good morning thank you mark for the kind introductionand i'm just overwhelmed to see so many of youhere today for our incubator meeting this is a fantasticturnout i'm happy for you mark to be jerry springer as long asi don't have anything thrown at me or as long as i don't get hit i want to begini'm just here to say a couple words of welcome reallybefore turning it over to the real meat of the programyou have before you on the program many many quite qualified experts who can help guideour discussion and enlist your participationwhich is really what we're here to do in the
thinking and design and collaboration aroundthese initiatives i just want to offer a couple words of framingand i'll begin with a little anecdote as judge juhas mentioned i had the great honorof clerking at the us supreme court one yearand the law clerks have a little tradition ofin addition to getting to know the justice for whom they're clerkingthey have the opportunity to have a little tea or coffee or a lunchwith other justices around the building just you know to have a chance to meet themand what not and i remember we had this opportunity with justicedavid souter
who probably goes down in the books as onethe shyest justices ever to sit on the supreme court and one ofthe most habitual at least in terms of his what he ate for lunchalways an apple and a cup of yogurt and when we had lunch with him it was no differentthere he was munching his apple and eating his yogurt andhe was talking to us about law practice and i'll never forget what he saidhe was recounting his experience as a young attorneygrowing up in new hampshire and his reflections on thatwere that the line between what we today regard asprivate law practice and
public interest work was just not a verystrict dividing line there was no strict dividing line between those twothings he basically said that in his community itwas unheard of to him at least that anybody who needed a lawyershould not be able to obtain a lawyerin his community whoever needed a lawyer whether for a probate matter a divorceland transactions small business whatever whoever needed a lawyer could get a lawyerbecause it was just understood that in that community that's what lawyersdid they made themselves available to the communityin whatever fashion and way made most practical
sensebut just as no one would ever go without a doctor in such a communityno one would go without a lawyer okay well you knowjustice souter grew up in weare, new hampshire a town of like 20 peopleso this is so this is harder to extrapolate of courseto the big metropolis’ and the big regions that that you allcome from so one of the challenges we have is how to takethe core idea of what justice souter is talking aboutabout what our profession is supposed to be about andmake it real with the scale and sustainability
that we’re all looking for part of whatjustice souter is talking about is actually captured in the business and professionscode of california and i’ll just read you one piece of thatwhich i always find extremely instructive so section60-68 6-0-6-8-h of the business and professions code thisis actually a statute it says it shall be the duty of an attorney neverto reject for any consideration personal to himselfor herself the cause of the defenseless or the oppressedi’ll say that again it shall be the duty of an attorney neverto reject
for any consideration personal to himselfor herself the cause of the defenseless or the oppressednow you know that is if you stop and think about itthat is i think in large part perhaps why youand your students or the students who you knowdecided to go to law school and that motivation that aspiration should guide ustoday let me say a couple words about the challenge that we faceso we’re familiar with legal aid and we're familiar with some of the statisticsaround poverty california has one of thehigher poverty rates among states in the nation
above-averageroughly around 17 percent one interesting graphicjust to put a picture on it that i glean from thehastings public interest website is that in california we have less than 1legal aid lawyer for every 8,000 indigent people okaythat means that if you were to fill at&t park just down the way here if you were to fillthat park with indigent people who qualify for legalaid there’d be just five peoplein that ballpark who are legal aid lawyers to serve the entire ballpark okay that isthe challenge with respect to
legal aid now we're not talking aboutin this in this gathering today just about indigent people according to some you knowpoverty guideline the title is moderate meansso if you if you look at the numbers of people who are living atlet's just say twice the poverty line above poverty at or above poverty butup to twice the poverty that's an additional 27 percent ofcalifornians an additional 27 percent on top on the 17 percentwho are legally poor and that's about 10 million people rightso we have a very very ser and you know even for people at the median incomemost average people can't afford a lawyer
for the ordinary transactions that that theyand challenges that they face so we're talking about a very significant spacehere where people need lawyers for variousthings highly consequential things that come up in ordinary lifewhether it be child support custody parental rights foreclosureloan modification access to benefits education immigration matters what have you and thewhole gamut okay this projectthe reason you're all here originated from some conversationsreally from a small working groupof the california access to justice commission
led by judgeron robie who’s here today and the small working group consisting of mejudge juhas jack london who i see who is here originally mary flynn who is now retired butnot really retired kelli now kelli evans lauriezelonnumber number of others got around to thinking about two kinds of problems that should becomplementary in a certain way one is the one i've mentionedwhich is the tremendous unmet legal needs of people who aren't evenpoor who are living you know your average personbasically and then on the other handthe tremendous numbers that we've seen in
recent years ofunemployed or underemployed law graduates shouldn't there be some supply and demandthat meets between these two things the tremendous unmet legal needsand the record rates of under and unemployment among our recent law graduatesso how do we make it possible to marry these two trend linesokay so that's part of the the big picture challengeand we've been lucky to garner the interest of the ford foundation and the public welfarefoundation as well as the our good friends here at the state bar todevoting some resources to help tackle precisely this set of problemsokay so when we have envisioned is essentially
a two component projectone part of what we're trying to do is to stimulate to seed to developmore and more models of how will be loosely calledincubators might might grow and develop these areloosely speaking and others will be more articulate about it than i willinitiatives that are designed to get recent law graduates intopractice where they are serving the very clientele that we're talking about in a sustainableprofessional expert way this will require i thinka number of changes in how we ordinarily think about the ambitionsof our law graduates first of all
i'll just confess to you and others can speakto this no one is going to get rich doing this kindof work but you know the trend line i think is veryclear that the days of the big law firmshiring and over hiring young associates from even the top law schoolsand billing you know the essentially the training costs of thoseyoung associates to their large clients that is quickly fading awayand so there needs to be i think a recalibration of what it iswe expect our law graduates to do with their law degreesas well as what they can expect to do as in
thefor their personal fortunes as well as their professional livesthroughout their careers and i would say you know to returnmany of the the young graduates we see to the original reasonsand motivations as to why they came to the practice oflaw secondly i think so so that's one of the things we're tryingto do is is trying to develop more models of how we can do thisand as you will quickly learn this morning thereis no algorithmic approach there are a variety ofdifferent models
and we’re looking for ways to develop themthrough this initiative the second thing is hopefully to develop somecapacity either here at the state bar or through other some other higher-level entityto help provide technical assistance and infrastructure and research and evaluation for theseemerging initiatives so like most initiatives in a start-up phase people aretrying to get things off the ground and we don't know what the results are goingto be and we don't know yet what are the best practicesbut it would be nice to have among this community of people heresome kind of infrastructure whereby you can share your ideasshare with each other what's working and what's
not and build in someevaluation and research and monitoring into what you doing so that we can improveour practice and focus on the things that are working getrid of the things that are not okay so that infrastructure development isis also a crucial piece of what we what we aim todo what we're asking you to do here today isboth extremely important and also difficultthe first thing is that we're asking for collaboration there's no way to solve these problems througha single law school initiative or a single lawyer referral service it's going to requiresome kind of teamwork between the law schools
between the public interest law organizationsbetween lawyer referral services the help self-help centersin the courts private law firms who are interested inin developing young attorneys in this way so we're interested in collaborative effortsthat are going to cut across these various institutional andorganizational lines that really builda lasting sustainable initiative okay that's that's the first thing the secondthing i think is we're looking for some scalewe're looking for initiatives that are really going to penetratethese problems in more than a kind of
small one off way this is hardbecause it's uncertain obviously got to smart start small start with things that aremanageable but how can we develop things in a way thatin that involve some serious scalability into the futureokay and then lastly i would say that there isobviously the question of support and funding part of what we're gonna eventually do you’llhear more about it later perhaps later this year we're offering throughthe good auspices of our foundation supportsome small mini grants to help initiatives get off the groundbut the but the crucial point i think is to
figure outhow in the development of these various incubator modelswe're going to get the requisite contributions from eitherlaw school side the private firms or other kinds of community or foundationsupport it's gonna be some kind of three legged oreven four legged stool in the end i suspect that willprovide these young law graduates with with the with the support that they need andthe infrastructure they need to get their careers off the groundin a direction that helps to meet these tremendous unmet needs okay so we have these big challengesand i'm just so excited to
see such alarge number of people turn out for what is really justour inaugural effort at all of this and as kelli and others will perhaps discuss we'regonna take this this very meeting we may have to clone allof you and we're gonna do this meeting again insouthern california and one more is it in thecentral valley okay central valley so this is statewide and we willwe will be compiling the results of these meetings andhopefully through what you will be discussing with each other this afternoonthere will be some actionable ideas that that
actually emergei'm just extremely excited by the possibilities and i look forwardto hearing about all of your efforts. thank you very much.
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