Q. What brought you to Boston?
A. I went to undergraduate school at Harvard and really liked Boston.
Q. How did you like Harvard?
A. Coming from a public school in Syracuse, it was a difficult but fantastic experience. The very first day, I had signed up for a philosophy course and I looked at the reading list. It was Kant, Aristotle, Plato, and others. I said to myself, “Oh, am I in trouble.’’ Two kids in front of me were from Exeter, and one of them turned to the other and said, “Not this crap again.’’
Q. What inspired you to go into legal aid?
A. This was the time of the War on Poverty, and what inspired me was the notion that lawyers could do for the poor what they had always done for the well-to-do. The guiding light of my career has been to use the law and legal tools to help people get out of poverty.
Q. What progress have you seen over 20 years, or has there been regression?
A. That’s a very tough question. The notion that government could deal arbitrarily with poor people was in retreat, but now we’ve seen a lot of setbacks. If you look at the ultimate question — Is the poverty rate lower now than it was? — the changes have been very marginal.
Q. What will you do in retirement?
A. I’m going to take a few months off. I’ve thought a lot about coming back as a volunteer and taking individual cases, which is where I started years ago.
Q. You obviously don’t get rich at a job like this.
A. Our starting salaries are in the mid-40s, and associates in big law firms are earning $160,000. So there’s a huge gap. And on top of that the student loan burden is so great. I have a lot of admiration for young lawyers who are sticking with it.
Q. Do you have trouble recruiting lawyers?
A. No, there’s still a huge number of idealistic lawyers who want to make a difference in their professional career. The problem is the opposite: So many people want to do this work and there just aren’t the jobs.
Q. What have funding cuts done to your organization?
A. We’ve lost more than 20 percent of our attorneys in the last few years, and the whole staff volunteered to take a 5 percent pay cut.
Q. What kinds of cases do you take?
