VI. Sunday Afternoon: Transforming the Practice of Law

A. Introduction

Those of us who planned the retreat intended for our discussions to build toward the Sunday afternoon session on transforming the practice of law. The more that we have met on telephone conference calls and in person over the years, the more that we have come to realize that we very much need to fill out our spiritual/political vision of a transformative law practice. Those of us working to transform legal education, for example, cannot expect our students, most of whom will become the next generation of practicing lawyers, to really commit themselves to a radical new vision of law without being able to link that vision to what they are going to do for a living and how they are actually going to live out their everyday lives. As inspired as we often feel by conversations about a world in which we fully recognize and confirm one another in our deepest and most loving humanity, these discussions inevitably carry a little asterisk beside them so long as we haven’t really filled out our vision of how the truth of this ideal can be manifested in the real work of a lawyer. This year, for example, our longtime comrade Paul Lehto was elected to the Board of Governors of the State Bar of Washington. This was a great achievement and has earned him public recognition in the Washington press as one of the legal system’s “new rising stars,” and Paul is without question someone who holds a deep conviction that we should each recognize the other as a “ Thou.” But until we can help him tell members of the State Bar who are mired in the inherited verbiage of contract, real estate, bankruptcy, and other doctrine—while being driven by the circle of cultural tradition to conform to standard rules of pleading and procedure, and motion-writing, and dress codes, and argument styles, and to carry out their appointed routines properly on pain of poverty and social ex-communication—we can’t move too far beyond the (very important) realm of inspiration.

B. Doug Ammar (Georgia Justice Project)

So, for this last afternoon session, we asked Doug Ammar of the Georgia Justice Project (GJP) to lead us in a replay of the previous year’s visionary discussion of how law practice might be radically different, but to do so in a way that filled out the details of everyday life even more than we had before. Also participating in this session, either in front of the room or around the room, were lawyers in practices of very different kinds:

• Nanette Schorr directing the family and education law section of her Bronx Legal Services office;
• Perry Saidman engaged in patent law private practice in Washington, D.C.; Paul Lehto engaged in a small general practice in the Seattle area, conceived to operate in an innovative manner, doing work in such areas as contracts and consumer sales;
• Cheryl Conner co-creating a new vision of collaborative and contemplative law practice in the Boston area;
• Deborah Miller, within a general corporate and criminal defense practice in Dallas, seeking to redefine the meaning of “representation” to include giving voice to the aspirations of her clients’ souls and not just their “ interests”;
• Dianna Stallone representing artists and other small business people in a semi-rural setting in the area of Northampton, Massachusetts; Kathy Clark combining law practice and spiritual consulting in innovative ways;
• Lindsay Harris working to humanize a traditional big corporate firm practice in San Francisco while seeking to integrate insights gained from international human rights work in Tibet and Nepal and her work in a graduate school psychology program; and
• Sarah Gerwig engaged in appellate defense practice in Atlanta, including her death penalty work, in a way that expresses the link between law and religion in her own education and background.

We asked Doug to lead the discussion because his Georgia Justice Project has made a most radical re-conceptualization of how a lawyer devoted to a sacred and spiritually connected world should engage with individual clients and with the wider community in which her/his practice is located. Doug began by re-describing for the newcomers the unique character of the work of the Georgia Justice Project in Atlanta. A competitive wrestler hailing from the area of West Virginia coal mines, Doug made it clear at the outset that he likes litigation and doesn’t mind a bit “getting it on” when it comes to defending his clients against people trying to make their lives even more painful than they often are. But Doug’s core initial point was that the dimension of courtroom warfare as legal protection is but a small and essentially subordinate part of the purpose and nature of legal representation in his legal community. Instead, Doug emphasized the central role of the contract that every client must sign if he or she is to be represented by the GJP—namely, a commitment to turn their lives around in a redemptive fashion, to see themselves as becoming members of the spiritually caring community that is standing up for them, to work in GJP’s landscaping business in order to pull themselves out of conditions of poverty and powerlessness that have often shaped their previous existence, and to participate in the church community with which the GJP is affiliated. In return, the GJP makes its own sacred promise to provide care and concern as well as economic support for the client and his or her family whether the client is convicted or acquitted, to visit the client in jail even if the client must serve many years, and to welcome the client into the community if he or she is acquitted or when he or she is eventually released. One way of measuring the importance of this re- conceptualization of a lawyer’s relationship to clients is to imagine how law students would have to be educated in order to be qualified to fulfill these kinds of commitments made to another human being.

As Doug moved further into his presentation, he shifted from the style of Southern humor and good-natured anecdote that we’ve come to associate with him and began to talk with tremendous passion about the necessity of every lawyer’s engagement with the reality of human suffering. And here Doug was not just talking about the suffering of his criminal defendants, but the suffering of every person living within a culture that does not validate and nurture his or her essential goodness and kind and gentle soul.

In this context, Doug told us of a visit he made for no legal purpose to an inmate whom the GJP had represented. The power of the story was Doug’s description of how deeply moved the client was that his Lawyer had come to visit him, at a distance requiring a several hour round-trip by car, for no reason except to see how he was, to talk with him about his incarceration experience, and to reaffirm by the simple act of the visit the fact that Doug and his client were bound by a fundamental commitment as human beings within the same community rather than simply as lawyer and client in the narrow role-based sense of those words and that personally distanced experience.

What was powerful about the story was that it revealed the suffering we all carry each day from the presumption of nonrecognition by the other, that in our alienation we do not provide each other the relief we each deserve of being valued as sacred vessels of humanity independent of any functional role we’re performing within the “system” of role-based relationships that imprisons us. Through this and several other stories, Doug brought out a sense of what it means to be “a sacred lawyer,” a lawyer living a practice that has as its highest priority the link required by justice between being a lawyer and elevating the spiritual and moral condition of the community that one works within.

Filling out this description of the GJP work more fully, Doug described the monthly meals that the GJP holds for all members of the community (lawyers, clients, community supporters, and others). Although he didn’t directly make this link, Doug described the conversion that gradually took place with one of his clients who was a kingpin drug-dealer type when he started his relationship with the GJP, replete with gold tooth and posse, and who was gradually transfigured and softened by the idealism and love that everyday activities like the monthly meals conveyed. Doug also brought out the importance of the influence of the Protestant Church down the street where Doug is a minister and the way that the mere presence of a spiritually validated church consciousness has an impact on the nature of GJP’s law practice.

C. Clark Cunningham (Georgia State Law School)

Clark Cunningham presented after Doug and described how he had consciously chosen to take a professorship at Georgia State in order to move his work closer to Doug’s and to be able to use it as inspiration for teaching his students that it was possible to practice in a way fundamentally different from the leveled-down doctrinal environment that was elsewhere in the curriculum being presented to them as a kind of thing-like necessity. Clark drew together the value of Doug’s work as a model with Clark’s own experience as a lawyer/Vista Volunteer immersed in the Detroit community during and following the social upheavals of the 1960s. Although these were not his words, Clark’s presentation and Clark’s presence conveyed a sense of the invisible power simply of “how one is” as a professor and the role of the making-present of this power in shaping students' moral consciousness toward connecting lawyering with doing good works.

D. Nanette Schorr (Bronx Legal Services Corporation) and Sarah Gerwig (appellate defense work)

Nanette Schorr and Sarah Gerwig continued to convey this theme about the centrality of the spiritual environment that should inflect itself into all aspects of legal work if we are to achieve the integration of spirituality, law, and politics to which we aspire. Sarah’s emphasis was really on how a public-interest practice like hers, serving as appellate counsel for indigent defendants in non-capital and even capital cases, can so easily become routine and bureaucratic when it is divorced from higher spiritual purpose. In a way, what Sarah was saying was that she, too, wanted to work near Doug in Atlanta and to participate in his work so as to relieve the frustrating limitation of the more functional and mechanical aspects of her own socially worthy work.

Nanette reinforced some of the sense of dilemma that Sarah’s description of more traditional public-interest work conveyed. One of the challenges that Nanette has faced as a leader of our group since it started in 1996 was how to connect the Politics of Meaning with the actual reality of her almost two decades worth of public interest work in the Bronx. In this session Nanette emphasized those elements of her daily family law work that paralleled Doug’s work in the sense that her work involves deep engagement with fractured family relationships in which she really struggles to overcome the adversarial projections that cause such harm to the children of the families that she works with (and here she drew no real distinction between the children of her clients and those of her “adversaries”). Nanette's presentation also echoed Sarah’s frustration at trying to do socially transformative work in a fundamentally de-spiritualized setting. Nanette emphasized that the current reality of legal services remains a blend of idealism and frustration because the “public service” dimension of the work is defined so narrowly within the pre-defined goals, procedures, and emphasis on volume-oriented service that characterizes the existing legal services culture.

E. Paul Lehto (private practice in an innovative setting)

Paul Lehto concluded the presentations about the transformation of practice by linking the sustenance he gains from his own Finnish heritage—famously stoical, communitarian, and redemptive in nature rather than preoccupied with winning and losing for the benefit of the isolated self—with the true role of the professional as a healer whose work is inherently linked to elevating the well-being of the other. He emphasized the lawyer as but one member of a helping community who ought to practice in a collaborative way with rabbis, ministers, psychotherapists, and physicians within the lawyer’s community to provide holistic assistance to clients—in part in order to be able to actually listen to clients as whole human beings rather than listening for so-called legally relevant facts with which to “kick someone’s butt.” He advocated the virtue of using flat monthly retainers as a way of establishing ongoing relationships with clients that free the lawyer from the pressure of the clock, and he advocated broadening the character of intake forms to explore whether the client is open to multi- professional forms of assistance and allow the lawyer to gain a sense of what that broader assistance might be.

F. Summary

Taken as a whole, this long session on transforming legal practice should probably be seen as but a preliminary discussion of the transformation of the work of the everyday life of a spirit/law/politics lawyer for our work to really be successful. The transformation of certain elements in the work of a lawyer were addressed and were genuinely compelling—for example:

• Doug’s description of the Georgia Justice Project’s agreements with its clients and how that reflects a fundamentally spiritualized view of the lawyer/client relationship;
• the description of such seemingly mundane details as Doug’s visit to a GJP client in prison and of the important community-building role that monthly staff and client communal meals can play;

Perry’s passing out two letters inspired by last year’s retreat, one to his clients conveying the reasons for rejecting future adversarial litigation and the other, his successful “after” letter to an opposing counsel (contrasting sharply with his “before” letter that was filled with the usual hostility and threats), that by evoking a cooperative spirit and focusing on the details of the spiritual injuries caused in an everyday patent law case broadened our sense of how to use the everyday client letter to elevate our relationship to lawyers that we work with (now no longer “opposing counsel”), as well as giving a concrete example of how to introduce an elevated consciousness about what social conflicts are really about, revealing in the letter itself the pain and alienation that underlay the conflict in question.

But the truth is that the discussion also revealed how much easier it is to express our attempt to bring spiritual-political convictions into practice through aspects of ourselves that are either culturally-redemptive or religious in nature than it is to do so through the details of legal documents and interactions, motion practice, and other forms of current work. Paul’s recent letter to all of us describing an interaction he had with a client relating to a problem involving a used-car sale provides a wonderful example of how we are beginning to think through spiritualizing each of these details of the work of a lawyer so that, as Hegel would put it, “quantity transforms into quality,” and we become able to see how the totality of a group of concrete examples can give birth to a new spiritualized paradigm.