president’s message
The Times They Are A-Changin'
By Wade H. Watson III
Caldwell & Watson LLP
[email protected]
T
his month’s issue is devoted to Pro Bono March
Madness, the Atlanta Bar Association’s continuing
legal education program that helps prepare lawyers
for providing pro bono services to people who cannot afford
attorneys. This program has been very successful and has
helped Atlanta Legal Aid and The Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers
Foundation, as well as many law firms, in their efforts to
provide legal services to the poor and marginally poor. It is
good and right that we should do this. We all
have an ethical duty as officers of the court
to provide access to justice for all of Atlanta’s
citizens.
both parties have no lawyer. For the poor, the middle class,
and even the upper middle class, legal services are either
absolutely or mostly unaffordable.
As Marty Ellin, our intrepid and tireless director of AVLF
often points out, lack of access to an attorney has a direct
adverse economic effect. People without lawyers are more
likely to lose their property. They may slip from comfortable
"I suggest that in order to provide
meaningful access for all our citizens
we have to come up with a better way
to finance basic legal services."
Yet I am struck by Georgia Chief Justice Hugh
Thompson’s recent report on the State of the
Judiciary that he delivered to the Georgia
Legislature earlier this month. In it he said that
the state of the Judiciary and Georgia’s legal
system is good for those who can afford it, but
an increasing number of Georgians cannot
afford attorneys and therefore lack access to
justice. Seventy percent of the State’s active
lawyers practice in just five metro counties. Sixty-two of
Georgia’s 159 counties have 10 or fewer lawyers and six
counties have no lawyers at all. By necessity, lawyers locate
where they can find paying clients. Atlanta is where the
greatest share of the state’s population and wealth is located,
and it is here that you find the most lawyers.
This concentration of lawyers in metro Atlanta still is of little
help to a growing percentage of the population who need
legal services. While we have a barely functioning system
for providing lawyers to those accused of crimes, we do
not recognize a right to counsel in non-criminal matters.
Government has its lawyers, big business has its lawyers,
the wealthy have their lawyers, those seriously injured or
damaged by the former three categories can often get lawyers
on a contingency fee basis, but everyone else pretty much has
to make do or to go without. Trial judges report the increasing
number of civil cases that they have to try where either one or
4
THE ATLANTA LAWYER
March 2014
to struggling, or from struggling to abject poverty, when
something goes wrong and they have no one to help them
correct it. They suffer foreclosure, eviction, deportation, loss
of employment, loss of child support, loss of visitation with
children, and even loss of government services, and have to
face the often bewildering bureaucracy of the judicial system
alone.
Of course there is nothing new here. I have been hearing
about this problem since I began practicing 32 years ago.
Despite the heroic efforts of many lawyers to address access
to justice, it is evident that what we are doing is not working
very well for many if not most people. One of the fundamental
problems I see is that we have been thinking too small and
we have been a bit naïve. Is it really realistic to think that
the 20,000 or so lawyers practicing in metro Atlanta could
have the capacity to give away enough time and services
to supply the unmet legal needs of the six million people in
The Official News Publication of the Atlanta Bar Association