Long time executive director of the Chicago Bar Foundation involved in numerous other organizations and initiatives. Played leading role in securing passage of Illinois state legislation funding civil legal aid.
Oral history details
| Storyteller: | Bob Glaves |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Houseman, Alan |
| Date of interview: | May 11, 2016 |
| Where relates to: | Illinois |
| Topics: | Access to justice, Civil legal aid: State Funding, Delivery systems, Incubators, Nonprofit management, Pro bono, and Technology |
| Law type: | Civil |
| Collection: | CNEJL |
| Length: | 0:43:16 |
Full text of transcript
Download PDF: TranscriptConsortium for the National Equal Justice Library
Oral History Collection
Interview with Bob Glaves
Conducted by Alan Houseman
May 11, 2016
Alan Houseman:
This is an oral history of Bob Glaves. The interviewer is Alan Houseman for the National Equal Justice Library. The oral history took place on Wednesday, May 11th, 2016 in Chicago at the Palmer House. Let’s start with a brief overview of your professional career, and then we’ll come back and ask some more in depth questions about it. Where did you go to college and where did you grow up and where did you go to law school, and how did you get to where you are today?
Bob Glaves:
Well, it was a circuitous route, as they say. I grew up in the Chicago area here in the suburbs. I’ve lived in the city now for 20 years, but grew up in the suburbs here. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin. Basically the way I got there was that, when I was in high school, I worked at a hot dog stand. A couple of the guys who were older than me went to Wisconsin. I went to visit them and thought this is the greatest place in the world. And they let me in. So I went to the University of Wisconsin, and it was an upset, but I graduated within four years and had a really good time.
Bob Glaves:
It was a dual major between political science and journalism. I got exposed to some law classes and originally was thinking I’d do First Amendment law when I decided I was going to go to law school. I took a year off in between to make sure this was what I really wanted to do. I wrote my essay with the idea that I would be fighting for the First Amendment when I got out of school. I ended up doing something completely different. I went to law school at the John Marshall Law School here in Chicago, which it turns out is right next door to where I work today. But I would have never known that back in the day.
Bob Glaves:
I did a summer associate position the second summer, so 1990. I was working with a litigation firm and really enjoyed doing commercial and tort litigation. I graduated in 1991 and went into that when I got out of school. I was lucky enough that they hired me in 1991. So I was not on a public interest path when I started. I guess I always had it in me somewhere, but that was not what I had in mind anymore. I was really just trying to get a job, make a living, and be a good lawyer.
Bob Glaves:
I started getting involved in pro bono and bar activities, and specifically got onto our legal aid committee. Over a period of nine years of practice, I got more involved. I will tell you more about how that happened later. But I got more involved to where I was very active in the bar and in the legal aid community and the pro bono community, and this job option came open at the Chicago Bar Foundation where they were looking for a new executive director in 1999. I had no intentions of leaving practice at that point. I liked being a practicing lawyer. But it seemed like a neat opportunity that I might do for a couple of years. It’s 16 years later, and I guess I haven’t looked back. I’ve been executive director of the Chicago Bar Foundation for 16 plus years now.
Alan Houseman:
Well let’s go back to why and what did you get involved with in terms of your pro bono activities and your legal aid activities?
Bob Glaves:
The way it started was I started at a larger firm. It was very much impressed on me to get involved in the Chicago Bar Association. Back in the early ’90s that was expected. That was not atypical that firms would encourage their younger lawyers to get involved in the bar to be both learning and networking and everything else. I don’t remember completely why I did it, but I joined the legal aid committee and our legislative committee. I was very much interested in policy and legislation by this point. So that was my interest in the legislative committee. I can’t really remember what made me join the legal aid committee, but I did.
Bob Glaves:
The old joke that Woody Allen used to tell is that life is 90% about showing up. I went to a few meetings, and it was mostly legal aid people and a few people who were more active pro bono people on the committee. They were talking about a lot of stuff I didn’t really understand. But I just kept going and listening and getting to know them a little bit. At some point we learned during that year that there’s no state funding in Illinois for legal aid. It seemed crazy coming at it from outside that we didn’t have that. And they were looking for a volunteer to help work on an effort to get state funding, to draft legislation. I thought, well, this is a nice mix with my interest in legislation and maybe I could help the committee this way.
Bob Glaves:
I had no idea this was going to take eight years. But I volunteered to do it and hit a brick wall immediately that first year. But we got something drafted up and shot down in the legislature. I thought well, I’ve put a lot of time into this, I’ll just keep doing it. In the course of that, I got to know a lot more of our legal aid community, had to learn about that to be able to do this legislative effort. I started doing a few things on pro bono while I was at it. One thing led to another. So in 1995 we were four years into this state funding effort of not succeeding. We had gotten to the point of having committee hearings and testified a few times in the state legislature to try to do it, but the Illinois budget was considered tight back then. In today’s world it looks like the golden days. But it was very tight, and they were not doing general revenue funding, so we just had not found a way.
Bob Glaves:
Well, in 1995, as I’m sure others have commented and talked about in your venture here, was when Congress almost defunded the Legal Services Corporation. In the process, Congress radically reduced the funding and put all these new restrictions on the LSC. By that time, and this comes back to the Woody Allen thing, since I’d been coming to the meetings pretty regularly and showing up and working on this legislation, they’d elected me to be the chair. I was 29 years old and I’d been a lawyer for about four years at this point. And all the LSC stuff happens. So now the bar as a whole got far more interested in these issues because it was a national issue, it was a crisis in many ways in the immediate aftermath of what was happening to the legal aid community in Chicago.
Bob Glaves:
I de facto became the bar association’s legal aid guy, because I was chair of the committee when all this was happening. It was complete happenstance that I happened to be doing that. So I was going to board meetings of the bar association to report on what was happening, what we were trying to do about it, and assist the ongoing state legislative effort. I got appointed to a special task force with the state bar to work on these issues, and to try to develop solutions. Now I was way in. I was still practicing and doing regular pro bono work, but now I was really deep into this and really motivated now to try to get the state funding, because we’d had such a radical cut that had happened suddenly there in 1995 to the federal funding.
Bob Glaves:
It took four more years, but we finally got the Illinois Equal Justice Act passed. That was right before I came to work at the bar foundation. That was my path. By now I knew everybody in legal aid, I knew much of the legal community, I’d tried a lot of cases in my private practice and was very active in the bar. But I had this weird confluence of experience that I had never planned on that was coming together to make it look possibly interesting to do this full time.
Alan Houseman:
Describe a little bit about what the Chicago Bar Foundation is and what it does.
Bob Glaves:
We’re the charitable arm of the bar association here in Chicago. Our mission is to bring the legal community together, really to mobilize the legal community around the issue of equal access to justice. The idea is that we have a special responsibility as lawyers to ensure equal access to justice, and whatever other charitable interests we all have as individuals, this is a common cause of our profession, thus that being our mission as the bar’s charitable arm.
Bob Glaves:
So our work is a mix of grants, advocacy, promoting pro bono, and then a number of different kinds of partnerships with the courts, with other foundations, and others to try to invest in legal aid and things that we know work well, pro bono and legal aid solutions. But we also look at the systemic barriers that are there and try to address those as well through innovative projects and initiatives. So we are a mix of those two. Unlike a lot of foundations, we’re not just grants. Grants are obviously a central part of what we do, but we’ve got a really talented staff of lawyers who work on these bigger systemic issues as well. They work to do, again, both the grants and other activity that helps support that and advance the cause.
Alan Houseman:
How are you funded?
Bob Glaves:
Our core funding is all volunteer contributions from lawyers and law firms. So we have to raise that money. We are fortunate to have a really great legal community, a very generous legal community here in Chicago that really believes in this cause. So in the time I’ve been there, our support has grown from about probably $200,000 a year to more than $3 million in voluntary contributions a year now. We have probably 6,000 individual donors and more than 200 law firms and corporations that contribute.
Bob Glaves:
With that core, we have a lot of partnerships with other local foundations, with the courts, that leverage additional funding through our grants process to support court based projects and other community needs and innovative initiatives.
Alan Houseman:
You’ve been also active at the national level and also in some other things. That includes the Donor’s Fund, and the National Conference of Bar Foundations, and the American Judicature Society, and probably things I left out. So talk a little bit about this.
Bob Glaves:
Our mission is really focused on the Chicago area in terms of what we’re trying to accomplish. But like anybody who’s in our position, a lot of the issues we’re addressing have national origins to them or national solutions that are part and parcel of trying to succeed. So for instance in our advocacy work, we work closely with the ABA, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, and others on funding for legal aid through the Legal Services Corporation on things like public service loan forgiveness, things that affect people who want to go into public interest careers, and similar issues. Our role is really coordinating the state advocacy here with our delegation in Illinois, working with our state bar. We do that recognizing we’re part of a national cause but with an Illinois mindset. We’re trying to support the cause here. We work on immigration similarly in advocacy for the same reasons. There are a lot of things messed up about our immigration system right now that do not have local solutions. The source is a federal problem, and we need to speak up on that, so we do that too.
Bob Glaves:
In the course of that, we’ve developed a lot of national partnerships. I was on the board and then became president about 12 years ago of the National Conference of Bar Foundations. It is as it sounds a group of bar foundations from around the country that have some common issues. It’s a chance for us to get together and learn from each other, and develop resources that we can all benefit from. I got involved in that for that reason. And again, I think that was the showing up principle. I got elected to be president for a short time of that.
Bob Glaves:
You also mentioned the Donor’s Forum, which recently changed its name to Forefront. It is our regional association of grant makers and nonprofits. So the Chicago Bar Foundation is a member as a foundation. That was something that had already happened when I started, that we were members. That is where we network with other foundations, other nonprofits on issues that affect all nonprofits. So board governance, good governance of boards, policies that affect nonprofit organizations, lots of resources and training, and common issues. Again, just getting involved in that through a lot of different ways, I eventually got nominated to serve on the board and then became the president a few years ago of the Donor’s Forum as well.
Bob Glaves:
Then most recently, in terms of the national boards, there’s the American Judicature Society. It is a hundred year old organization that has had a really significant role in the history of promoting access to the courts, good courts, a good justice system, from the early days. It did really interesting stuff in the early part of the 20th century that we now take for granted about traditional rules and ethics rules and things like that that did not exist. They were at the forefront of that movement. I got on the board just a couple of years ago, not realizing that its mission had been taken up by many other organizations in different ways. The board had already started a conversation that continued when I got on there about possibly dissolving, and taking the major functions of the American Judicature Society, and placing them in other places. It was a very interesting experience. We did ultimately vote to dissolve the board, and it’s worked out very well I think. The work that they were doing has been relocated to the National Center on State Courts. Duke Law School has taken a piece. A group in Hawaii has taken over the remaining functions that the American Judicature Society was carrying on. So that board slot is ending, officially at any moment.
Alan Houseman:
You’ve also been involved I know with some advisory roles. Most recently you were involved with the Public Welfare Foundation. Why don’t you describe a little bit about what that project is.
Bob Glaves:
The backdrop to this is that the Conference of Chief Justices passed a resolution a year or two ago that committed them, as the leaders of our state courts around the country, to the idea that we should have 100% access to justice. It’s great, and it sends a great message when the leadership of the courts says that we should have that as an aspirational goal and commit to it. The Public Welfare Foundation put some funding behind that, and a process behind it with the National Center on State Courts, to try to address what is it going to take to actually make that come true? Not a small task.
Bob Glaves:
There is an advisory committee and then a subgroup of that committee that has been tabbed, I always put this in quotes, an “expert working group.” Because I’m on it, I would put quotes around it right away. But there are a few of us who are trying to put together some templates about how states would look at this challenge, and try to both map out what they have going already and how we might get to the goal that everybody’s chasing, which is justice for all. It’s been very interesting. As much as we all know we’re seeking this, we had at least two days of debate over what that means. What does justice for all mean? How do you define that? It turned into a really interesting conversation. Most of us that are involved in this project have been looking at it from the civil legal aid side of the system, where there’s not a public defender system and where there’s a lot of issues that come about because of that.
Bob Glaves:
Our criminal system is not working perfectly by any stretch. There are large segments of things that are addressed through our administrative processes that involve significant rights and responsibilities like immigration, Social Security at the federal level, and then many important things that happen at the state level. In the administrative arena, there are the federal courts, and then there is all the systemic work that groups like the Shriver Center here in Illinois and others around the country do. Does the definition encompass all of that? I think most of us would say yes it does. But the Conference of Chief Justices who did this resolution lead our state courts. So there was a big conversation about what does the definition even mean, and what’s our focus going to be. Having identified there’s a lot bigger challenges than we can even address through this process, the focus is going to be primarily on the state courts.
Bob Glaves:
The second big unresolved issue that grew out of that is that most middle income people can’t afford us as lawyers either and are very much part of the justice gap, part of the population who are going to court on their own and trying to resolve issues on their own. That is not traditionally something access to justice commissions and others have looked at. We’ve been looking at it more at the bar foundation for a few years. But it’s not something that’s typically been part of the people’s planning processes. So that’s going to be an important issue.
Bob Glaves:
The third big unresolved issue, the other really 800 pound gorilla in the conversation, is what does effective assistance mean? When you’re talking about access to justice, and everybody’s supposed to get effective assistance to ensure they get access to justice, what exactly does that mean? That is an ongoing conversation is probably how I would describe that.
Alan Houseman:
What would you say from your experience, both at the Chicago Bar Foundation and in your private practice, is the role of pro bono? How important is pro bono work to access to justice?
Bob Glaves:
Okay. Well I think pro bono plays an integral role, but in ways that aren’t always considered as such. In terms of delivering access to justice, pro bono plays an important role but not the main role. The main role of delivering access in the criminal and civil side is through people who do the work full time. Just as our hospitals and other systems depend on full time people who are committed, who are supplemented by volunteers, that’s how law should operate as well. But pro bono plays an important role in supplementing the full time role of legal aid, public defenders, and others in the system. Pro bono can bring many different types of expertise that aren’t necessarily in place with organizations. Pro bono can supplement directly some of the work that’s being done, fill in some gaps, and have some flexibility.
Bob Glaves:
But the bigger reason we feel pro bono is really critical and integral is that, if we want a legal community that’s fully engaged in this process, fully engaged in supporting legal aid, public defense, and all of the things necessary to create equal access, it’s really critical for them to get in the game, be part of the systems. Most people who are in private practice do not practice in the courtrooms where low income people and middle income people are running into the challenges that they do. Or they tend to be in transactional practices so they may not even see the courts at all and don’t necessarily see what the challenges are in access to justice for regular people. Pro bono gives that exposure right away. When people get involved in pro bono they tend to come with other types of support too — financial and bringing their influence to bear to help do this. We think it’s really critical for our legal community to be involved in all of those ways. It plays a really integral role I think in the legal community’s part in all this, a smaller role in the actual access that happens for the people in need, but just as important, because it really provides a critical supplement to what the full time folks are doing.
Alan Houseman:
From your experience in the Chicago Bar, how do you see civil legal aid today, as well as indigent public defense, in this world of access to justice?
Bob Glaves:
Underappreciated. Underfunded. I think that’s been true for a while. But it has some of the best lawyers on both the civil side and the public defense side, some of the most dedicated lawyers who are trying to make the system work the way it’s supposed to for everybody. In the larger legal community and beyond, I think it’s an underappreciated role that legal aid plays. For sure, we aren’t investing in it in a sufficient way at the government level. Our legal community here in Chicago, and I think this is true in many places in the country, is very generous in providing voluntary support. But we’re not doing enough to support these systems through our government, to do this so that there’s sufficient resources available for all the people who need it.
Bob Glaves:
As you all know well, that puts legal aid and public defenders pretty regularly in the position where they are always trying to do more with less, and always have more people knocking on the door than they can help, and have to make prioritization decisions that are really difficult or sometimes turn away people who really need the help but they just can’t do it.
Bob Glaves:
But we have really great lawyers. I think the under-investment comes in two ways though. It’s just not having enough of them and not supporting them enough. I think there are some really interesting technology innovations happening around legal aid and others in the courts, many of which are driven by legal aid, but there’s not typically enough investment in the technology aspects of running a modern legal aid program. Not because people don’t care about it, but it’s hard to fund. It’s hard to find the funding for that. It’s sometimes easier to fund lawyers — which isn’t easy in the first place — than to fund the infrastructure you need to support them. We could be doing more to utilize other professionals around the lawyers to make everybody the most efficient and effective as possible in serving the people in need. So those are some challenges.
Alan Houseman:
What is your vision, what would you personally like to see as the broad access to justice movement? Where would you like to see it go?
Bob Glaves:
If I was king for a day.
Alan Houseman:
Not trying to pin you down to an institutional position, but to a personal position.
Bob Glaves:
My personal position’s probably pretty consistent with our institutional position. Everybody who would need legal help would have access first of all to much better information and resources to be able to understand if they even have a legal problem and get some basic information about it. Because so many of the issues that people face, especially if they find out about them early, are not that complicated yet. But there’s not a great understanding among the public of their legal rights and responsibilities or how the legal system can help. So we need to do a better job of educating and making available information and resources. That’s the front end of any access to justice solution. There’s a lot of good work happening around that right now.
Bob Glaves:
We also need to make our courts reflect the modern reality that not everybody’s coming in with a lawyer. The courts were set up and designed with the idea that people are represented by lawyers. In the modern era that is not always true and probably shouldn’t always be true. But it’s definitely not always true now. So systems need to work better. Again, lots of good work is happening, but we have a long way to go on both of those. I see those as front end solutions before you even get lawyers involved.
Bob Glaves:
Having said that, the other thing that we’ve learned and really believe strongly is that having a lawyer involved early on in the process of any type of legal issue once you’ve identified it as such can really make all the difference. So we’re a strong believer in hotlines. We have what we think is widely considered the best hotline in the country for legal aid, and it’s called CARPLS here in Chicago. It’s a very innovative program that provides advice over the phone and through some advice desks. They’re able to resolve about 85% of the issues that come to them through brief advice and assistance. If everybody got that early or had access to that easily, we think there’d be a lot less pressure downstream on problems that grow into much bigger problems and require a lot more lawyer time, a lot more court time, a lot more of other resources. We’re not the first to say continuum or the last to say continuum, but it really does involve a continuum. But really a lot of emphasis on that front end.
Bob Glaves:
Even if we succeed in doing all that, obviously there’s not enough investment in lawyers both on the civil and criminal side to be able to help people who need that further assistance. Again, in my dream world, we are making that available to people who can’t afford it, but we are also doing a way better job of making our services affordable and accessible to people who can pay something. There’s not enough emphasis on that yet. There needs to be proper investment in legal aid and public defense funding. But then there need to be also much more affordable options available through the market. We have a real market dysfunction in our profession right now that lawyers aren’t more available and accessible.
Bob Glaves:
The last piece is we can’t forget about the bigger systemic issues that people face. For instance, people are victims on a wide scale of consumer fraud, mortgage fraud, so many issues like that. It’s not just one on one legal help that people need. They need advocacy and sometimes the ability to band together in class action impact litigation to be able to resolve that. That needs to be there on the back end of that continuum as well.
Bob Glaves:
The grand vision is that there’s a continuum and everybody has access to this. I think I would be sounding a lot like other people in saying something like that. But less emphasis on this front end technology. That can help a lot and is a really necessary piece of all this. But we really need to do a lot better job of making the legal help that people need more affordable and accessible and not losing that emphasis while we’re trying to create these other solutions as well. I realize these are really long winded answers.
Alan Houseman:
It’s perfect. That’s what I was looking for. Do you have any further reflections on civil legal aid, indigent criminal defense, and even the broad continuum you’ve talked about? Is there anything further you’d like to add?
Bob Glaves:
I would emphasize a couple points I made earlier. I’ve been fortunate in my career to have the ability to work with really our entire profession, in private practice with some of the best lawyers that I was learning from and then up against, and working closely with the courts at all levels. I’ve been able to learn a lot from them. Now I’ve worked very closely with people in legal aid, and less so with public defense, but I’ve also had a chance to meet a lot of them also. One thing I’ve learned and seen is some of the best lawyers in our profession are working in legal aid and public defense. These are just as good lawyers as some of the top lawyers in private practice who’ve just chosen a different path.
Bob Glaves:
I don’t think this is as true today as it was when I started, but I think there was a sense that legal aid lawyers or public defenders weren’t always as good lawyers as you could hire in private practice. I do not believe that’s true for one second. In fact, I think they stack up very well and are dedicated to doing this type of work at a financial sacrifice. So we want to invest in that and make sure we have another generation to follow in the footsteps of this, and a bigger generation, because we need more of them. That’s one big lesson I would take.
Bob Glaves:
The other is that we’ve got an incubator program too that we’ve been working on for a few years now to help newer lawyers who want to go into private practice and serve that gap market, people who can pay something, but to provide more innovative and accessible services to make them more affordable to people in that gap market. We’re just scratching the surface there. We’ve had more than 50 now who’ve gone through the program or are in the program now and in the network.
Bob Glaves:
In the course of that project we’ve learned a lot looking at how the business and technology sectors handle innovation and how they look at responding to new technology, new opportunities, what we see are these vast problems right now when you look at access to justice. They really look at it in a very different way than we tend to as a profession. Where we lawyers see problems, the business and technology sectors sees opportunities. Where we see risk and get scared of it, they get excited by it, to go try to solve a problem. So you see things like Uber and Lyft, these companies that came about to challenge the taxi industry, Google, and all the different technology companies. They were willing to take risks and go push against the system. That needs to get more into our DNA as the legal profession because we’re not changing as fast as other industries are to respond to the opportunities that technology provides in a way that preserves the important role our profession plays. It’s a critical role for people who need legal help. We’ve got to get a lot more comfortable with that faster, before other people try to sweep in and come up with magic solutions that are pure technology based, that aren’t necessarily going to work for everybody.
Alan Houseman:
Just a footnote, explain more practically what the incubator program is.
Bob Glaves:
Sure. It’s called the Justice Entrepreneur’s Project. It’s recruiting newer socially conscious lawyers who want to start their own practices. It’s a competitive application process. They have to show that they not only want to start their own practice, but they want to start their own practice serving the community and serving people who are right now having access to justice challenges for different reasons than the low income people are. It’s giving these new lawyers an opportunity in a space that looks very much like the tech and business incubators. It does not look like a law firm. It’s a collaborative space. They do a formal pro bono placement to start the program where they spend six months doing pro bono work at one of our legal aid partner organizations to learn about the area of practice they want to go into, but also to underscore their commitment to serving the community. That’s part of the program right on the front. But then the main thing that we provide beyond that is the collaboration among the lawyers themselves. It leads to all kinds of great things that we never would envision, which is great. You put good people together, stuff happens just by putting them together.
Bob Glaves:
The main thing that we’re still learning as we go through this is that this business entrepreneurship training doesn’t come in law school right now. It’s easy to say we should price our services differently, we should do business, there’s all these great technologies out there. But if we don’t expose people to them, train them, and give them the resources to be able to use them, it’s pie in the sky. So we’ve built into the program that we are going to help people get access to those resources, get training, and learn together how they can try new things. Again, take risks that most of our profession is uncomfortable taking, and do things differently, and see what works. We’re about three and a half years into the program now, since the lawyers started coming through the program. The ones who are further out, there’s some who have really been successful doing this so far, and are making a decent living and serving this market in a way that’s opening access to people. It needs to be scaled up tremendously before it’s really going to be a larger scale solution. But it’s showing some things that we think are really promising and effective.
Alan Houseman:
Are there other incubator programs in the country like yours? Is yours pretty unique?
Bob Glaves:
Ours is relatively unique. I think there are some newer ones that are coming about that are trying to do this. There are other incubators, or other programs that call themselves incubators, that have not quite as ambitious missions. So they might be in law schools where they’re trying to help people who have graduated who want to start their own practices. But it’s very traditional, the type of work they’re teaching them and the type of practice they’re teaching them. What we’ve learned is the traditional model of the small community practitioner is not meeting the needs of that community right now. Doing things the way everybody else has done them, it’s not impossible to succeed. There are people who succeed doing it. But it’s less and less likely you’re going to be able to succeed going forward. And we know, even now, there are so many people who can’t afford it. So we trying to teach them to do things differently, to use these innovative approaches in pricing and technology and everything else.
Bob Glaves:
There are only a couple others I think have really incorporated that into their models, and they’re some of the newer ones. I think Texas is aspiring to do something like this. There’s one in California doing something like this and one in New York that’s starting up with similar goals. And then there are less ambitious but still important goals in some of the other incubators around the country. More and more people are seeing the movement itself, just like the individual lawyers, can learn from each other and learn from the approaches people are taking. As people learn something works, it’s easy to spread it around the country.
Alan Houseman:
I want to return to your personal life. I know you’ve done some things in your personal life with schools, Mayor Daley and things like that.
Bob Glaves:
We live in the northwest side of the city here. So my kids went to the public school there. There is a local school council that I got drafted to be part of at one point, so I served on the council there. But we also did a lot of work with the mayor’s office, and previous Mayor Daley in Chicago, in the early 21st century at the turn of the millennium. We created a 21st Century Leadership Council, which was younger leaders in different aspects of our community. I had the opportunity to serve on that, which was fun. I mean, some of the people that are on that are really big hitters now. So I’ve tried to stay involved on the civic side of things as well. There’s not as much time for that. I tend to focus on the Bar Foundation work.
Bob Glaves:
We were talking about boards earlier. I really try to be on at least one board that’s consistent with our mission at the Bar Foundation. It helps me stay tuned into some of the bigger issues that are complementary to what we’re doing. It also helps me be a better executive director to our board. So sitting on the other side helps me be better at helping our board members. It’s like, gee, we told them all this stuff, why didn’t they get it? Then I’m sitting on the other side on a board, and you’re busy, and you have your day job, and this is the side thing, and people are telling you all these things and I don’t remember them. It makes me feel that I could do a little bit better job of being helpful to our board in the process of that. It’s mostly legal that I’ve done that, but I’ve tried to pick some civic spots too that might serve that need too.
Alan Houseman:
Well, terrific. As we end, is there anything else you want to add, I’ve forgotten to ask you about, that we should get on the record?
Bob Glaves:
I don’t think so. I feel very fortunate to have had a chance to do this, and really to work with such a great group of people. Despite all the challenges that are out there right now in working on access to justice, it’s very inspiring to see what great people are working on this, including the two of you, that I have the opportunity to work with every day. That includes people doing it full time and also very busy people taking time out of their busy schedules to do pro bono or to do advocacy or to serve on boards that are promoting this cause. It gives me hope that we’re going to be able to solve this issue over time. So I want to leave with that optimistic note.
Alan Houseman:
Thank you very much. This has been terrific, Bob.
Bob Glaves:
Thank you. I appreciate you thinking of me.
END