award was presented virtually. Alison Paul drove down from a couple hundred miles to present if during the heart of the pandemic. It was quite moving for me.
There’s another one that I really cherish. Years and years ago when I was lobbying in North Carolina, I was particularly focused on housing. I owe so much to the late David Bryson and Florence Roisman for just showing me what a legal aid career could be about. Way back when in North Carolina, we had a great relationships in the legislature. It was not crazy legislatively like it is now. The state got something called the Stripper Well money, which was one of these awards, like the tobacco award. It just went to the state to do whatever the hell they wanted to do with it. There was after I had learned from David and others of this concept called a housing trust fund. At the state level, it sets aside money to create low income housing. I drafted a bill that really targeted ]low income communities, people that would be opposed by the “not in my neighborhood people”.
But the Senate chair of the committee with oversight of the money, he put the whole award into the NC Housing Trust Funds to get it off its feet. It’s grown over, gosh, that’s over 35 years. Right toward the end of my time in Washington, the head of the Housing Finance Agency and his board, they were all in Washington for a lobbying day on the Hill. They took me to dinner and gave me an award citing how many low-income people had been housed with the support of the trust fund. But it was amazing. I had lost track of how much it had grown and how many people had been housed because one person happened to be at the right place at the right time with a little money involved to get your foot in the door. As bad as our politics are, most people get into politics to do good. And here was a case where a rural NC legislator had a chance to do just that. That was something that meant a lot to me from my previous life. So that was my list.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. Well, we’re about done. Do you have any final thoughts before we close?
Don Saunders:
I think the final thoughts I initially had, I’ve gotten through there. It’s just how excited I am about the future, the maturity of the organizations, the new leadership, the new advocates. This, gosh, it is going to be fun for you all. I hope you have the chance to make a career in this work. Believe me, at the end of the trail, it’s just as fulfilling as the beginning. I might have another wall or two in my little house here if I’d gone another way, but it wouldn’t be worth it. It was a wonderful career and I am so excited about the future and looking forward to seeing how things develop.
Alan Houseman:
Well, thank you very much, Don. This has been terrific. It’s been a great honor to have you here and to do the oral history and I’m so proud of our friendship. That’s been so many years. So thank you.
Don Saunders:
Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
END