A Message from the Executive Director

Doing less with less?

By Dave Pantos

It’s a basic tenet of any well-run non profit: during lean years, you promise to “do more with less.” That helps to inspire your staff and your donors that you have this endless reserve of counter-cyclical capacity.

At some point, though, when the “less” keeps coming, you have to own up to the new reality. Doing less with less. Major proposed funding cuts to Legal Aid, coupled with drastically diminished IOLTA funds, may cause us to do just that.

In July, we found out that the US House of Representatives passed appropriations reducing Legal Services Corporation funding by over 25%. This is an astonishing figure that would result in mass layoffs of legal aid staff throughout the country and the closing of scores of field offices.

We in the interested community held out hope that the Senate would pass an increase in funding; thereby setting up a debate between the recognition that free civil legal aid is even more crucial in tough times, on the one hand, and the blindness to that reality on the other.

So much for that Pollyanna vision. In September, we found out that the US Senate has proposed a 2% cut in LSC funding. Now the debate is between a small cut and a big cut.

We’re now rooting for a small cut! How times have changed.

Keep in mind that any cut would be in addition to the 3% cut passed during the spring budget deal this year. We bore the entire 12 months of that cut during a six month period, forcing us to not replace staff lost to attrition.

Plus, the Interest on Lawyers Trust Account revenue has been cut further this year to only a tad over $40,000—total. In 2007 that amount was $515,000.

While Legal Aid of Nebraska is fiscally well-managed, if the cuts keep coming we will have to make hard decisions. Fortunately, we have retained some excellent attorneys and staff who are great at what they do and are willing to take on more and more cases.

Additionally, we enjoyed the support of volunteers from the broader legal community when the call went out through the SOLACE program about our attorney, Pat Ford, who suffered a debilitating stroke.

Moreover, we are employing innovative technological tools to further stretch our limited resources, such as an online application alternative for new clients, automated document assembly, and improved and enhanced electronic case management systems.

But in the end, largely, our business model is staff attorneys taking cases and achieving access to justice for poor clients. Like the 80 year old widow in Grand Island whose Social Security funds were being garnished.

Or the amazing woman from Africa we are working with who was born deaf.  She had to come up with her own sign language because nobody in her village could teach her.  She came to the U.S. with her son and his wife.  Her son is in prison and her daughter-in-law has serious problems with drugs and alcohol.  She is currently in Omaha caring for her two grandchildren and we helped her establish guardianship of them. 

Tech innovations and volunteers help significantly, but the cuts being proposed are the non-profit equivalent of a tsunami.

Almost 90% of our revenue goes directly to legal representation of clients. We’ve already cut the obvious fat: We now email our newsletter and Annual Report, we do phone and video conferences rather than in-person meetings, we host in-house CLE’s to reduce training costs…so, what’s next? You can fill in the blank.

If you’ve read this far you are someone who cares about Legal Aid and our mission. I am glad to have your ear! Here’s how you can help.

Frankly, consider joining the essential roster of donors to Legal Aid: more and more of our financial support is coming from private donors like lawyers and law firms. Or you can volunteer: Work with our professional staff to take on cases that we can no longer take. 

Right now, we are still able to do more with less. But “less with less” is one road we’d rather not travel.