Discusses his start with Navajo Nation legal services and then his long career with Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC). He emphasizes innovative anti-poverty litigation and advocacy for systemic change.
Oral history details
| Storyteller: | Gary Smith |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Houseman, Alan |
| Date of interview: | Oct 8, 2024 |
| Where relates to: | Arizona, California, and Rural America |
| Topics: | Anti-poverty law, Civil legal aid: State Funding, LSC: Restrictions, Poverty law, Recruitment and retention, and Right to counsel: Civil |
| Law type: | Civil |
| Collection: | CNEJL |
| Georgetown Law Library link (possible video): | |
| Length: | 0:50:37 |
Full text of transcript
Download PDF: TranscriptConsortium for the National Equal Justice Library
Oral History Collection interview with Gary Smith
Conducted by Alan Houseman
October 14, 2024
Alan Houseman:
This is an oral history of Gary Smith, who’s the Executive Director of Legal Services of Northern California. The date is October 8th, 2024. Gary, let’s begin with an overview of your career, where you grew up, where you went to college, where you went to law school, divinity school, clerkship, and your various professional roles including your teaching roles. Then we’ll come back and talk in depth about your legal services work.
Gary Smith:
Well, it’s an unremarkable story. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia. After I went to high school, I went to Penn State University in the center of the great state of Pennsylvania. My family is still mostly in Pennsylvania. I follow the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania sports teams. I stay in touch with my family on political things, especially in election years like this because Pennsylvania is such an important state. It’s very true that politically Pennsylvania has Pittsburgh on one side, Philadelphia on the other side, and Alabama in the middle. So that’s what you get politically in Pennsylvania. But in any event, at Penn State I got degrees in psychology and sociology. At the end of my time there I got interested in the academic study of religion. A guy in the religion department, a professor of mine, he thought I should go to graduate school and study religion because I had this interest in it.
So I did. I also had an interest in law school that came from my studies of social justice in the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition. So I ended up going to Yale Divinity School and at the same time I applied to the law school and I had an acceptance at the law school. So I held it and I spent the first year at Yale in the divinity school and I worked at New Haven Legal Assistance. That was part of my social justice inquiries during law school. At the end of that year I started law school at Yale and I studied public interest law and social justice stuff. I was at Yale for five years and I was able to get the two degrees, Masters of Divinity and JD, in five years. They’re both three year degrees, but it seemed like I was there forever.
After law school, I got a clerkship. I clerked for two years for a federal judge in Philadelphia in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. His name was Raymond Broderick. I worked extensively as a law clerk on a case called Halderman versus Pennhurst Hospital. It was a case that went to the Supreme Court twice. I think it was argued three times, argued the third time after I left. But the judge basically shut down this awful place. It was holding developmentally disabled people and they were being warehoused there and treated terribly. The judge shut it down and ordered the state and the counties to put these people in community living arrangements so that they could reach their highest potential. So I learned a lot in the clerkship. After the clerkship I took a job at DNA Legal Services, which is an LSC-funded program that covers the Navajo Nation.
The Navajo Nation extends in three different states. I was in the Chinle, Arizona office, which was in the real heart of the Nation, and I was there for three years. I was hired as a staff attorney. A week after I got there, the managing attorney quit. The other staff attorney wasn’t interested in managing. So I became a manager after one week’s tenure. But as Alan [the interviewer] knows well, that was legal services then and in some ways it still is in some places. It was a wonderful living experience. I got married during law school to one of my divinity school classmates. I would’ve stayed there in the Nation probably for a longer period except we had our first child in November of 1987. There’s not much to do with a child in Indian country if you’re not an Indian. So you can’t own property, you can’t buy a house. It’s hard to settle into the culture when you’re not part of it. But we loved living in the culture.
I looked around for another legal aid position. There was a position with Legal Services of Northern California, a managing attorney position in their Yolo County office. That was just one county adjacent to Sacramento County. We thought, well, that might be interesting. We’ll go to California and stay there for a couple of years. We’d never been to California. We were East Coast people. So we went and I interviewed in Sacramento. Your old friend Victor Geminiani hired me as the managing attorney of the office in Woodland.
It was different. It was a different experience. When I was in Chinle in Arizona, I only had one client who had a telephone, and I could never get a hold of him. Everybody was on his phone. What we learned there was you did everything carefully and in writing, sending letters back and forth to clients. I still think that I tend to communicate to my staff in writing — now, of course, it’s emails — probably because of how I learned to do it back then. So I became a real lawyer at LSNC. We were a really hard charging aggressive program. At the height of our work in the mid Nineties, I think we were managing 35 class actions in federal and state court. By that time, I think after about four or six years, I became the director of litigation. My office moved to Sacramento. We always lived in the Sacramento area, my wife and I, and our kids. So that was a great experience.
Then we went through the trauma of 95 and 96 with the change in Congress and the defunding efforts and then the restrictions, and we survived that. For about four or five years I kept successfully persuading my executive director, Roberta Ransom, not to retire. But she finally did in 99. With great reluctance I became the executive director since I didn’t particularly want to work for anybody else, but I didn’t really want to do the bureaucratic job. So I asked the board to let me continue to oversee the advocacy. So I did that. I stayed on as director of litigation and advocacy while I was executive director. But after about 20 years of doing both jobs poorly, just last year we appointed, again from our Yolo office, a real director of advocacy and litigation. So she’s doing all that work now, but that takes me up to now.
It’s startling to me when I think that I’ve been the executive director now for 25 years and all that we’ve been through We went through the recession. We went through different periods of hostility from LSC and then of course COVID, which I think was our greatest challenge. The way we survived it was probably our finest hour as a program. I was very proud of how the program continued to pursue our vibrant anti-poverty mission. We pursued it throughout many decades of efforts to get us to go more lightly on the anti-poverty stuff and go more heavily on the individual access to justice stuff. But we continue to be an anti-poverty program, probably one of the few LSC-funded anti-poverty programs left in the country, but that’s who we are.
Alan Houseman:
So let me go back a second. I think you answered this, but I want to pin it down. Why did you go into legal services from your clerkship? Because obviously coming from Yale you had one of the best legal educations in the country and a clerkship could have opened up anything.
Gary Smith:
I went to law school for only one reason, and that was to learn the law in order to do legal work that would impact poor people in a positive way. That really comes out of my tradition. I consider myself a Christian. (Many Christians would not consider me a Christian. I certainly am not a evangelical or biblical Christian, but I consider myself a Christian.) The social justice instructions that I find in the Judeo-Christian religion have always motivated me to do this anti-poverty work. I mean, I never considered any other legal job.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. So you’ve described your work at DNA and at LSNC. What were your most important accomplishments at LSNC?
Gary Smith:
Well, I did a lot of litigation. I became a very successful and accomplished lawyer. But my biggest accomplishment at LSNC, probably there’s two of them. One is all the really great people that we hired into the program, and I was a part of all that hiring process. I sit on every hiring panel of attorneys and the people that we brought in over many years are just wonderful people. Many of them started their careers with us, we almost always hire from the third year pool of law school graduates. It’s the only way we can really hire to get a diverse group of attorneys. Many of them have become senior management now in this program and they’re now running the program much better than I did. So that’s one thing I’m very proud of. But the other thing is that this program had a very strong anti-poverty impact policy-related mission before I came. The mission of the program is to identify and defeat the causes and effects of poverty. We were able to continue to work on that mission and to keep that mission ahead of us throughout all of the challenges that we got from LSC and from communities and sometimes from the state to dilute that mission. This program has not diluted that mission.
Alan Houseman:
So you’ve been involved in a number of state and federal cases. Describe some of your key victories and why they were important.
Gary Smith:
When I was a real lawyer, I did a lot of Social Security related stuff. I did a lot of cases that went to the Ninth Circuit and I’m proud of some of those cases. Some of those cases were very important and beneficial to claimants for disability benefits in Social Security cases. One of them called Bunell v. Sullivan is one of the most cited cases in the Ninth Circuit. It comes up every time they look at a Social Security case and how the administrative law judge evaluated pain testimony. That case of mine often is there. My substantive cases, some of them had significant positive impacts both in state and federal court.
I was the lead amicus in a case that went to the California Supreme Court. The state court had said that this nonprofit public interest law group called Tenderloin Housing Clinic was actually, for various technical reasons, ineligible to practice law under the California Bar rules as a nonprofit law firm. What the court said would’ve made pretty much every public interest law program in California ineligible to be a nonprofit and therefore would have had all sorts of bad administrative and tax consequences. So we took that case to the California Supreme Court and we won and reversed that lower court opinion. That was incredibly helpful for the state public interest law community.
But I think that the most impactful case I ever did, and the one I was most proud of, is one where I wasn’t the counsel, I was the plaintiff. That was the case Legal Aid Society of Hawaii versus LSC. We challenged the federal restrictions that had been imposed in 1995. There were five LSC plaintiff organizations, and at the end of it, one individual legal aid plaintiff, and that was me. We won a preliminary injunction and for almost a year we were unfettered by those restrictions, although the rest of the other programs in the country were not. Then LSC, of course, as you know well, jimmied with the rules and the regulations and the courts subsequently said that what LSC did was not basically an unconstitutional condition on our receipt of the funds. But we were incredibly proud of that work and I was proud to be a part of it.
Alan Houseman:
Actually that case allowed legal aid programs to use non LSC funds to do restricted work. So it was a key case in the effort to live with the restrictions.
Gary Smith:
It opened that door. We weren’t satisfied with a lot of it. In the national community there was a lot of controversy amongst people about whether we should file or not. We tried to get more programs to join the case. We could only get five. But because there was a great fear, and it might’ve been reasonable fear, that just suing them so soon after all the trauma would cause an even worse reaction in Congress. But it did not. So it worked out.
Alan Houseman:
You’ve done some policy advocacy work too. Describe some of that and your accomplishments.
Gary Smith:
Well, our program does a lot. It does a lot of litigation, but it does a lot of administrative and legislative advocacy around policy issues. Most of those are substantive. We’re trying to get benefits to low income people in areas like housing and public assistance and civil rights and health. We’ve done a fair amount of that and I’ve been involved in that. I mean, we can do that because we are in California and we are frequently invited to do that and so we can comply with the LSC lobbying rules.
But I think maybe a couple of the most impactful things I’ve done are structural things. I’ve been very involved in the statewide legal services community. I’ve been on the board and really helped recreate the Legal Aid Association of California, which now has over a hundred members. So LAAC as it’s called is now a very, very powerful voice for poor people and for funding and service improvements in delivery of legal aid in the legislature.
So we got some important bills passed through the legislature. One of them was to create what we called the Shriver projects, which are eight big programs that fund right to counsel. It was one of the first right to counsel projects in the early two thousands. We created that legislatively and I had a big part in that. We also got the legislature and the Bar to require banks that were holding funds in their lawyer trust accounts to give the same interest in those accounts as the bank would give to regular account holders. Before that, they gave pitiful interest. Of course the interest is important because that that is collected (and is too small to send to a client), goes to the interest on lawyer trust account program, which is now over a hundred million dollars this year. So we were able to legislate an increase in those bank accounts. It’s pretty boring work, but it really had a great impact over time for the entire community. So again, I’m proud of the work that I have done that is structural in nature and that has yielded benefits in terms of more money or more funding or better delivery services for the whole statewide community.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. You’ve written a number of articles for legal services and advocates in the Clearinghouse Review and other places. Describe what you’ve done and its importance to the legal services advocates.
Gary Smith:
Well, I did many articles with three wonderful colleagues, Gill Deford, Jane Perkins, and Mona Tawatao. Every year we did an annual review of the Supreme Court decisions that might impact our kinds of litigation. We did that just for the community and really for the programs that would do work that would implicate those kinds of cases. That was a lot of articles, but that was sort of purely academic work. I also did articles that I thought would be useful to the community. I did an article way back in the early Nineties on how legal aid programs can collect attorney’s fees because we were doing a massive amount of litigation. Until the time when the restrictions prohibited us from collecting fees, we were making $600,000 a year in my program. That was true over the past 10 years before the restrictions. Thank God we got that restriction lifted finally. But before that, I thought it would be useful to the community to say you can get money out of these cases. So I wrote that article.
I’ve done a lot of work in legal services as an amicus curiae. So I wrote a little article saying, this is a nice vehicle for programs to get into a case that may be of importance at a time when it might result in a precedential decision. Then I did an article after the restrictions. Since we couldn’t do class actions anymore, I wrote an article about how you can use, in federal court, the Declaratory Judgment Act to get affirmative injunctive relief that basically benefits an entire class of people without having to bring it as a class action. So I thought that was useful. We’ve done that quite a bit. We did it last year in a case in Chico and got a great declaratory judgment that prohibited the City of Chico from criminalizing homeless people. But of course right now we’re in the midst of their efforts to undo that case because of the Grants Pass decision that just came up. So those were the kinds of articles that I liked to write. Of course, the article that I wrote that got the most attention was the one with Sergeant Shriver on the cover, the Poverty Warrior article.
Alan Houseman:
Right. So describe that article and the backlash that it brought.
Gary Smith:
Well, I wrote the article. I was tired of being with my colleagues, my LSC program director colleagues, and seeing how defeated they had been in terms of aggressive anti-poverty advocacy by their view of the restrictions. I thought, we are not so restricted. We can both comply with the restrictions and do really, really aggressive work. It’s possible to do that. So I wrote that article basically to encourage people and to say, what is your mission? I pointed out that the original mission of the federal program with Sargent Shriver and all the guys that were there at the beginning — like you Alan — was an anti-poverty mission. Then, because it was so effective in bringing mostly litigation but also other policy initiatives, that mission got diluted by the powers that be and turned into an individual service mission or an “access to justice” mission.
I actually had two backlashes from that article. The first was people in our community who, and I was a bit critical because I did say anti-poverty work is hard to do and most of the LSC community wasn’t doing it even before the restrictions. But I’m just here to tell you, I wrote in the article, you can still do it if you want to. It’s a question of choice. So the first backlash was from my friends in the community, particularly people who are working hard and very effectively on right to counsel programs. They said, what’s wrong with access to justice? I had to respond to those folks and I said, access to justice is great. I think everybody who’s in court who’s poor should have a lawyer. I think the government should provide for that, but it’s not something that my program primarily wants to do. I’m telling LSC-funded program people that you can do other anti-poverty legal work if you want to. But I didn’t anticipate the offense that was taken from my own colleagues and I was sorry about it. John Pollock is still a friend of mine. I talk to him frequently. He wrote this sort of rebuttal article. I talked to him about it. I certainly support all his right to counsel initiatives and programs and he’s been incredible the way he does it.
But the second backlash I did not anticipate either. I wrote that article in 2010 or 2011. I had had a little discussion about the issue at an open meeting in San Diego. It was an LSC conference, it was a board conference. So I had a discussion with an LSC board member. He stood up after a program lawyer from Ohio was talking with great pride about this case they had done that had resulted in a published decision in the Ohio Supreme Court that helped many, many mortgage holders in some way during the recession. The board member stood up and said, how many hours did you spend on that case? She said, I don’t know. This was a young woman. Then, in a really mean way, the board member said, why didn’t you spend all that time helping individual mortgage holders who were having their own problems? Why did you spend it all on this one big case? It was so unexpected that the lawyer who I think was close to tears didn’t know what to say. So I stood up and I said, they did that case because LSC performance criteria tell us, and the ABA standards on legal aid provision tell us, that we should do work that will produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people that are affected by the same problem. She did exactly what she should have done. Everybody clapped. The board member was very unhappy. So from then on — perhaps continuing a bit to this day, I hope he never looks at this recording — my name and my program was well known to him – Victor Maddox.
Alan Houseman:
Explain who he is.
Gary Smith:
Vic Maddox is one of the directors on the board of the Legal Services Corporation. He’s a lawyer from Kentucky. He’s a Republican appointee, a very nice guy. I’ve had many discussions with him since. My understanding from Ron and others is that he works very hard in Congress to keep or increase LSC funding. But he is allied with very conservative interpretations of what LSC programs should do. One of his colleagues on that board is Father Pius Pietrzyk, who also seems to have very restrictive interpretations of what legal services programs should and shouldn’t be doing with their LSC money.
Alan Houseman:
Right. I should have done this earlier, but let’s just do it now and then we’ll come back. Could you describe LSNC for us? How many offices you have, the area covers, that kind of thing, just so everybody has a context for what you’ve done.
Gary Smith:
So our program covers 23 counties in northern California. Basically the top third of the state from the Sacramento area all the way up to Oregon, with the exception of the five Bay Area counties. We have eight offices. With the exception of Sacramento and Vallejo, they are in very rural places. So we have a staff of about 60 lawyers, probably about 150 total staff. Our budget this year is about $18 million and we closed upwards of 10,000 individual cases this year.
Alan Houseman:
Great, thank you. Besides your running LSNC and your federal advocacy work, federal litigation, you also teach. Describe your law school teaching.
Gary Smith:
Well, I stepped down two years ago after the last year of COVID. I taught public interest law and also poverty law seminars at the University of California at Davis for about 23 years. I taught students who were interested in those subjects. So it was a pretty good recruiting tool and it was a lot of fun. I think there are still eight or nine lawyers in my program who came through my class. But during COVID, it was not so much fun. Then I thought they needed somebody other than an old white guy teaching these classes. Kevin Johnson’s a great friend. He was the dean of the school for many years. He stepped down as dean and as the president of my board a couple of years ago. But I said, yeah, time to get somebody else.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. You’ve been active in state and national legal services committees and state and national bar committees. You discussed a little bit of this earlier, but could you describe some of your other committee work?
Gary Smith:
Well, I think that my most effective work has been, again, at the state level with the Legal Aid Association of California, both as a board member but as chair of LAAC’s advocacy committee since 2002 or something. That committee recommends that LAAC take positions on different legal issues that come up that impact our clients and our communities. That can be in litigation or it can be in legislation. So LAAC has done a tremendous amount of work in lobbying for bills that were introduced that help poor people in different ways, and also supporting through amicus and otherwise litigation that was going through the pipeline that we thought was going to help poor people in different ways. I personally abstain on advocacy decisions that might implicate my LSC restrictions.
In the late Nineties and early Two Thousands, LAAC was moribund. There was no statewide entity in California, big as it is, that spoke for the 110 legal aid programs in California. We were adrift. When Governor Wilson defunded the State Bar itself in the early Nineties, our community was cut loose. There was no glue, there was no cohesiveness. So we recreated LAAC. The original LAAC was put together by people like Toby Rothschild and Victor Geminiani. We recreated it in the late Nineties and it has become very, very vibrant because of its executive director, a great person named Selena Copeland. It has become a really strong voice for the legal services community and for our clients. My work on national committees is it is a little bit diffuse. I don’t have a lot of influence with LSC, although I will say that — and it’s hard to believe I’m saying this, and some of my old colleagues like Victor Geminiani would choke — I consider Ron Flagg to be a friend.
Alan Houseman:
Ron Flagg is the president of LSC?
Gary Smith:
Yes, the president of LLC. But see, I didn’t finish my story about that Poverty Warriors article. Vic Maddox read that article in 2013 or 14. He and Father Pius took it to [then LSC president] Jim Sandman and said, everything this guy is saying in this article has to be violative of LSC rules and restrictions. This guy and his program are rife with compliance issues and you need to investigate this. I didn’t know about this “investigation” at the time. Nobody knew about this and Don Saunders [of NLADA] didn’t know about it. So Sandman referred their complaint, which they made in writing about me and the article, to General Counsel. The General Counsel was Ron Flagg and his deputy, who is now General Counsel, was the wonderful Stephanie Davis.
They wrote this long memo that completely vindicated what we were doing. They said that these advocacy issues are choices that a program can make. He cited the same stuff I cited. The LSC performance criteria and everything said we can do this. It came out at an LSC board meeting and Don called me from the board meeting. He said, did you know about this? I said, no, what the hell. But it turned out to be a great thing because we of course disseminated the long memo Ron approved. If programs cared, and only a few do, but if they did, they could say, oh, we can do this anti-poverty work. That was the second impact of that article. It gave me great respect for Ron and that respect continues today.
Alan Houseman:
Good. That was very good. You’ve won some awards for your work in legal aid. Discuss your awards and what ones one or two or whatever meant the most to you?
Gary Smith:
Well, awards in legal aid, mostly you get them after you’ve been around for 50 or 60 years. They mostly recognize that you’ve been around for 50 or 60 years. But I got an award when I was first at Legal Services of Northern California and I was managing the Yolo County office, which is a little rural county. It’s where Davis is, but it’s across the river in Sacramento. The Yolo County Bar Association is a really small bar association. I knew all those people. When I first came, I was trying to do all this aggressive legal stuff and I ruffled a lot of feathers in that bar. But that bar gave me this award as the outstanding attorney in the county. That meant a lot to me. It meant that those people, even if they disagreed with what I was doing, respected what I was doing. I knew those people. There’s only like 20 of them. So I was very proud of that.
Then in 2010 I got an award that the State Bar gives out called the Loren Miller Award, after the Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. It recognizes the outstanding legal services attorney in the state in terms of their commitment and also in terms of their personal work extending legal services to poor people. I was quite honored to get that award. What moved me to tears was when at the state bar meeting, they also gave me the letters of recommendation that my colleagues had written about me. It was an emotional moment. So that’s what the awards meant to me. It meant that people that I worked with respected what I did.
Alan Houseman:
Good. Finally, I wanted to ask you about your vision for the future of legal services, particularly the national program. Obviously we’ve covered some of this in what you said. As you address that or separately I would like you to talk about some of the trends we see in the access to justice world role of non-lawyers, self-help technology. So the question is, what is your vision of the future of legal aid and how do you see some of these developments in the access justice world? Are they a part of it or not? That’s really the question.
Gary Smith:
Well, and that’s a question that many of us at my and your level are thinking about all the time now, but some stuff is sort of episodic, right? I mean, LSC came to us in the Nineties and said, you ought to close all your rural offices and just operate out of Sacramento and serve all the far away clients by telephone. We’re going to do telephone hotlines and that’s going to provide access to justice. We said, no, we’re a community lawyering program. But they pushed us on that for some years. They wanted to do hotlines. Now some of this new stuff is sort of updated versions of hotlines, except it’s on the Internet or it’s whatever. All of that is fine, or it might be fine. I have no idea whether this stuff works or not, but it might be fine in terms of programs, organizations that want to do access to justice work, that want to provide a little bit of advice for poor people who have a personal legal problem and can’t afford a lawyer. That to me is “access to justice”, and if these programs help people do that, okay.
But if we’re talking about legal aid, my mission is doing work that will have a strong impact on poverty in the community. So that’s the divide. But I think that’s been the divide since the 1980s. If a program wants to do access to justice work and do 10,000 advices on how to get a divorce, okay, that’s helpful to the person who needs that advice. But it’s not what I consider to be the mission, and not what I want legal aid to do. So I think that the trend will be that missions like ours or programs like ours will continue to shrink. Hopefully they’ll continue to be funded. I mean, the number will continue to shrink, but so long as the funding continues, that’s good.
My fear over the last four or five years is we are having a lot of trouble, and my colleagues also say they’re having a lot of trouble, getting the third year law graduates that used to be a mighty stream coming out of the law schools to come into my program. That’s how I keep my program alive. I get these kids, I send them off into these wilderness offices. It’s like the Peace Corps. I don’t expect them to stay there for 20 years, but that’s okay. They stay for three years and then they go somewhere more “civilized” and I get other kids in to replace them. That’s been a great model for us. But now what we’re doing is we’re pouring a lot of effort into educating kids in law school about civil legal services. We now have a massive summer program. We pay people a lot of money and we have them in our offices. It’s not really to do the work. It’s just to give them a taste of what legal services could be. Then we hope that come the next year, they might be interested in working for us permanently. So I am worried about that aspect of it.
But your broader question is how we think of legal aid. I’ve quoted you, Mr. Houseman [the interviewer] many times. You wrote some article and you asked, what was distinctive about the first federal legal aid program as opposed to all of the little charitable volunteer lawyer programs? You said that the old way was looking at the legal requests, or the legal demands, of individual people who had personal legal problems and couldn’t afford a lawyer. You said that the new federal legal aid programs were distinctive because they looked at the legal needs of the entire poor community, got input from key players in those communities, and then figured out legal strategies to try and address those needs. And for some of those needs and strategies — and this is still true — no individual poor person will know they’re affected by it or walk into your office and ask you to help them with it. So that has always been something that I have tried to keep my program aware of and working on. Whether that will continue, I don’t know. I’m probably half a generation behind you, but even my generation of the old guard of poverty warriors is retiring and I don’t know whether or to what extent that kind of mission will continue. If it does, like in my program, but if you can’t hire the lawyers to continue to do it, that’s a problem for me.
This other stuff, the Internet and AI, again, it’s new stuff. I don’t understand all of it. If it helps people with problems, just like a telephone hotline used to, good. But I don’t want to do it. I don’t want my program to do it.
Alan Houseman:
This has been terrific. Do you have anything else you want to add before we close?
Gary Smith:
I’m looking to retire the next year or two myself. So I’m thinking about these things, same as you’re asking. I was going through a box of old stuff and I found this memo. You probably knew Don Greisman, right?
Alan Houseman:
Yes.
Gary Smith:
Greisman was the executive director here at LSNC before Victor Geminiani. Greisman wrote a memo on December 30th, 1980. It was sort of a review of his year. He is complimenting the staff on great stuff they had done but he was looking forward with great trepidation because Reagan had just been elected and they knew what Reagan was going to do with respect to LSC. So it’s this long memo talking about how change is coming, and it’ll be probably bad. We’ll have to deal with it, but we’ll get through it.
I thought back about how we’ve had those kinds of changes in our programs and in threats to our programs so many times over the years. The programs that have wanted to keep doing the anti-poverity work have found ways to keep doing that work. So that’s what I’ll hope. Again, what I said earlier, I have great people who believe in the same mission that the first generation guys like you hoped this whole federally funded legal aid stuff could do. So hopefully it’ll continue without me.
Alan Houseman:
Well, thanks. This has been terrific.
Gary Smith:
Thank you, Alan. It’s nice to organize my thoughts in these ways, so I appreciate that. it’s always great to talk to you.
END