Legal Pad

Foreclosure Law Expert Has Volunteer Spirit

[Scott Graham]

When Manjari Chawla put out the call for volunteers to the Federal Pro Bono Project’s monthly housing clinic, she got a good response. Many lawyers have come by at least once to counsel distressed homeowners facing foreclosure.

But San Francisco solo Steven Miyake’s help has been off the charts. “He comes once a month, every single month,” advising homeowners about a fast-changing area of law, said Chawla, the supervising attorney for the project.

For his efforts Miyake has been named the project’s solo practitioner volunteer of the year.

Warm Fuzzies Aren't Only Reward of Pro Bono

[Amy Miller]

The personal rewards of doing pro bono work are well documented. So it was no surprise to hear lawyers tell heart-tugging stories about helping childless couples adopt or abused women escape violent relationships at a panel discussion on pro bono work Thursday sponsored by Silicon Valley Campaign for Legal Services.

But pro bono work has its professional benefits, too, said the four attorneys and one state judge who spoke on the panel at Bingham McCutchen in East Palo Alto.

Michael Trinh, an associate litigation counsel at Google Inc., started doing pro bono work for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as a first-year associate at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Instead of being stuck doing document review, he was doing meaningful work in areas of the law he hadn’t been exposed to before.

“And it’s had a profound impact on my career development,” Trinh said.

Associate Deferrals Proved Positive for Public Interest Groups

[Cynthia Foster]

According to a new report (.pdf) published by the Pro Bono Institute, the public interest deferment program instituted at many big firms to combat the recession have experienced success, at least on the public interest side.

There were some doubts about whether or not such programs would work. The report, however, would seem to indicate that they have. Over 97% of non-profit respondents reported that they would accept deferred associates again in the future.

Vivia Chen, over at sister publication The Am Law Daily's blog The Careerist, calls the programs a success, and that this success is a "no-brainer."

The participating firms, however, might be a bit more reserved in their judgments. According to portions of the law firm survey, many firms believe it is too soon to accurately judge the impact the deferment programs will have on their businesses.

Pro Bono Mexicano

M.C. Sungaila and David Ettinger, both partners at Los Angeles-based appellate firm Horvitz & Levy, were celebrating along with human rights groups last week when an international tribunal found Mexico liable for failing to investigate and prosecute a pattern of sinister murders of maquiladora workers — girls and women at foreign-owned factories in the border city of Ciudad Juarez.

Sungaila, left, the principal author of a pro bono amicus brief in the case for Amnesty International and others, and Ettinger had been brought in by a lawyer for the family of one of three young women whose unsolved murders were at the heart of the case. That was after he’d seen a brief Sungaila had filed in a domestic-violence-related lawsuit against the United States before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

One thing leads to another, after the jump ...

O'Melveny Scores Pro Bono Win in Human Trafficking/Slavery Case

Paul McNamara, in the Los Angeles office of O’Melveny & Myers, secured a $768,000 judgment last week for an Indonesian domestic worker who was enslaved by a banker and his wife in their LaCanada home.

The verdict is one of the first civil judgments under the California Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which passed in 2005, according to McNamara and Kevin Kish, an attorney at Bet Tzedek, a public interest law firm that worked on the case with O’Melveny.

McNamara, who usually works on class actions and insurance defense, said he wasn't aware of the scale of human trafficking here before taking this case, which the firm handled pro bono.

“This really is not an isolated incident,” he said. “It’s widespread in Los Angeles and California.”

Bank executives as tight-fisted human traffickers, after the jump.

NorCal Innocence Project Scores $2.4 Million Grant

A Santa Clara lawyer and wrongful-conviction crusader recently got good news from the feds in the form of big money — and that means good news for some innocent inmates locked up in California’s prisons.

Kathleen “Cookie” Ridolfi, executive director of the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law, sounds pumped about the $2.4 million federal grant the project is sharing to administer a massive new DNA testing program.

“It’s the biggest project of its kind in the country,” Ridolfi said. “This is really groundbreaking work.”

What is the PCDNATAP, and how does it get someone out of prison? After the jump.

Firms Pledge Their Support of Pro Bono

Chief Justice Ronald George praised a roomful of do-gooding lawyers late yesterday for tackling “the challenge of the unrepresented litigants in our civil justice system.” The event marked Bay Area firms’ signing, or re-signing, of a pledge to commit resources to pro bono services. Among other things (.pdf), the signing firms agree to try to annually devote the equivalent of 3 percent to 5 percent of their billable hours to pro bono work.

The chief justice, left, and chief judge, center, shook a lot of hands Thursday, with firm representatives like Baker & McKenzie of counsel Howard Fine.

See what other firms are on the hook to do good, after the jump ...

To Get Happy End For This Interstate Custody Dispute, S.F. Lawyer Had To Be Dogged

 The pro bono cases Steve Dye (left) is accustomed to in the San Francisco office of Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis are Guantanamo detentions and death penalty cases. When he got a call about reuniting a pet owner with a beloved dog, he thought, “This’ll just take a couple of phone calls.” How wrong he was.

Evacuating New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Katrina four years ago, Jessie Pullins had been forced to leave his beloved Lab-Akita mix, JJ, behind with food and water, expecting he’d be back in a couple of days. When he finally got home, JJ was nowhere to be found. A year later a kind volunteer happened to see the dog featured at a California shelter on Cesar "The Dog Whisperer" Millan’s TV show. Then a series of benevolent events connected Pullins with Dye for help with getting his dog back.

After failed attempts to negotiate with the San Luis Obispo shelter that had taken the dog in and adopted him to a local family, Dye filed a conversion lawsuit. A legal battle ensued –- including even a change of venue from L.A. to San Luis Obispo –- until JJ’s adoptive family finally settled with Dye on the courthouse steps before the court’s judgment. JJ and Pullins were reunited.

“It’s one of those representations that are once in a career, at least for me,” Dye said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever had a client so appreciative, so happy with the work.”

—  Kate Moser

Volunteer Program Needs More Booty, Fewer Bodies

BETWEEN JOBS An occasional look at how the crisis economy is affecting laid-off legal professionals and the options open to them.

It used to be that San Francisco’s Volunteer Legal Services Program begged people to come donate time. Now they’re turning people away.

The SF Bar Association’s VLSP holds about three CLE trainings nearly every month of the year. They offer an introduction to landlord/tenant and family law, among other things. Trainees then can provide pro bono assistance through VLSP.

In all of 2008, a total of 295 lawyers got training.

Then came the 21st Century Depression … after the jump.

Surfers Should Find a Way to Blame Paris ...

A trademark dispute has whipped up some choppy surf in Santa Cruz, and Gibson Dunn has signed up for lifeguard duty.

The firm is working pro bono for the nonprofit Santa Cruz Surfing Club Preservation Society and Harry Mayo, an 85-year-old former surfer who owns a museum-quality photo collection of the early days of wave riding in Santa Cruz.

The two are suing (.pdf) another surfer, alleging he falsely trademarked the original Santa Cruz Surfing Club’s logo. Mayo and the Society say they used the logo in commerce first — including on a batch of fundraising T-shirts licensed by Levi’s, one of which Paris Hilton wore on the March 2004 cover of Elle magazine.

The same month the hotel heiress was published wearing the $100 tee, defendant Ryan Rittenhouse applied to trademark the logo. He incorporated a for-profit entity called the Santa Cruz Surfing Club in summer 2007. Rittenhouse now sells apparel with the logo through what he claims to be “the official Web site” of the Santa Cruz Surfing Club.

Rittenhouse issued a statement in which he “condemns the evil misconstrued lies and false accusations.” He said he invested $150,000 in his business, which is operating at a loss, so the “perception that profit is the only motive couldn't be further from the truth.”

Bring on the lawyers, after the jump …