By Rachel Kipp
When Michael Schwartz’s mother and aunt died in 2012, his entire family agreed that Schwartz should keep the family home. But Schwartz’s aunt died without a will, leaving ownership of her half of the house unclear.
While Schwartz was working through the complicated probate process, he was injured in a tractor-trailer accident. Though he was able to stay in the home, Schwartz still needed help becoming its legal owner. He was referred to Philadelphia VIP in early 2020. With the support of VIP staff, a volunteer attorney helped Schwartz fight a $10,000 outstanding lien and gain legal title to the house he had long called home.
“There are no words to express how grateful and appreciative I am,” Schwartz told VIP for a blog post. “I have a home to live in and I own it. I tell everyone I know.”
For 40 years, the staff and volunteers of Philadelphia VIP have been providing Schwartz and other Philadelphians with the expertise to navigate an often arcane and complicated legal system with a sense of empowerment. VIP has kept families together, helped Philadelphians stay in their homes and preserve their incomes, and fueled local economic development by providing legal aid for small businesses and nonprofits.
As volunteer attorneys work to change lives for the better, they too, become empowered, gaining critical practical experience and, perhaps more importantly, an understanding of what it means to struggle to obtain basic human needs like housing, family, income and community. From understanding grows advocacy, fueling the ongoing fight to create more equitable systems for all Philadelphians.
“The heart of the Philadelphia lawyer is public service,” said Tobey Oxholm, who helped to found VIP. “It’s how we define ourselves: The willingness to do excellent work for clients who other lawyers wouldn’t help…. It’s the highest and best calling of us all to ensure access to justice by the least of us.”
Perhaps VIP’s most important legacy has been to firmly establish pro bono as an integral part of the Philadelphia legal community, said Eve Biskind Klothen, who was the organization’s first executive director.
“It’s hugely important – it means generations of lawyers who have handled pro bono cases and who then become strong advocates for legal services on the state and federal level,” Klothen said.
The Beginning
Philadelphia VIP traces its roots to the Philadelphia Lawyers Volunteer Action Program (PLVAP), which was formed by the Philadelphia Bar Association in 1981 in response to federal funding cuts to legal services for low-income Americans. The cuts prompted a discussion about how the public interest and private bar could join forces to fill the gap.
“In 1980, President Reagan was elected and in his first budget he allocated zero for national legal services,” recalled former Chancellor Frank Devine, a VIP co-founder, former board chair and longtime volunteer. “At the time, Community Legal Services [then the federal grantee for those funds] had around 96 lawyers. Shortly after the cuts, they had less than half that. They literally had to tell clients to come and pick up their files because CLS could not handle them anymore.”
PLVAP was organized by then Chancellor Joe Foster and then Chancellor-Elect Robert Daniels with the goal of finding a pro bono attorney for each case that CLS could no longer handle. Devine says during its first year, 705 lawyers took on cases for 1,300 clients, with the services provided valued at more than $1 million. But the program was completely volunteer-based – in order to truly make an impact, organizers realized they needed a more sustainable operating model.
PLVAP was reorganized in 1986 as the Philadelphia Volunteers for the Indigent Program (VIP), with a full-time executive director, a part-time paralegal, and a vision to create a sustainable source of legal services for Philadelphia’s poorest residents through cross-sector collaboration.
“What VIP offered was a collegial partnership among the Bar Association, the Bar Foundation and Community Legal Services, by which the Bar Association pledged to do substantial recruitment, the Bar Foundation pledged to do substantial fundraising and CLS pledged to identify clients and legal needs that members of the private bar could readily take on or learn how to represent needy clients,” Oxholm said. “That was the innovation that VIP was.”
By recruiting volunteers for VIP, law firms could give young associates critical experience at practicing law and interacting with clients. For young lawyers, Oxholm said, “it was the chance to be the kind of lawyer they aspired to be when they went to law school and to provide real help to people who really needed it and who had nowhere else to turn.”
“We wanted to harness the energy of many hundreds of lawyers in Philadelphia,” added Bennett Picker, who was Chancellor in 1986. “If you wanted to make a significant difference [through pro bono] in those days, there was nowhere to go. VIP became a connector to help us develop ties to the community, recognize the need and to match the lawyers with the needs.”
As VIP grew, it birthed other legal services agencies, including the Homeless Advocacy Project and the Consumer Bankruptcy Assistance Project, that provide specialized services to populations with unique needs.
“VIP has continued to be innovative in identifying new needs,” Oxholm said. “Look at tangled title: That is the perfect example of the judiciary seeing and issue, practitioners seeing an issue and calling on the Bar Association to put heads together to come up with a solution that works for everybody. The idea was to make VIP the place where the private bar is working with the public interest bar and working with the city bar and the judiciary in the common cause of making our society more equal for everyone.”
VIP Today
Poverty has long been one of Philadelphia’s most intractable problems. According to a 2017 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the city’s poverty rate rose by about 10 percentage points from 1970 to 2016, and the rate has long been the highest or one of the highest among large U.S. cities. It was against that backdrop that Philadelphia VIP was launched and it’s the environment in which organization continues to operate today.
In 2020, more than 1,600 VIP volunteers took on more than 1,500 cases, devoting more than 14,000 billable hours. Today, VIP volunteers represent individuals and organizations on matters in four priority areas: preventing homelessness, supporting family stability, preserving income and promoting community economic development. Fifty-five percent of VIP’s clients are Black and 14% are Hispanic.
“What we see here is people having trouble keeping up with a system not designed with them in mind and in some cases it is geared to work against them,” said Rida Haq, who became executive director of VIP in 2020. “We are helping people navigate those systems. It’s addressing equity in a more systemic way.”
With more than 10,000 lawyers practicing in the City of Philadelphia, Haq notes there is huge potential to engage more people and help further meet the community’s needs, “we just have to figure out what the secret is to push beyond the 1500 attorneys with whom we routinely engage.”
Haq notes that VIP is unique in that, for all programs other than community economic development, it accepts volunteers from all levels of experience and with a background in any type of law or practice area.
“A second-year litigation associate is not going to get to first chair a case for a very long time. Transactional attorneys are not representing people with life-threatening kinds of needs,” Haq said. “It’s a different kind of pressure when it’s a person with a name, a face, a whole story. We do our best to support people and on-ramp them into representing an individual client.”
She noted that “even the most thoughtful volunteers” come away from the experience learning lessons about the benefits in our society of having social capital and what it means not to have that privilege.
“Having someone to turn to when you are in trouble; that is the difference with most of the people we are representing – they don’t have that,” Haq says. “If you think about this simply in terms of income, you’re missing a key piece. We tell people: Don’t think about what you would do if you were in a client’s shoes. If you think that way, you’re gdoing to make some preformed conclusions and judgments that are not applicable to your client’s scenario.”
The Volunteers
Alex Braden has been volunteering with Philadelphia VIP since the beginning of his legal career in 2007. “I fell into it like so many young lawyers do; I started my career at Reed Smith, and I had a colleague who was my summer mentor, and he was working on a VIP case,” said Braden, who joined the VIP board in 2011 and served as president from 2019-2020. As a young lawyer, Braden started attending monthly meetings at Reed Smith’s office where volunteers who were working on tangled title cases for VIP clients could compare notes and share their experiences.
“We were really encouraged to collaborate to get these thorny cases to advance,” Braden said, noting that working on tangled title cases “really was sort of baptism by fire; it got me acquainted with a lot of aspects of local real estate law that I might not have otherwise encountered. Early on, I got some direct contact with the Register of Wills, the Court of Common Pleas. I also got in touch with members of the Philadelphia community who are severely underserved…. You see right off the batd how critical the work of Philadelphia VIP, along with its sister organizations, is for this cohort of Philadelphians.”
VIP staff attorneys work directly with volunteers to provide guidance and resources throughout the trajectory of a case, including connecting newer volunteers with those who are more experienced.
“A big part of VIP’s mission is to engage Philadelphia’s robust legal community around volunteerism and encouraging that volunteer community to be a community for lawyers to interact with each other and guide each other and to serve as mentors and backstops for each other,” Braden said. “The benefits from that are that it imbues confidence in the volunteer attorney.”
Helping clients through VIP is “the most satisfying feeling I’ve ever gotten being a lawyer,” Braden said. “The system is rigged against poor people. VIP’s work provides a leg to stand on for a lot of folks who otherwise wouldn’t be able to solve these kinds of problems simply due to the fact that they can’t afford it.”
Phylicia McFaddin had been deeply involved with doing pro bono work as a law student at Widener University Delaware Law School. When she graduated in 2014, she knew she wanted to continue that work as a young lawyer, which was what led her to volunteering with VIP.
“I didn’t have all the experience in the world, but VIP was really great at giving me whatever support I needed. It was easy to jump into taking a case,” said McFaddin, now a VIP board member. “Part of giving back to the community is not being afraid to take on something that might be new or outside of your comfort zone.”
McFaddin said working with VIP clients “is where I really learned to be a good listener.” Beyond the understanding mechanics of the case, she said, it’s important to learn each client’s story, where they’re coming from and what outcome they’d really like to achieve.
“That’s helped me a lot in my career as a contract negotiator and drafter: Really listening to the people on the other side of the table and what it is they’re trying to accomplish,” McFaddin said.
The Future
As the organization looks ahead to the future, it’s with an eye to creating an updated operating model that addresses the significant systemic changes within the legal profession over the past four decades, along with rapidly evolving attitudes toward work and volunteerism.
For example, when VIP was founded, many private attorneys had the advantage of clerical and administrative support staff to help them with the nonlegal aspects of cases, including their pro bono efforts. Today, many firms have consolidated or eliminated those services, and attorneys are expected to do more of that work on their own – VIP’s data shows that the average mid-to-large sized law firm has reduced administrative or clerical staff by 35% over the past five years.
“An insane increase in pressure on most attorneys who work in big law firms impacts those attorneys’ ability to do pro bono, ” Haq said. “We’ve been thinking about how we can reduce some of the nonlegal burdens on our volunteers.”
Whereas in the past, much of the case management work fell to volunteers, VIP is seeking to move in the direction of where staff can “be there not just when you need us, but all the time and be more of an active and involved partner in each pro bono case.”
VIP has been seeking new streams of funding and going back to existing funders to demonstrate how completing such a shift would create a scalable and sustainable model that, over the long term, would allow the organization to serve more clients.
“Many of our cases are very much life-changing for clients and that’s an emotional burden as well,” Haq said. “If you have a case manager who is more of a partner instead of just there when you need them that helps in a number of ways, including feeling like you just got a backup who is also providing emotional support.”
While the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t necessarily create new problems for many of VIP’s clients, it exacerbated the myriad challenges that are associated with poverty, Haq said. The protracted shutdown of the courts, city offices and other businesses also created slower progress for cases, which is a particularly acute problem for the clients VIP serves.
“No one wakes up in the morning and decides they need title to their home,” Haq said. “Most have a precipitating event that causes them to discover they have a tangled title, like a burst pipe they can’t afford to fix. If they want to qualify for help from the City of Philadelphia they need title. It used to take a year to go through the probate process … but due to significantly reduced capacity, it now takes a much longer period of time. And meanwhile, that person is living in a home with their water shut off.”
VIP is the “agency of last resort” for many Philadelphians, Haq said, the place where they end up after navigating through a series of challenges, and having other options fail to pan out.
“We’re the last stop; that’s really important for volunteers to remember,” Haq said. “If you don’t do it, don’t assume someone else is picking up that need. Lots of times people read a mass appeal [for volunteers] and think, ‘I don’t have the time.’ Our volunteers don’t necessarily have the time; they just have the heart.”
