Oral History of Esther Lardent, Esq.
David McCarthy2021-02-24T11:16:08-05:00Note: You may use Ctrl/F to find specific text within this document.
Esther Lardent
September 26, 2006; December 16, 2010; March 22, 2011;
November 9, 2011; February 22, 2012; August 3, 2012
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Transcript of Interview with Esther Lardent (Sept. 26, 2006; Dec. 16,
2010; Mar. 22, 2011; Nov. 9, 2011; Feb. 22, 2012; Aug. 3, 2012),
https://abawtp.law.stanford.edu/exhibits/show/esther-lardent.
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ORAL HISTORY
of
ESTHER LARDENT
Interviewers:
Maureen Thornton Syracuse
Erica Knieval Songer
Dates of Interviews:
September 26, 2006
December 16, 2010
March 22, 2011
November 9, 2011
February 22, 2012
August 3, 2012
ORAL HISTORY
ESTHER LARDENT
September 26, 2006
Tape 1
This is Maureen Syracuse interviewing Esther Lardent on September 26, 2006. We are in
Esther’s home and the purpose of this recording is to record her oral history. So Esther, if you
would begin, tell me your full name and your date and place of birth.
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
My full name is Esther F. Lardent. F is for Ferster, which is my maiden
name, and I believe that my date of birth is April 23, 1947, in Lienz,
Austria. But there is some confusion about that.
All right. Tell me about your parents. What were your parents’ names?
My father’s name was William Ferster, and it’s Polish, Polish-Jewish and
so he was also known as Wladjek which is William, I understand in Polish
and my mother’s name was Rose Seidweber Ferster.
Where were your parents born?
Unfortunately I don’t know the exact place where they were born. They
were both Polish, and I know that they both were born in and lived in very
small towns in Poland, but I don’t actually know the names of the towns
that they were born in.
Well tell me what you know about your parents’ early life. What sort of
work did your father do when he was starting out?
My parents were both the eldest children of very large families. In both
cases, I believe six children. And they were very poor, and neither of
them ever went to school. My father’s family actually was Hasidic and
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
1
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
religious, my mother’s family was not. My father originally became a
kosher butcher, and that was the work that he did. And my understanding
is that in the schtetls, in the little Jewish communities in Poland, that was a
very important responsibility, being a kosher butcher. And it was
something that he took a great deal of pride in.
And what about your mother, did she ever have an occupation?
I don’t think so, but my parents didn’t talk a great deal about their lives
before I was born, so I don’t know. My mother actually was married
before she married my father, and the only thing that I really know about
that is that she married a man who was somewhat older than she was who
was a — he was involved in business of some kind. Apparently quite
affluent. They lived in Warsaw and they had a child, a daughter named
Hannah.
Tell me what you know about your parents’ life. You say you don’t know
much. Tell me what you know about their life before you were born.
What happened to them?
I know literally almost nothing about their lives before the war. I have
some photographs that give me some hints, but I really don’t know very
much about them before the war. Both of them were in concentration
camps during World War II. My father was in Bergen-Belsen which was,
as all the camps were, a terrible camp, but was considered more of a work
camp than a death camp. My mother, it’s my understanding that she and
her husband and her daughter actually hid during the early part of the war,
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
2
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
after Poland was invaded and taken over by the Germans, and they tried to
pass themselves off as Catholics, but were inadvertently outed to the
authorities and — my mother and her daughter were sent to Auschwitz.
And they were separated, and so I am not sure exactly where my mother
was at the end of the war because, I think, that many people who had
survived in Aushwitz were marched to other places, but that was where
she spent much of the war.
Do you know what happened to her daughter?
I don’t know. My assumption is that the daughter, who I think was about
eight when she was brought to the camps, was probably killed. But my
mother I think firmly believed that her daughter had been able to survive
and, indeed, after the war spent a great deal of time going to the various
displaced persons camps for children to see if she could reconnect with
her daughter, but never found her.
You said that you are not exactly sure when you were born. What do you
know about where you and your parents were living at the time that you
were born?
My parents met after the war. They hadn’t known each other before the
war. They met at a displaced persons camp, and my understanding is that
that camp was outside of Linz, Austria, in the American sector. Germany
and Poland were divided into sectors among the British, the French, the
United States, and Russia. And the camp was in the American sector,
which was a good place to be. And they met there. They presumably
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
3
married there, although there was never any actual external validation or
record that I ever saw of their marriage. And I was born there. And we
stayed there for some time, and then — we spent the first four years of my
life traveling around Europe and Israel. We went to Germany, we went to
Venice, we went to Marseilles, and then we went to Tel Aviv and Haifa in
Israel. And I gather what was happening was that my parents were trying
to both search for my mother’s daughter and also, in Israel, to reconnect
with my father’s brother and his family, since they were one of the few
relatives that had survived the war, along with my parents. I believe that
the reason that I have some confusion about my birth date and my
birthplace is that, at some point, like many people who were living in the
displaced persons camps, my father became involved in the black market,
which was quite prevalent in Europe after the war. And he was caught by
the military, the U.S. Military, which was in charge of this whole area, and
was actually imprisoned for some period of time. And because my parents
very much wanted to come to the United States, they avoided mentioning
that imprisonment, not surprisingly. And apparently because my birthday
and birthplace could have been connected to this, in the official records,
the only official records of my birth, which are my immigration records, I
am listed as Ella Ferster born in Poland on July 7, 1946. And I would
never have known anything different, but when I was registered for school
my mother gave the April 23rd d ate and Austria. And my mother’s aunt,
my mother’s sister rather, my aunt, who was with us after the war,
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
confirmed that that was my birth date, so apparently it was. When my
parents and I were in Israel, they thought that was where they were going
to settle there, but this was 1949/1950 very soon after the war that created
Israel as a nation, and they found the place frightening, I think. I think it
was a little too unstable for them, and so we came back to Germany, and
what I do know is that we lived there for at least several months, I don’t
know exactly how long, in one of the largest of the displaced persons
camps, the camp called Bad Reichenstol, and from there we emigrated to
the United States. We came over on a converted battleship, in steerage,
and came actually through Ellis Island.
Let me ask you two things. Do you have any memories of anything from
that time before you actually came to the United States?
I do have some memories, they are very sporadic, but very visual. I don’t
remember anything about Austria, I think I was probably quite young. I
remember though being in Venice, and because it’s such a striking city, I
actually have visual memories of Venice. And I remember singing in
Italian in a little — being put on a table, I think I must have been two or
three, and singing in a little bar or trattoria in Venice, and I remember, in
Israel, being taught Hebrew. And my teacher was a former soldier who
had lost his leg in the war, so I do remember that. And I remember being
on the boat coming to the U.S. because I was incredibly sick. I was seasick
the entire time, and I think I remember when we came into the New
5
York harbor, my father brought me up to the deck of the ship so that I
could see the lady, so I could see the Statute of Liberty.
Ms. Syracuse: And how old were you when you came to the United States?
Ms. Lardent: I was four, I was about four. So it was 1951.
Ms. Syracuse: And when you came in through Ellis Island, where did you go from there?
Ms. Lardent: Apparently we were supposed to be going to Louisville, Kentucky or as
my mother would say, Kantooky, because there was a synagogue and a
group of families there who were willing to take us in and help support us.
But my mother’s sister, her younger sister, who we had spent a great deal
of time with after the war, she and her husband and her daughter had
actually come to the U.S. before us, and they had moved to Springfield,
Massachusetts. And so my mother wanted to know how far Louisville
was from Springfield, and the answer was, of course, a long way, and she
apparently convinced the immigration authorities to let us go to
Springfield, where my mother’s sister was going to sponsor us. So we
ended up moving to Springfield. And neither of my parents spoke a word
of English and certainly couldn’t read or write English, and we ended up
living in one room together, in the home of a woman who’d agreed to take
us in.
Ms. Syracuse: And how long did you live there, do you think? Do you know if you lived
there and what age you were . . .
Ms. Lardent: I don’t have very strong memories, I do know that we lived there for a
while. We then moved to apartments that were in public housing in the
6
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
North End of Springfield, which was very racial diverse community, and
stayed in those for a while, and we then lived on the first floor of a duplex
house that was conveniently located literally next door to a synagogue. It
was a Russian synagogue, but it was an orthodox Russian synagogue, and
it was the synagogue that we went to. So I know we did that. And then,
by the time I think I was probably eleven and twelve, my parents actually
had saved enough money to buy a house.
And now — and you continued to live in Springfield?
We did. We lived in Springfield. We moved when I was in high school to
Forest Park, which is the more affluent neighborhood in Springfield, and
bought a very little house in a very nice neighborhood. But yes, we lived
in Springfield that whole time.
So what do you remember about your life in Springfield, before you
started school? Do you remember anything?
The interesting thing is I started school actually right after I got there. My
parents, as I mentioned, had never gone to school, but they had a very
clear sense of education as the most important vehicle for advancement,
and they very much wanted me to succeed. And so, again, I don’t know if
it’s apocryphal or real, but I think it is real. Apparently the day that we
actually got to Springfield, they somehow managed to get me to the
library near our house and get me a library card. That was sort of a first
step. And they got me enrolled in school, even though I think I was
actually a little bit young, and probably theoretically should have waited
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
for the next year. So I ended up going to kindergarten in the Springfield
public schools. And one of the things — it was a fairly tough school, it was
very much a ghetto school — but the thing that I remember is that my
parents became very unhappy because they, I was learning about other
religions. The story that I remember is that I came home from school one
day and showed my mother what I had learned and what I had learned was
to cross myself. And my parents were not happy with that, even though
my mother wasn’t particularly religious, they were not happy with that.
And so they ended up enrolling me in Lubavitcher Hasidic Yeshiva, and I
would take the school bus and go to the Yeshiva every year for several
years. I remember the Yeshiva, because there was not a great deal of
English being taught in Yeshiva, and girls were not expected to be
particularly intellectually outstanding, and so it was a very safe
environment, I think from my parents’ prospective, but a very frustrating
environment for me.
So does that mean that you were going to the Yeshiva full time as your
education, so you were out of the public school system?
I was out of the public schools, and English was taught only sporadically
there. Many of the classes were in either Yiddish or Hebrew, and that was
a problem because obviously I wasn’t hearing English at home. We didn’t
have — you know television was just sort of coming to its own — we didn’t
have the money for a T.V. I did have some volumes of an encyclopedia
and, of course, I had my library card, and so I would go to the library
8
every couple of days, pick up four books, bring them back, read them very
quickly. And so I learned my English originally from books, almost
completely from books, because nobody around me really spoke much
English at all.
Do you remember friends from that time in your life?
Having just gone to a reunion, I now do remember. And one of the things
that’s interesting is that the public housing project that I was in, and the
Yeshiva were populated for the most part by children of other
concentration camp survivors, who had come over after the war. The
families were quite close, although they also had their own feuds and
disagreements. But quite close, and the children, of course, were all
typically of a certain age. There was one or two children who had actually
been born during the war, who I am sure had amazing stories about how
that happened. But most of us had been born in 1947, 48, 49, 50, and we
were a transition generation. On the one hand, we were very much
steeped in our parents’ history and past and language. For most of us,
Yiddish was our first language. And their culture, which was a very
different culture. One of the things, when I was at this reunion of some of
my childhood friends was that we talked about the fact that none of us
actually knew how to set a table correctly, because spoons and forks and
knives go in a different place — in my parents world — and we were all
confused about how to do that. But we were also given fairly
contradictory messages. We were supposed to respect and value our
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
9
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
Jewish heritage and their past in Europe. And, in a way, I felt as if I grew
up in a Polish schtetl, which had been transported pretty much intact to
Springfield, Massachusetts, but it was like growing up in the turn of the
century. But in another way, of course, we were becoming Americans,
and so we were picking up the popular culture at the time, and we
reinforced that among each other. My parents, and I think the rest of the
parents, never talked to us about their experiences at all. And we didn’t
talk to each other about what our parents had in common. But
subliminally, we understood that we had a very special history, we had a
very special obligation, and that we weren’t actually either greenhorns
which was what these people were called or Americans. We were
somewhere in the middle between those groups. We were sort of a
transition link between those groups.
Did you, when did you come to know your parents history?
You know that’s an interesting question. I am not sure. I think that at
some level I probably knew something about it when I was quite young,
because I remember having dreams, really nightmares, quite vivid ones
about the camps. And what was amazing to me was when I was older and
I can remember those, they were physically accurate, you know the
barracks and the cots placed on top of each other and that sort of thing. So
I think I knew something about it and I knew it was different. And one of
the things, when I started public school, which was in second grade, then I
noticed that the adults that I saw in public schools, the teachers and the
families of the students there, didn’t have numbers on their arms. And all
the people that I knew, all the parents of the children that I knew, all my
parents’ friends, all had numbers on their arms. So I think there were
ways in which I sort of understood that. I think that it became very clear
to me actually through television — we got a television set, I don’t know
how old I was, but you know it was Howdy Doody and all those
programs. But we also watched documentaries, and the two that really
stand out in my mind were Judgment at Nuremberg which, and they had
some actual footage of camps and at one point my mother recognized a
woman who was a guard at Auschwitz and she fainted dead away. And
then we actually watched the Diary of Anne Frank, and I remember telling
my mother that Anne Frank had survived because I didn’t want to tell her
that she hadn’t. I don’t know how old I was, but I am guessing maybe I
was a teenager by then. So by then, it was, I understood, I had at least
some sense of what they had gone through.
Ms. Syracuse: Did you have any other siblings?
Ms. Lardent: No.
Ms. Syracuse: So it was you and your parents.
Ms. Lardent: It was me and my parents. I did have some cousins in Springfield and in
New York and then some second cousins in New Jersey and then some
people . . . another cousin came over from Poland in the mid-fifties, so
there was at least some family, but certainly no grandparents, no siblings.
And so it was an interesting environment. I think part of the reason that
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
my parents really strongly encouraged me to become a doctor or a lawyer
or to be very successful professionally was the fact that they didn’t have a
boy. And so I was their sort of hope, if you will, in terms of making a
success of myself. And I still remember — the only paper that we ever got
because they didn’t read or write English was the Daily Forward, which
was a Yiddish newspaper that my mother couldn’t read but my father
could. And my father would show me pictures of Golda Meir and say,
“You see, see what she can do, you see.” I think that if they had a son I
am sure that their son would have been the focus, but instead it devolved
to me.
What did your dad do to work?
When he came to this country, he tried to become a butcher again, and he
went to work for A&P, which was then sort of the dominant grocery store
chain, at least in that part of the world, and he found it too stressful,
apparently, and he couldn’t do it. So, he very proudly joined the
Teamsters union, and he became what was called a Teamster’s helper. He
didn’t drive for most of the time that I was home before I left for college.
My mother never drove, my father finally learned how to drive, but didn’t
drive and didn’t have a car. So he couldn’t become a Teamster. What the
Teamster’s helper would do is to load and unload the bottles, the empties
onto the truck and unload the full bottles of beer and wine and sodas at
various bars and restaurants. Both of my parents were very short. I think
my mother was probably 4′ 11″ and my father maybe hit 5 feet. So here is
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
this little man with these very broad, muscular shoulders. He really
enjoyed his work. He loved it. His colleagues called him Bill, and they
would make little jokes and, although he had a very thick accent, he did
learn English because he was out there, and he enjoyed the camaraderie.
And he was proud of the work and he worked constantly.
So Esther, you went back to public school for second grade, what was the
name, or do you remember the name of the school that you went to for
elementary and grammar.
I think it was Lincoln Elementary — they tested me when I went back to
the school. And apparently, although it was supposed to be an objective
test, it was quite culture-biased, and so I actually ended up in a class for
emotionally retarded children for a while. And so I had a very interesting
couple of months there, and then someone there noticed that I was actually
reading novels. They realized perhaps the test didn’t actually reflect my
capabilities, and so I was put into regular classes. I think it’s one of the
reasons that civil rights is such an important issue, given my parents’
background, but I think that that experience of understanding that
seemingly objective qualifications and criteria can, in fact, be quite
culturally biased was really important to me. The other thing about it was,
as I mentioned it was a school in a very poor neighborhood. Many of the
children were African American or Puerto Rican, and thinking back, I
think the teachers were very supportive of me. And I think it was for a
very troubling reason, which is that they assumed, because I looked like
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
Ms. Syracuse:
them, that I had intellectual capabilities that other kids didn’t have. So in
a very distressing way, I kind of benefited from bias being in the school.
And then did you go from elementary school to a junior high school?
Yes. Springfield at the time had three-year junior high schools, so you
went from first through sixth at elementary school. And I went to a junior
high school very close to my home, called Chestnut Junior High, which
was again very much of an inner city junior high school where there were
some very tough crowds, there were a lot of pregnancies, but I did have
some teachers, again, who were very very supportive of me, and they were
the ones who encouraged me. I don’t think my parents had any idea about
this, although maybe they did from other parents, but I don’t remember
them actually mentioning this. The city had magnet high schools. They
had a commercial high school, technical, classical and then there was
Cathedral, that was a parochial school. And you had to take a test to get
into Classical High School, which I did. It was really quite an amazing
school. A lot of the teachers had advanced degrees including doctorates,
they had a lot of advanced placement courses, and it was really a very
dedicated group of teachers and a very rigorous academic climate. I did
quite well there, although certainly I was not at the very top of my class. I
came out of my shell a little bit. I was in student government, and I was
the arts editor of the newspaper.
And what other hobbies did you have, other interests did you have outside
of school?
Ms. Lardent: Well, I didn’t really have hobbies. It’s interesting that you’d mention that.
You know that concept was sort of foreign to me because my parents had
none of that. They didn’t really think in terms of recreation. We didn’t go
to movies, we had no books in the house, they didn’t read, and they didn’t
have hobbies. They did play cards. They had a group of people that they
socialized with and played cards with, and we went on vacation to the
beach, to the Connecticut shore, for probably a week, two weeks every
summer. But hobbies were sort of a foreign notion, and my parents were
very focused on work and survival [END SIDE A]. I never learned to
cook, I never learned to sew. I was discouraged from any of that, and, as
there were for many people at that time, there were home ec. classes in
school, and I was a dismal failure. You started out, I think the first thing
that you were supposed to sew was an apron which tells you sort of where
things were, and of course the boys took shop and the girls took home ec.
And I somehow got very stuck on the waistband of my apron, I remember.
Everybody else had moved onto skirts and suits, and I was still trying to
get the waistband on my apron. So I didn’t have those hobbies and all.
My big interest, I read still a tremendous amount. When I had my reunion
with my friends, they talked about the fact that people used to worry about
me because I always had my nose in a book. And, in fact, I don’t know
how old I was, but I got in trouble once. I came home and my mother met
me at the door very upset because she had gotten a call from the police
because I had been at the library, the same library where they had gotten
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
me my library card when we came to America, and had taken out, again,
four or six books and I was reading on my way home and crossing streets
oblivious to traffic. And the police and a neighbor called my mother to
tell her that I was doing this and that I needed to be kind of disciplined for
it because I was endangering my life.
But what did you read? Did you read certain kinds of books? What do
you remember?
Well, what I remember, particularly when I was younger, was I loved fairy
tales and there was the brown book of fairy tales and the lavender book of
fairy tales and the blue book of fairy tales and Grimm’s and Scandinavian
fairy tales and Arabian fairy tales, and I loved all that. And as I got older.
I read fiction, lots and lots and lots of fiction and almost no non-fiction at
all. So I loved that, and I was, thank goodness, at the time of growing up
at a time of cultural upheaval, so I loved music. The Beatles had a very
profound effect on me when they came to the United States, and I loved
the Beatles and I loved the Rolling Stones and I got very very involved in
music. And like lots and lots of teenage girls of that age, I figured out
who my favorite Beatle was and why and that sort of thing. I was
interested in politics. I grew up in Massachusetts, you know, as you did,
when John Kennedy was running for President, and I adored him and
hated Richard Nixon with a passion. When I was a kid, I wanted a pet, I
wanted a dog. And my parents actually got me a dog, for a very brief
time, but decided the dog was too dirty an animal, so I ended up with a
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
parakeet who I did not like and I named the parakeet Richard Madhouse
Nixon — Dickybird, for short — because I really didn’t like the parakeet.
And so politics was a little bit of a hobby. And actually, as young as I
was, I got very very interested in what was going on with civil rights, and
I wanted to travel to the South and participate in sit-ins and civil
disobedience, but, as you can imagine, my parents frowned on that. But I
actually joined the local chapter of the NCAAP.
While you were in high school?
While I was in high school. And was very very interested in and very
committed to the civil rights struggle and the values and couldn’t figure
out how a seventeen-year-old white girl in Massachusetts could actually
do something, but I was very much taken with that.
When you think back to high school, are there any particular friends who
stand out who influenced you or teachers or other adults who maybe had
an impact on you.
There were definitely teachers. I mean, my history teacher whose name
escapes me, but who I have a picture of actually, I think was very
important to me because he give me a larger world view. I mean I really, I
think he was an exceptional teacher, and it was the first time that I sort of
understood anything about history, including relatively modem day
history, but, you know, the history of the United States and how it was
created, and that was very important to me. I had a French teacher who
had her doctorate and had been educated at the Sorbonne, and she
introduced me to French literature especially French theater, which I
loved. And then Mr. Black, it might have been Dr. Black. He was the
faculty advisor to the newspaper staff, and he was the one who encouraged
me actually to apply to schools other than — you know my parents wanted
me to attend — they wanted me to go to college, it was very important, but
they wanted me to go to college close to home and that would have either
been Springfield College or the University of Massachusetts. And it was
Mr. Black who encouraged me to apply to Radcliffe and to Pembroke and
who particularly was enamored to Pembroke because one of his children
had gone to Brown and who created an expectation among us. Looking
back, we were incredibly annoying, because we would, on the blackboard,
if you were on the newspaper, you were at the newspaper for homeroom.
And on the blackboard, we would list in the fall, in the winter and spring
of our senior year who was going where and to what schools and it was
only the Ivy’s and related schools that really mattered. So we were little
snobs. But he was the one who actually told me that there was a distinct
possibility that I could get into these schools and that I could get
scholarships because, of course, my parents were, my mother wasn’t
working at all because she had significant health issues. She worked for a
while in a hospital laundry, but she really couldn’t sustain it. And she
cleaned houses for a while, but she couldn’t really sustain that. And my
father was I am sure making minimum wage, and one of the reasons he
worked lots of hours was to get enough money. And they were very
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
careful with their money and very interested in saving money. But they
had no ability to send me to a private school. So those three teachers, I
think, were very important to me. And in terms of friends, I hung out with
this group of pretty verbal, fairly confident students who did very very
well academically. And they were some amazing people. I still remember
one boy in my class who also came from Europe, his family was Russian,
and in fact I had a girlfriend who also was Russian. And he was amazing.
He actually directed a movie that I helped with in very modest ways as his
senior writing project. I have always wondered what happened to him.
He was a great guy. So a lot of very bright, very accomplished students
most of whom came from families very very different from mine. They
lived very different lives. They were much more prosperous, and their
parents were professionals, middle class, that sort of thing.
When you think back to your high school days, do you remember, did you
have any ideas of what you wanted to study if you went beyond high
school or what work you might want to do? Do you remember any
pictures you had of your life, what you thought your life might be?
Well, I think my parents thought that I should become a doctor. But
science was not exactly my forte to tell the truth and nor did I think math
was. I remember being humiliated in my math class by a teacher who kept
asking me questions I couldn’t answer. So I loved being the arts editor, I
loved reviewing books and films. In theater, I didn’t even know there was
anything called live theater, to tell you the truth, as I had never seen it, so I
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
didn’t know about that, but I did do book and movie reviews, although I
didn’t see many movies when I was a kid, and I loved that. But that didn’t
seem to be like a profession at all. And I knew my parents wanted me,
were into the idea of medicine. But I don’t know, I think I wanted to do
something that would be to help other people, and I wanted to somehow
get close to the truth, whatever the truth was. Those were my goals, but I
also knew we didn’t have a lot of money and, as I said, my grades were
not bad at all, but they weren’t terrific. But then in my senior year I took
the SATs and got terrific scores on the SATs. I remember everybody
being very surprised at that because I wasn’t really perceived to be
somebody who would do that. And that opened up a lot of possibilities.
Well tell me about applying to college and where did you apply? Do you
remember? Where did you want to go? How did that all work, and then
where did you end up? That’s five questions.
It is a lot of questions. I applied to U Mass, I probably applied to
Swarthmore College. I applied to places that were — I didn’t want to go to
I think a women’s college, but I applied to places that were well regarded,
that had a women’s school in the context of a coed university. So there
was — Rutgers, I think, had a women’s college, Douglas, it was Douglas.
So I applied to that, I applied to Radcliffe, I applied to Pembroke. And I
went with another friend of mine in my class to Providence to actually
interview, which, you know, I don’t think that ever happens anymore.
And I got into, I think, pretty much every place that I applied to. And I
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
don’t know if it was Mr. Black or if it was the school counselor, but I was
discouraged from going to Radcliffe because, I think, people thought it
would be overwhelming for me, which, I think was probably right. I
think, you know, the size of it, the very different backgrounds that people
had, I think I could have gotten very very lost there. And I ended up
going to Brown. And again I don’t know if this is true, but my memory is
that I actually got into Brown when the woman who was number one in
our class and a cheerleader did not. And then I got in through their
students of disadvantaged backgrounds program. And the result of that
was it turned out to be really a perfect place for me to go to school in
many many ways. One of the reasons was that they just gave me extra
attention and extra help. And so they would, for example, they’d give me
money to go to New York, and I went to museums and live theater for the
first time ever. So it was a terrific environment, and it was also one where
I didn’t get lost in it, let’s put it that way.
And what kind of, what were your academic interests? What was your
major? What classes did you take?
I started off taking biology and things like that, what you need for a premed
degree and soon realized that that was a big big mistake. And then I
kind of actually pretty much took whatever interested me, I have to say,
and so I took a little more history, which continued to be really fascinating
to me, poli-sci was fascinating to me. But my first official major was
religious studies. Not that I was religious in any way, I really . . . as I
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
mentioned that my father was very very religious; my relatives were
Hasidic, and I didn’t like their version of religion at all. And I pretty
much was falling away from all that. But I thought that religion could
maybe get me to the center of things, to the heart of things. And I had
some wonderful teachers. One of them actually just died. But really
amazing teachers who were ahead of their time, I think, in thinking about
sort of the continuum of religions and sort of what was common to all
religious thoughts. So it was really very interesting. But it turned out, that
wasn’t for me either. So I took fabulous comparative literature classes,
and then I became a French literature major for a while, and I ended up
graduating with a major in English and American literature because it was
what I had enough credits in to graduate.
What kind of student were you? Were you a dutiful class attender? What
kind of college experience did you have?
I had a wonderful college experience, but I was not a dutiful class
attender. First of all, you know, I went to college at a very interesting
time because when I went, Brown and Pembroke were very much a
school, as one of the dorm heads once said to me, for fine young women
from fine old families. It had a little bit of the sort of clinging vine of the
Ivy League aspect to it, and it was, I think, probably viewed as a place
where people who couldn’t get into Harvard went. So there were a lot of
people who were children of well-known people, a lot of people came
through prep schools and that sort of thing, incredibly different. It was
also a party school. It had no sororities, which was one of the reasons I
went there. I had been in a sorority, and I had been president of my
sorority in high school and hated it and wanted to have nothing to do with
- But it did have fraternities and a very very robust social life which I
engaged in fully. When I first went, I remember coming to the school and
my parents didn’t drive me. My father wasn’t capable of driving that
distance, it would have been too frightening. I was wearing a suit and a
panty girdle and a hat and gloves. And, you know, four years later when I
graduated I owned several pairs of bell bottoms, work shirts and buffalo
hide sandals. So it was a time of cultural and political foment, and on top
of that, for me, was the fact that I came from this very very sheltered
home, and that it was very clear, from — the message from my parents was
that I was supposed to do well in school and I was supposed to be very
well behaved and not be in any way a problem for them. And I was in
high school, which meant that when I went got to college a whole new
world opened up for me. So I would say I was a . . . I attended classes
idiosyncratically. If I liked the course, I would go all the time, if I didn’t
like the course, I would rarely ever go. I was not consistent in any way. I
spent a lot of my time involved in political protests. It was certainly the
time for that, antiwar protests, also protest related to things like parietal
rules for women. And it was definitely a time when my sense of the
inequality of women’s lives came to the fore. So I spent a lot of time
doing that. On the other hand, I also graduated magna cum laude and I
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
was in Phi Beta Kappa, so I clearly had a very good grade point average
and did well academically. But I was known for my nickname, which was
the Midnight Wonder, because I just procrastinated terribly, and I think I
got pretty unpopular because I would just complain and moan and weep
and gnash my teeth and have anxiety about the fact that I had paper due
the very next day and, you know, I hadn’t even started it, and what was I
going to do. And then I would get the paper done and get a really good
grade on it, and people got very sick of and very unsympathetic to my
ways. But I was quite undisciplined, and a lot of my education was in
classes that were absolutely wonderful classes and wonderful teachers. It
was an extraordinary education. But a lot of my education also came
outside of that in the usual college bull sessions with people, and I read
what I wanted to read and often that had nothing to do with the reading for
the courses that I took. I read. I discovered modern literature in a way
that I hadn’t before, and I fell in love with Joseph Heller and Mikhail
Bulgakov and Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut and all those people
and just read deeply and widely. So, it was a wonderful experience, and I
came out looking as though I had worked really really hard, and I worked
harder, I think, than I pretended I worked, but I was not a diligent student
by any means.
You mentioned something about the protests that you participated in.
Your college years were . . .
1964 to 1968.
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
And can you, do some examples come to mind of how the changes in the
outside world impacted your life, when you were in college?
Absolutely. I mean the biggest thing, of course, was — well, there were so
many things. I mean part of it was YouthQuake and cultural, and it was
clothing styles and hairdos and music and drugs, and I was, you know,
fully there with all of that, without a doubt, and sexual liberation and,
again, fully there with all that. But also politically — I think the biggest
thing was the Vietnam War and protests against the war. And all the
things that were happening nationally were happening at Brown, so the
mobilization, the mock funerals, the demonstrations, burning of draft
cards, teach-ins, all of that was going on, and I was very much, not a
leader in any of that, but very much a participant in all that and read
widely and that sort of thing. And, you know, more discussions, and you
know heroes and villains. Senator Moss was a hero, Lyndon Johnson was
the villain, the world very black and white. And I would go, I think, we
probably had demonstrations weekly. I walked out of my college
graduation in protest because they were giving an honorary degree to Bob
Hope, who was viewed as very much supporting the military and the war,
and to the father of then Senator John Chafee who was quite famous on
the Brown campus because he had strenuously objected, I think he had
become physically involved in trying to stop an anti-ROTC protest that
was going on at the school. It was those times. So, that very much was an
enormous part of our lives. And we had teachers who understood that that
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
was really part of, it was part of their own school to help us gain some
knowledge in the times that we were living in. So that was a big big part
of my life as it was so many other peoples. And then the other thing was I
discovered movies and theater. I had many lives in that sense. I mean it
was definitely the sort of social dancing to James Brown and The Rolling
Stones and enjoying spring weekend, and all that sort of thing, but also I
did theater reviews and movie reviews and I just remember that Brown
has now and had then an amazing theater department and I can still
remember seeing my first live play which was at Brown. It was an
Edward Albee play and it was incredible. And just being blown away by
that — that was another major that I thought about, but I lack the talent
really to participate in it. But I still hung out at the outskirts of the theatre
crowd, and I would go to every movie I can imagine. And we would each
come out just high as a kite from these movies, from watching Bonnie and
Clyde which just felt like a completely different kind of movie or Ingmar
Bergman movies which were so unbelievable or, you know, it was very
sort of, the movies that were fringe, Flaming Creatures. Did you ever see
Flaming Creatures?
No, I don’t know that one.
Oh my God, a very bizarre movie, very out there in many many respects.
And music and rock and roll, as it was for so many of the people, was so
important. I remember seeing Janis Joplin perform and the Animals and
following The Rolling Stones around to several concerts in the New
England area because I was so taken with them. So it was an amazing
time. It was an amazing time, and the other part of it for me was the
continuing interest in civil rights and, of course, that was going on and that
was so important, as well. I ended up my junior year of college, I did a
summer VISTA program, and I was assigned, they asked me what I
wanted to do, and I expressed my interest in working on civil rights issues.
And I was assigned to work with an organization called Operation
Exodus. That was in Roxbury, the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.
And what Operation Exodus did was it took kids out of the inner city
schools and voluntarily sent them to schools in some of the wealthier
suburbs like Newton. And so I worked with them programmatically and I
also volunteered to be a playground counselor for kids in the Roxbury-
Dorchester neighborhood where I lived. One of the things about VISTA
was you have to live in the neighborhood where you worked, but my main
task was to research and document and hopefully to end de facto
segregation on the bus and in schools. This was 1967; it was right after all
the Watts and riots and all those issues. And, of course, in Boston, school
desegregation was the issue, and so I actually went and met with and
interviewed people like Louise Day Hicks and various other people about
the situation. I went to the schools in Roxbury and Dorchester, and as
Jonathan Kozol, who was writing his book then, documented, they were
abysmal. And I prepared my report. And I handed it over, and nothing
happened. And I was outraged. And I realized that just being right didn’t
Ms. Syracuse:
Ms. Lardent:
matter, nothing was going to change. Operation Exodus was on Blue Hill
Avenue in Dorchester, in the area it was known as the Strip, with lots and
lots of community groups, and one of the groups that had its offices
nearby was CORE. And the NAACP also had an office. And the folks at
CORE and NAACP were in the middle of a developing lawsuit that
became the Boston desegregation case. They were among the many
people that I interviewed and I did volunteer work for them. Before that
summer, what I’d decided that I wanted to do was to go to graduate
school, get my doctorate, go to New York, find a job teaching in a college,
and hopefully figure out a way to become a movie and theater reviewer.
That was my vision for what I was going to do. When I came back to
school after that summer, I had decided that I was going become a lawyer
because, as near as I could tell, the only people who had a capacity to
make things change were lawyers. I had not known any lawyers growing
up obviously. These were the first lawyers I was exposed to, and I
realized how much power they had to do right. So I went back for my
senior year, and I applied to law schools to become a civil rights lawyer.
Did you have, at that same time, did you have any sense of any issues
affecting you as a student because of your gender.
Oh absolutely. As I mentioned, I think, there were issues that were
coming up and it came up interestingly around — you know it was
interesting because being at Pembroke, Pembroke had its own deans and
vice-deans and that sort of thing, and they were very strong, very smart,
very capable women. So there were some role models there that were
quite interesting. And, in fact, the generally accepted wisdom at the
school was that Pembrokers were much brighter than men at Brown. We
thought that, they thought that. But despite that, we were, in many ways,
viewed as needing protection in lots of ways. And, you know, when I
look back at it now, I think that some of the sort of fundamentalism that
you see now toward women and why women need to wear burkas and
things like that. It’s a much more moderated version of that. So of course
we had parietal rules. The men didn’t have parietal rules. We were
objects of temptation, I guess, and the idea was that the way you
controlled it was to control us. So they could come back any old time and
we had to be back at 11:30. Now those parietal rules kept getting watered
down and expanded and expanded until they were really pretty
meaningless. But still why us? And you couldn’t have men in your room
except certain times of the day and under certain rules and that sort of
thing and we all started to really resent that and to question that.
Tape 2
Ms. Syracuse: So your burning issue when you ran for Student Government . .
Ms. Lardent: A winning issue, I might add was coed dining Really. What happened was all
of our classes for Pembroke were on the Brown campus which was several
blocks away, and you know Providence, Rhode Island, the weather got pretty
bad, but we had to eat at Pembroke. We were not allowed to eat at the Brown
Refectory, affectionately known as The Rat, and so I ran for Student
Government on the coed dining ticket, and just swept right into office. Because
I was a movie reviewer. I used a poster from the movie “Tom Jones,” where
Tom and this woman, they’re eating and she takes a bite of a turkey leg and then
he takes a bigger bite, very sexual. I used that as my campaign poster. So, uh
coed dorms, we wanted coed dorms and, of course, that was unthinkable at the
time. By my junior year, I think, the women began to realize that we were in
many respects second-class citizens, and so much less so, I think, than women
on other campuses. We had our newspaper, for example, we had our own
yearbook, so that the fact was that the women were not necessarily very much in
positions of leadership and authority, in Brown institutions. We had our own
Student Government; didn’t matter quite as much. But we began to realize that
we really were being held to different standards and that we were being
restricted in activities. And so we actually had a big protest march which was
very Martin Luther like. We had a list of demands, and we went up and we put
them on the door of the Dean’s house. But interestingly enough, I still
remember this, and resenting it at the time. There was a guy, who was a year
-30-
ahead of us at Brown, and he kind of helped us orchestrate the protest. And I
remember thinking why do we need a guy to tell us to do this, so it was
fascinating, I mean, there were certainly external things going on. I mean Ms.
magazine was beginning to appear, and women were starting to talk about this
issue in New York. And I’m sure that had some impact, but it was just, in our
own world, we felt it and we couldn’t understand why if we were intellectual
equals and even the physical equals, I mean, Pembroke was interesting because
we had a women’s hockey team, and, you know, it was a school in which
women really were equal except that we weren’t.
Ms. Syracuse: So, separate but equal?
Ms. Lardent: It was separate but equal, but every time we kind of had to deal with men — I
remember even the protest against the war, men were the leaders and women
were sort of the facilitators. We were the secretaries, we took notes, we made
sure that we had everything we needed for the meetings, but we were never
people who spoke. And in a way, you could rationalize that by saying well it
was men who had been drafted and we weren’t. But there was just something
wrong with it all, and I still remember when I came back and I decided I was
going to take my LSATs and apply to law school and there were three women
who took the LSATs. There were more women from my class who went to law
school afterwards, but that year there were three women who took the LSATs,
and when we came in we were booed, because the men thought that we were
going to ruin the curve, we were going to skew it. And it was very clear that we
really, that our strength and our capacities were threatening to men and to the
school and that there were all kinds of preconceptions that didn’t apply to us at
all, which was frustrating. But it was kind of exciting to see, you know, how
you could just knock those things down. So I’d say my, and I was definitely one
of those people who, I had wonderful friends, women friends at school, but my
rep was I don’t really have that many women friends, most of my friends were
men. And I think that underlying that was that those are the people who are
more interesting, more intellectually adventuresome. And something happened,
I think in my junior and senior years when I began to realize how important
other women were to me. And how much we had to share. And it was a major
shift, definitely.
Ms. Syracuse: Well, tell me a little bit about applying to law school. How did you decide
where to apply and I know you wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, but what was
your idea about what law school would be like?
Ms. Lardent: I really, again, I had absolutely no idea. I mean the only lawyers I knew where
these NAACP and CORE people. I didn’t really know anything about schools.
Pembroke didn’t have anybody who could really counsel me on that at all. And
so, I’m not even sure how it was that I knew where to apply, but what happened
was my grades, as I say, were good. I did very well in my LSATs. And it was
1967,, and I was not somebody who was going to be drafted. So, somehow, I
don’t know if I talked to friends, I don’t know if I talked to men, I don’t know
how I knew this, but I knew that I was in very good shape, and so I applied to all
the top schools. So I applied to Yale, I applied to Harvard, I applied to NYU,
Columbia, Chicago. I don’t think I applied to Stanford, although I wanted to,
because my parents were extremely unhappy about the idea of my going all the
way to California. But I applied to those schools, and I got in everywhere. And
I had sort of knocked Columbia off my list because I was actually sort of seeing
somebody who went to Columbia, who was an undergrad at Columbia. And I
went to see him and visited the law school while I was there, and the class that I
saw, I have a feeling it might have been Judge Rifkin, I’m not sure, but it was
somebody who is a judge who was teaching who made people stand up to
answer. And I was at the height of my political radicalism, and I didn’t stand up
for anybody. So, that did not look appealing to me. And then Yale, I went and
interviewed at Yale, and in retrospect, I’d probably have been happiest at it, I
think. But there were very few women there. There were nine, ten, eleven
women in every class. The classes were small, but there were very few women,
and there were rules about when women could live off campus, for law school.
And that didn’t seem right to me. So, I finally narrowed it down to Harvard or
Chicago. Chicago was further away, which had great appeal for me, further
away from my parents. I really wanted to kind of be out on my own. And they
gave me a $100.00 a year more than Harvard, which was at the time all the
money in the world. Because again, I had, as a VISTA volunteer, I had earned
$40 a week and had to pay, of course, my rent and other expenses out of that.
My parents had no money, I had no money, and so I needed quite a bit of
financial aid, and that just was a tipping point for me. So, I decided that I would
go to Chicago. Chicago, I thought, was a pretty liberal school, you know I
didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know anything about the law school. I
knew nothing about the Chicago School of Economics. I just had no idea.
Because, again, I had no counseling. But that was where I decided I was going
to go. In the spirit of the times, I was thinking of myself as a free spirit, and
while my lifestyle wasn’t really counter-culture, it was in some ways. I went
barefoot, and I had to borrow a dress for my senior year photo, because I didn’t
own one, and ommed a lot. So there was a part of me that really resented going
to law school. It felt like a little bit like prison to me. I’d have to be very proper
and wear suits and that sort of thing, but living a life in the arts just seemed, it
seemed incredibly self-indulgent, given everything that was going on in the
world.
Ms. Syracuse: How did you spend the summer between college and law school?
Ms. Lardent: Well, because I did think of myself as kind of going into this very straight
world, I decided that this was my last summer of freedom. So a very good
friend of mine from high school, probably one of the very few people from high
school that I stayed in touch with, June Freeman, and I decided that we were
going to spend the summer in Europe. We got inexpensive tickets from
Icelandic Air, and we had our Europe on five dollars a day book. Part of the
decision actually, just stepping back, I would have to say that one of the reasons
why we made that decision of other than sort of wanting to have our freedom
was, of course, everything that happened in the spring and summer of ’68. First,
the assassination of Martin Luther King, which was just almost unthinkable. It
was only thinkable because we had been through John F. Kennedy’s
assassination. And that was such a loss of innocence. I think the closest
experience, similar experience for younger people would have to be 9/11. That
sense that the world as you know it was somehow a sham and that there are all
these horrible things going on that you weren’t aware of And that the capacity
for evil is so close to the surface and so prevalent. I was actually at home, I
think on a school break and hearing about his assassination, and just thinking
that the country was going to go mad, that the center just literally wouldn’t hold,
that there would be an uprising of incredible proportions. And then, Bobby
Kennedy’s assassination. And I think part of the reason that June and I did this
was we had started it sort of more in that spirit of the last kind of fling, if you
will, before adulthood. But I think it evolved into a sense that we weren’t sure
we wanted to live in this country anymore. And we wanted to be away from it.
We really did. We wanted to be away from the hatred and the anger and the
divisions and everything that seemed to be going so terribly wrong. And so we
actually had a very schizophrenic summer, part of it spent hanging out with cute
French boys, drinking wine, or sleeping on the beach on the Riviera because that
was all we can afford. And part of it spent in Maoist student centers talking
about politics and trying to explain in French what was happening in the United
States. And what was going to happen next. Was there just going to be this
conflagration, and will the revolution come. We thought that was actually what
was going to happen. We really thought the people would rise up. And the
pressures of racial hatred and this horrible and divisive and unfair war were
going to lead people to just overturn the government. And so did the students in
the Maoist centers. And, of course, we flew into Paris, and the first thing we
heard from everybody was you can’t stay in Paris, because the student uprisings
were going on and the police were arresting anybody of a certain age. So, we
ended up — we didn’t exactly have a big plan for where we were going, so we
ended up actually hitchhiking through the Loire Valley and then down to the
Riviera and had a number of, amazing little experiences there. And then, and I
think this was sort of the final moment in creating my feminist consciousness,
we were hitchhiking through the low Alps. And we had learned never get into a
car with two men. You would think that people would know that, but we were
young and foolish and we didn’t. But we learned that lesson soon enough, and
so we would only take rides from couples or from single men. And we got in a
car with this man and June didn’t speak French. I spoke French with a terrible
accent. I was quite fluent. And we got into the car with him, and we were
driving along in a very lonely stretch of highway and he now said that he
wanted to sleep with us. And I explained that we didn’t want to do that. And he
was upset, and he was going to make us do that and stopped the car and grabbed
- And we ended up running away from him, leaving everything we had in the
car. And then going through would have been funny if it wasn’t so frightening,
this experience of dealing with small town French gendarmerie and trying to
explain what was happening, and their version of somewhat investigating the
crime and ending up in Marseille without passports, toothbrushes, changes of
clothes, money, anything. We ended up finally coming back to the U.S. early
because we didn’t have enough money to really take care of ourselves in
Europe. And certainly we were not going to be doing hitchhiking and sleeping
on beaches anymore, because we had learned our lesson. So I came back and
went to stay with friends of mine in Providence. And they tell me that routinely,
when I started talking, I would start talking about this attempted rape. And
again, I think it’s the shift in thinking. I think that my assumption, before this
happened, was that being raped would be awful, but it wouldn’t be the end of
the world. I mean, you know, I wasn’t a virgin. What did it matter? And it
wasn’t until I came very, very close that I realized that this wasn’t a sexual act at
all, it was an act of rage and aggression. And how powerless I felt, and how
differently the police treated the crime. That was, I think, the final lesson that
turned me into a very strong feminist.
Tape 3
This is Erica Knievel interviewing Esther Lardent on December 16, 2010. We’re at the Pro
Bono Institute, and the purpose of this recording is to record Esther’s oral history for the Women
Trailblazers Project. This is tape number three in that recording. Now Esther, when the last
session ended, you were discussing your trip to Europe with June prior to law school. Can you
describe what happened and how you felt when you were returning to the U.S.?
Ms. Lardent: Absolutely. It was a fascinating time of course to be in Europe because it
was the summer of 1968, and everywhere we went there were
demonstrations, strikes, and riots — not just workers, but also students. So,
very much that same sense, I think, of a time of great turmoil and upheaval
and a very split society where people were very much at odds with each
other, and with some terrible things having happened, obviously violence
and assassinations and everything, but also sort of a sense of promise —
-37-
very much a sense that there was a new generation that wasn’t going to do
things the same way. So, then coming back to the United States, having
been very happy to leave after the King assassination and the Kennedy
assassination and just this sense of the center not holding, when I came
back, I stayed with friends in Providence, Rhode Island — my friends who
were a year behind me at Brown, and just really didn’t do much of
anything, you know, picked up a little work here and there, waitressed,
that sort of thing, but honestly didn’t do much of anything. And of course
we were all fascinated by, and glued to the T.V. watching the 1968
Democratic Convention, and watching what was going on in the streets of
Chicago and the demonstrators — the way that Mayor Daley really
suppressed any efforts to bring different views, and the fact that the — and
you know, I feel badly actually about the way that I viewed him, but the
fact that Hubert Humphrey, who we viewed as sort of part of the old, tired
party, and who turned out to have in fact, if I had researched it, some real
bona fides in terms of civil rights and progressive politics, but we didn’t
view him as, I didn’t view him as an opponent, but just somebody who
really felt like someone from the past, as opposed to somebody who could
lead us into the future. Watching the demonstrators in the streets and
being clubbed and everything else in the city that I was about to go to, was
quite — it made me think again about whether — really, was this what I
wanted to do. Did I want to go to law school? I mean it seemed as though
that was so far removed from what was going on in the streets, and had so
much less immediacy and then I was going to Richard Daley’s city, so it
raised some issues for me, but I decided that I was going to go. I had
never been further west than New Hampshire before I went. So, I went
there and got to the building that the university owned, and what they had
done which was really interesting was, the building was on 60th Street, and
at the time in Chicago, I don’t know if this is still true, then 60th Street was
sort of the — it was kind of the northern most edge of a very unsafe
community. Chicago is very — there was an amazing amount of racial
segregation and tension in the city, and the law school was on 60th Street
as was the School of Social Work — I think it’s SSA. And what they did
was they put — I had been assigned a roommate from the social work
school and put in an apartment that looked out on the Midway, which was
where the — the place where it turned out a lot of the gangs in the area
would come and negotiate and sometimes fight with each other. The
building was all women, interestingly and it was a pretty dangerous place
to be. We all had experiences with getting held up when we went to do
laundry in the basement or having our apartment broken into and that sort
of thing, but it was only two blocks from the law school, which was great.
So I went to law school, you know, went to my first day of law school and
what was really striking was there were 25 women in a fairly small class.
I think the class probably was 140 people. It was the largest number of
women to have ever come to Chicago and of course it was because of the
Vietnam War and so it was really quite striking. I’m not sure the law
school knew quite what to do with us and not only were there a lot of
women, but obviously there were a lot of women who had had kind of a
feminist awakening as well. And the school definitely wasn’t ready for
that, nor was it ready for people who were very progressive in their
politics. I hadn’t gotten a lot of counseling about what law school to go to
and I think I made the assumption that Chicago was, in fact, a very liberal
school and while it certainly had a lot of old New Deal folks there, it was
also the time when a number of people, Judge Posner, most notably, were
coming to law school who were from the law and economics school.
What we found was there were all these interesting regulations so, for
example, women couldn’t wear pants — had to wear skirts. I don’t know if
that was a written or an unwritten rule but women had to wear skirts. By
the time you hit about November or December in Chicago, there was no
way that you were wearing skirts. So that was one of the rules and the — I
still remember that the only woman, I believe at the time, on the faculty,
was Soia Mentschikoff. And Soia Mentschikoff had with her husband,
Karl Llewellyn, who by then was gone but they had basically been the
authors of the Uniform Commercial Code and Soia was, you know,
obviously brilliant, enormously well respected and we used to joke that as
a woman you could be on faculty at Chicago if you had written some
major piece of legislation.
Ms. Knievel: Is it that simple?
Ms. Lardent: Yeah, exactly. And she was very soft spoken, so you had to lean in to
listen to her, but very powerful. But I remember that we, because we felt
like we were in a guy’s locker room and there was no place for her. There
were not even enough bathrooms for us and of course we couldn’t stay in
the student housing because that was all men and it was attached to law
school. So we formed a Law Women’s Caucus, just as a support network.
And I still remember Soia, Soia I think asked to speak to the women in our
class and she gave what was in many ways a lovely speech about how
wonderful it was to see more women at the Law School, how wonderful it
was that more women were coming into the law. But then she said a
couple of things that I think were very . . . upsetting. She talked about the
fact that we needed to dress modestly, of course this was the time of
miniskirts, and then she said that one of the things that was really
important was that we had to be very careful in the way that we portrayed
ourselves. And she said “so for example, if you’re doing moot court and
you get upset, you really shouldn’t cry.” And I thought, well why would I
cry? I mean, why would we be more prone to crying? And the other thing
she said was “and just remember, always remember that you’re law
students first and women second.” And that did not go over well with our
crew. Then we went into our classes and what we found was that the
professors, most of them, were just not prepared to deal with women and
particularly a large number of women. There was one professor that just
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
wouldn’t call on women at all. Just kind of pretended that they didn’t
exist in the slightest, and then .
Would women raise their hands?
I don’t remember if we did. I mean it was — this was definitely at the
height of Socratic method teaching, too. It was brutal. My first class in
law school, which was, it was an introduction to the legal profession, it
was Geoffrey Hazard, and I remember one man — I didn’t really expect
that they’d just start right in, that didn’t happen so much in the world of
liberal arts, and so I remember one guy was crying. What I tried to do was
sit behind the tallest guy I could find in the class and hope that I would
never get picked out in the chart, you know. I don’t remember if women
did raise their hands, but women just didn’t get called on. The other side
of the coin was, Norval Morris, what he liked to do in his class was he
would pick the youngest, most innocent looking woman in the class and
he would ask her to state the facts in a case called Stephenson v. State.
And Stephenson v. State involved the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan
in, I think in Indiana, who kidnapped a woman who was a kindergarten
teacher, took her to Chicago, raped her and ultimately she died from being
abused sexually and physically. We’d heard about this. So we all actually
vied to be the youngest looking, I mean people wore pigtails. We were
pretty in your face and we certainly tried to be pretty in your face. We
vied for who would be the most innocent person and that person presented
the facts in the case but did it with, you know, an obscenity here and a
kind of colloquial term for a body part there, and I think he was really
quite appalled by the whole thing. But you really did have this sense that,
you know, we were just out of place there and there were rules, we didn’t
know the rules, they were like secret meetings, we didn’t have them, so we
kind of created our own group. It was a very contentious three years at the
law school, for a lot of reasons, not just around issues of gender but, you
know, the Vietnam War was continuing and it was expanding into
Cambodia and there was the violence on campus at Kent State and Orange
State and other places and there were demonstrations about a politically
active faculty member, not at the law school, but at the college itself who
had been denied tenure and so the students were — you know there was a
lot of marching, there was a lot of demonstrating and students were being
summarily dismissed from the school and so we were demonstrating and
helping them, you know asking that they be given fair hearings and
demonstrating and some people were working on helping the Chicago 9
with their defense as that case started preparing for trial and one of the
things that we did was we asked — after Orangeburg State and Kent State —
for teach-ins. We asked for time for that and the faculty and the
administration were very, very unsupportive of that and so that resulted in
more friction and discussions. Actually for me it was great. It kept me
engaged enough in the school because I wasn’t necessarily loving my
teachers and my courses. It’s a school that’s very highly rated and we did,
which was amazing because it’s not a very large school — we did actually
have, you know, very senior respected people, you know the Editor-in-
Chief of the Supreme Court Review and person who wrote the book on
Admin law and that sort of thing —teaching first-year classes, which was
pretty fabulous. But it just felt out of sync and we definitely, I think many
of the women in the class felt that we were being tolerated but not
welcomed.
Then what started happening was that women who were being interviewed
got all kinds of interesting responses from the employer interviewers.
Again they weren’t particularly used to having all these women as well.
So people were told things like, you have two strikes against you, you’re
not on Law Review and you’re a woman. Or we don’t hire women, we
find their high squeaky voices really distracting, or you know, we need
you to, you know, go in, work really hard, be committed for the long term.
This is when people in firms went in and then literally died with their
boots on at the same job, you know, forty some years later. And you’re
going to get married and have kids and so, you know, why would we want
to invest in you. And what we did was we, again the Law Women’s
Caucus, complained to the law school about that. What they did was they
set up a process to investigate our complaints and the process was led by
Owen Fiss, who taught at the law school. He then, he left, I think he went
to Yale, I think after a couple of years at the law school. He had been a
major figure in the Justice Department in civil rights, obviously at an
amazing time in civil rights and he, in fact, had a big picture in his office
that I loved. It was Bull Connor’s troops with hoses, you know, trying to
push back civil rights demonstrators. And civil rights was why I went to
law school, of course in the first place so I was very moved by that. He
led the process and the process that the law school came up with was that
they wrote a letter to the firms, a number of firms, that were alleged to
have made these statements, they didn’t identify particular students, which
I think was right, and they would say “you know, it was alleged that da,
da, da, this obviously creates an, you know, an unwelcoming environment,
etcetera, etcetera, and did this occur?” And then the law firms would
write back and say “why no, it didn’t.” And that would be the end of the
process. We didn’t think that was a really great process. Eventually what
happened was that a number of people, the lead plaintiff in the case was a
woman in my class named Karen Kaplowitz, and a number of people
came together, filed a complaint with the EEOC alleging that under Title
VII (I thought this was really very creative), the law school was, in effect,
acting as an employment agency that allowed employers that
discriminated against women and people of color. We had, I think two or
three students of color in our class, a very, very small number. But they, if
we felt isolated, they felt doubly isolated. And we actually got a Show
Cause ruling from EEOC and then we went to federal court and we lost in
federal court because the law school wasn’t getting any direct financial
benefit and wasn’t actually an employment agency. But we made a lot of
people very, very tense, as you can imagine at the law school. It was not a
happy place for me at all.
Ms. Knievel: Were there any professors that were supportive of the Women’s Caucus?
Ms. Lardent: Yes.
Ms. Knievel: Or of you particularly?
Ms. Lardent: Well, I mean, you know, again Soia Mentschikoff was of a different
generation but she certainly was a strong woman. And not so much in
terms of supporting women as much as someone that we felt really taught
a different way and had a different approach to the law. There was one
professor who taught Contracts and Admiralty, Grant Gilmore, he was an
older man and we loved him and actually, we did a skit at the end of our, I
can’t remember if it was our first year or second year, and it was called All
Law Professors Should Be Shot. It just gives you some flavor for what the
environment was like. And we had people who, in my class, who imitated
various law professors, many of whom are now senior partners at large
firms in Chicago and New York, and they would plead their case and then
we would shoot them. And then at the end somebody said “but wait,
where’s Grant Gilmore” and then there was a blackout, that was the end.
So he was the only one that we saved. So other people, again guys in my
class clearly developed terrific relationships but we were just not happy
campers. Oh and the other thing that I should say that was also an issue
for us was, as I mentioned, you know, the law school was on 60th S treet so
it was facing Woodlawn which was a very poor community, it was where
Jesse Jackson was actually starting his neighborhood organization that
then grew into the Rainbow Coalition. So you had this very white, very
wealthy, very privileged, very elite school and then you had this
neighborhood that was completely falling apart and a number of us
volunteered with TWO, the Woodlawn Organization, and we mentored
kids and did things like that. Behind the law school there was a big lawn
and we would sit there and play volleyball and hang out. And we just
thought the neighborhood kids should be able to come because they didn’t
have any place. They had burnt out buildings and dangerous alleys. That
was also not a popular thing at the law school either. So we got into
battles about that as well. I think it’s fair to say that intellectually I had
loved Brown and I didn’t love my law school classes. I took a seminar
with Ellen Fist on discrimination and I didn’t love that. I just, you know, I
felt very alienated from the place and I think that’s true of, probably a few
of my classmates. But there were some people who loved it and really felt
that it was intellectually exciting and stimulating. One of my classmates
went on to be the Dean of the Law School, Geoff Stone, and then went on
to be the Provost at Chicago and continues to be a very progressive,
fabulous thinker in the law. I’ve only been to one law school reunion and
I was one of I think two women from my class there, which was pretty
telling. It was a tough time. We were right at the cutting edge and nobody
had figured this out. We hadn’t figured it out, nobody else had figured it
out.
So the other thing with respect to law school or two things, I think that
made it a lot more palatable for me included the fact that there were
wonderful people and I loved many of the men and women in my class,
are friends to this day and just wonderful people. There were two other
things that really made it palatable. The first was that I discovered legal
aid and did a lot of work with the Mandel legal aid clinic and that felt right
and meaningful and important and helpful for me. I wasn’t interested in
doing individual legal aid because I thought that was a little bit “band-aid
on the gaping wound” but I loved the idea of kind of making people’s
lives better and helping powerless people so that was really important.
The other thing was that when I was coming back to law school after the
first semester break, I ended up sharing a cab with a med student and then
we ended up getting married after my first year and I was very lucky that
my then husband was very supportive and that I had a life outside of law
school and there was so much that pushes you not to have a life outside of
law school. He was really very supportive of my staying in law school so
that when I would threaten to quit, which I did about every other day, he
would say, you get through it and then you get to be a lawyer and you will
be fine. That was, that was really wonderful and it really helped.
Although between his being in med school and my being in law school we
didn’t see each other that much but it, it still was, was a really terrific
thing. Just to give you another example of sort of how fraught the
experience was after we had filed the complaint, what we then did was
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
that the next year, which I think was our 3″ 1 year, when the law firms came
to interview, many, many, many of the students who were scheduled to
interview with them were women. Including people like me who were
never going to go to a firm and we interviewed them and we asked them
about their policies . . about parental leave; well then it was maternity
leave, but parental leave. We asked them about whether there were
women there who were partners. What practice areas women worked in.
We drove them insane. Some of these people were sweating bullets
(laughter) by the end of the experience. And so we messed up everybody
else’s placement stuff which . . . I’m sure that some of the people were a
little hostile about, but we, we made our point, which was great. Honestly,
I really did think of it as three years that I needed to get through. Which
makes me sad. I look at, you know, friends of mine who went to law
school and really enjoyed it and I, and it might have been the time, it
might have been law school, might have been where I was at. But it was
not a great experience for me. It was not certainly intellectually a great
experience.
When you threatened to quit, was there something else you thought about
doing? Or did you always want to be a lawyer and you just, were hating
the experience?
There were sort of two separate things and they were very different. One
was the idea of just becoming more politically active in a much more sort
of front line way. Cambodia was happening. The war was continuing and
everything else and . . . But the other was what I had really wanted to do
until I had my experience in working as a VISTA, I wanted to write. I
wanted to be a theater and movie critic. I wanted to do creative writing
and not only did I miss that in law school but . . . I think it really destroyed
my capacity to be that kind of creative writer. I became a drier writer — an
outline 1, ABC person. And you don’t put juice into a brief most of the
time, although it makes for some interesting briefs and opinions that have
had some, some, fascinating, you know, literary allusions. But I had taken
this course and I sort of accepted that, that course, and move forward. So
then I started to think about what I wanted to do and the summer after my
first year, I didn’t work at all. I actually just hung out with my husband
and got married and didn’t work which was great.
Ms. Knievel: Did you stay in Chicago or did you go home?
Ms. Lardent: What happened was that my husband’s father had died a number of years
before and then his mother died in his first year of med school. So we
ended up . . . his parents lived in Maryland. We ended up going to
Maryland. We got married in Springfield in late July and then we drove
down to Maryland to fix up his parents’ house and sell it and hang out and
do nothing. And so then I thought about what I was going to do my
second year. Originally, what I was going to do was come to D.C. and be
a Nader’s Raider. I would have met a lot of people that I now know who
actually were Nader’s Raiders at that time. Then what happened was
somebody at the school said “you know there’s this really interesting thing
that the HEW Office of Civil Rights is doing.” They’re the ones who look
at universities and hospitals and other organizations that get federal money
and investigate complaints of discrimination, and it’s always been racial
but they’re now starting to look at discrimination against women. It just
seems like something you might really like. So that’s what I did after my
second year. I really enjoyed it. It was looking at and investigating
complaints and also they were beginning to write the regulations for the
executive order that expanded discrimination and expanded the
jurisdiction to include women and so I helped to work on those regs. It
was very committed group of people. Originally, what I thought I wanted
to do was to try to get a job with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or the
Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, which had an office in Mississippi
and go there and work on civil rights issues. My husband, who was at
Pritzker said, “you really want me to transfer from Pritzker to Ole Miss
Med school?” Compromise is everything in a relationship. So I tried to
figure out what I was going to do in Chicago and I thought, this will work.
This is good. So, I graduated and went to work for the federal government
which is something I never thought I would do . . . I was there for only a
short period. The greatest thing I did . . . unfortunately was also the
reason that I left, that was a complaint that had been filed by women at the
University of Michigan saying that they were being discriminated against
because of their gender. So we went and we did an on-site review at the
University of Michigan. The fact that all of this was so new meant that
. people didn’t couch anything in the files in subtle ways. We found the
most amazing things in there. For example, there was one comment in a
file about a very distinguished woman . . . and her husband had accepted
an appointment at Michigan, and in the file it said “and we’re very lucky
because she’s following her husband, so we can pay her a lot less than
we’d have to if she were a man.”
Ms. Knievel: So did the case just involve faculty or did it involve students as well?
Ms. Lardent: It was faculty. The complaint was faculty, and we sat in a room for weeks
at a time and just went through files and that sort of thing, and we found
that there had been discrimination and under the Executive Order — I think
it’s 11246 as Amended by 11375 — what you can do is you can
recommend that federal monies be terminated and at Michigan, even then,
it was millions of dollars . . . millions of dollars. So you had this amazing
power. I mean there was this fabulous remedy, except of course, when we
went to go ahead and try to do this, and by this time, you know, I mean, it
was Richard Nixon’s administration that was in. Although, I will say the
head of the Office of Civil Rights was a guy named Stanley Pottinger who
was really quite progressive. I think he might have been a Republican —
was quite progressive, and supportive about this, and then a guy named
Marty Barenblat, but they really cared. But as you can imagine, what
happened was this complaint winded its way through what was then HEW
— we were overturned. So, it was like having an atom bomb, but you
couldn’t drop it, and at that point, I decided that I need to get out.
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
Were you shocked by what you were finding in the files?
I was appalled. I don’t think any of us sort of realized how intense this
was, how accepted it was, how wide-spread it was. Women were clearly
not taken seriously. They were not viewed as peers. What we would do is
literally go through people’s credentials, and the credentials would be
identical to a man, and they would be seen as second rate . . . or, innately
presenting problems and obstacles, and that sort of thing. It was exciting
because this had never been done before. We literally created the model
for how the review went. Women were there in greater numbers, and
women were applying in greater numbers, and it was just a different kind
of discrimination, but it had an intensity to it that was very strong. When I
thought about doing civil rights work, I had always thought about it in
terms of race, we have such a horrible history that is pernicious and
lingering, to this very day obviously, racism in this country, but there was
kind of viciousness about this that was really disturbing. It felt so
wonderful to be able to do something, and then so distressing to realize
that, you know, we were always going to get blocked politically. I’ve
never been a fan of big institutions. I went to fairly small schools in part
because of that, but this convinced me that, one, that I was not somebody
who worked well totally inside the system, I would get too frustrated with
- And also that, you know, large institutions like the government were
. . . they could do good, but they could also do some pretty bad things. I
just felt like I really needed to leave. I was very unhappy.
Ms. Knievel: What was happening at home at the time with your parents? Were they
supportive of your decision to be at HEW?
Ms. Lardent: You know my parents, really didn’t understand any of this. They didn’t
understand it. They thought it was great that I was a lawyer. They
thought it was great that I had a job. They didn’t really understand. They
were concerned that I was leaving, you know, fairly soon after — it was
like a year and a half I think that I stayed there. So, they worried about
that because I looked like I was unreliable and just jumping around and
that sort of thing, but they really didn’t understand. My husband, again,
was very supportive of whatever I wanted to do even though, at this point,
he was finishing up his last year in med school, so my income was the
only income we had. He was great. He was just fine with whatever I
wanted to do.
Ms. Knievel: What was his reaction to this case?
Ms. Lardent: He wasn’t surprised actually. I mean I think if anything, the
discrimination against women in med school was so much greater. It
really was like a hell week experience for women. People would do things
to try to shock them, you know, with cadavers or sexual stuff. It was
pretty brutal, and there were not that many women. It’s amazing when
you look at the number of women in law school and med school now
compared to then, you know, it was so different . . just incredibly
different. So I started to try to figure out what to do. At the same time,
my husband was being matched for his residency, and he had decided after
thinking about . . . surgery, particularly orthopedic surgery, what he found
that he liked even though he’s a great, really a great doctor in terms of
diagnosis was that he wanted to go into psychiatry, and he really wanted to
go to Cincinnati, where there were a number of people who were really the
cutting edge people in psychiatry and he really wanted to train with them.
I looked at him and went “really Cincinnati, really?” What to do? We
decided he would go there. I would stay in Chicago, and I lived with a
friend. We would see each other every couple of weeks, and then, see
where we were going to go, and maybe I would move there or maybe we
would do something else. What happened eventually was that he — I think
he really enjoyed the program. He did not enjoy Cincinnati, and one of
the things about psychiatrists is that even when they’re residents, they start
picking up patients. Wherever you do your residency, you’re very likely
to sort of stay, and it’s very difficult to pull up roots and move because
you’ve got people who are relying on you in long-term treatment. So, we
decided, not Chicago, not Cincinnati, and we talked about it, and the two
places that both of us really liked were the San Francisco area and the
Boston area. Growing up in western Massachusetts, Boston was like the
big city for me. So, either one was going to be fine, and we ended up in
Boston. He ended up doing his residency in Boston. While he was still
doing his residency in Cincinnati, I was looking for a job. I wanted
something that I wasn’t going to care about basically. I wanted to make
some money, but this was just clearly interim because one way or another,
I was going to be leaving Chicago. I heard about this job at the American
Bar Association. I was not a member of the ABA and not a big fan of a
professional association, but the job was fascinating. It was being the staff
director of the ABA’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities
which was the liberal conscience of the ABA, and working on issues
around the criminalization of marijuana and conscientious objectors in the
war, and women’s rights, and civil rights, and I thought, “wow, this is
really pretty incredible.” And so, I applied, and I got the job. There were
hardly any women lawyers who were actually on staff at the ABA. I came
in, and starting working on these issues, and the leadership of the section
was incredible. They had these incredible people — Brooksley Born, Sally
Determan, Cecil Poole, Mona Tucker. Unbelievable people who were
leaders, who were creating public interest law in so many respects, and it
was just . . . it was great, and they very much treated me as a peer, which
was terrific. And the division of the ABA that I was in had a number of
men who were also staff directors, who were also younger, and they were
great to work with, and you know, the rest of the institution was
bureaucratically stodgy, but we didn’t care . . . we didn’t much care about
the institution. We just kind of did our thing, but it was a really great
group of people, and I really enjoyed it tremendously, and we were
working on all kinds of interesting issues. Chesterfield Smith, who
became one of my beloved mentors — just an amazing man. All the issues
about the Nixon impeachment were raging, and Chesterfield had testified
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
and supported the impeachment in court, and Bert Jenner who was the
counsel for the Democrats in the impeachment, was one of the leaders in
the section. It was the legal education that I never got at law school .
being around these amazing people . . . many of whom are still some of
my dearest friends, and many of whom were my mentors, and really
taught me what the law could be and how you could be a really good,
effective lawyer. It was an amazing experience.
Do you remember any advice that some of gave you? Does anything stick
out in your mind?
It wasn’t advice as much as it was very much this sense that if you were a
good lawyer, you cared about these larger issues, and you could really
make change. So it’s this amazing sense of potential, and the power of it
all. They were such empowering experiences for a young woman. I
would . . . I remember sitting there once with Chesterfield when he was
president of the ABA, this legendary, amazing guy, and he said, “So, what
aren’t we doing that we should be doing? What are your ideas?” My
husband and I actually were talking a lot about the intersection of law and
psychiatry, because it’s such a horrible fit. I mean, you’ve got psychiatry,
which is all shades of grey and uncertainty, and then you’ve got the law
that’s all black and white, and I said . . . and this was at the time when
Judge Bazelon and the public interest people in D.C. were looking at
things like right to treatment, right to refuse treatment . . . all these
fascinating issues. People were looking at the insanity defense and what it
meant, and how, what it should look like. The American Bar Foundation
had actually published a fascinating piece on all of this stuff. So, I said,
“well, you know, I think we should do something on this,” and that
became the ABA Commission on Mental and Physical Disability that
exists to this very day, and we went out and got funding for it. It was just
incredible. Having said that, I still remember the first meeting of the
Commission, which was chaired by, a man who was a leader of the section
and later, President of the ABA, I had literally written the charge for the
Commission. I had written the funding proposal for it. I really understood
this issue of the law substantively as well as most people, better than a lot
of people. We got into the first meeting, and somebody starting talking
and he looked at me and he said, “Okay, Esther, are you getting this
down?” And I broke my pencil in two because I was so ticked off. I
couldn’t believe it. I was still being treated like a secretary, and there was
still a lot of that. You know, women would get up and get coffee — even
in this very progressive part of the bar, but what I saw were women in
positions of leadership, people of color in positions of leadership and
white men who respected them and understood their capacity and
encouraged and supported that. And, of course, it was at this time when
this group in the ABA, that’s now been kind of main-streamed in a way,
was doing the most attention getting things. One year, there was the, what
I refer to the “ass and grass” period where the section was looking at
decriminalization of sexual activity between consenting adults and
decriminalization of marijuana. How much fun is that? And we actually
got those adopted by a much more conservative ABA House of Delegates.
I loved the people I was working with. I loved the work I was doing. It
was very policy based. It was really a lot of fun, and obviously. I was
leaving Chicago, and I couldn’t continue to do it. I stepped down as head
of the section, although, then I chaired a committee for the section, and I
served on the council of the section, so I stayed in touch . . on a continual
basis. But, I did a consultancy on a commission on legal education, and
Attorney General Levy was on it and some other folks were on it. What I
realized was it wasn’t nearly as much fun when it was an issue that I
didn’t care very much about. There I was in Boston, with my husband,
who was gone all the time because he was doing his residency, and trying
to figure out what I wanted to do, and I was still doing some consulting,
but you know, feeling a little bit at loose ends, and very fixated on the
Nixon impeachment process, because I had, as somebody who grew up in
Massachusetts, I worshipped John Kennedy, so I hated Richard Nixon
since 1959, 1960, when I was a little kid. And so . . and just watching
this all play out was just . . . it was incredible, again, it was like a legal
education in and of itself . . . I kept sending telegrams to people because I
would be watching the hearings, and there’s a Jules Feiffer cartoon, and it
shows somebody, sort of, sitting there, and the person goes, “I’m so
depressed. I don’t have excitement in my life. I don’t have a reason to get
up in the morning. I don’t have something that I feel passionately about. I
miss Nixon.” [laughs] And that was true. But I realized this was not
good, I thought, “I went through all of law school. I went through all that
hassle. I should litigate, and I should do public interest litigation.” So I
started volunteering for an organization called the Cambridgeport Problem
Center, which was a little artifact of the 60s that was in a basement in a
kind of iffy neighborhood in Cambridge. It came out of a time when there
were a lot of kids in the late 60s in Cambridge, who were homeless or
runaways or living alternative lifestyles, and who needed counseling —
drug counseling in particular. They were having substance abuse issues,
and so it started there with volunteers, and then after a while, they added
just generally, psychological counseling, and then legal counseling. I
started volunteering there, and it was really fun. It was just the usual
range of individual low-income issues — people who needed to get
disability and had been denied it even though they were clearly eligible,
and people who were being evicted. I did a lot of domestic violence work,
and some federal disability work and some other things, but mostly just
state courts — one by one, little cases, but they meant a lot to these folks.
After a while, they said, “we’d like to hire you,” because they were
working with law students at Harvard, and they said, “we need somebody
to supervise the students.” So I was doing that and really enjoying it. You
know, it wasn’t a huge time commitment. It really wasn’t even
necessarily full time. What I realized by doing it was that I wasn’t really a
litigator, that I was incredibly anxious about litigating. I over-prepared
like crazy. I literally would get kind of nauseated. I knew where every
ladies’ room in Eastern Massachusetts was in the courthouses. From
friends of mine who are litigators, I get that that is not atypical for very
successful and effective litigators. After the hearing, even if we won, I
didn’t get a high. And doing individual case work to me felt — I just felt
like it was a drop in the ocean. It was just really frustrating. The Boston
Bar Association, which is one of the great bar associations, as much as
that I am not such a fan of bar associations, there are places — the D.C. Bar
is one, the Boston Bar is another, that are incredible. Fabulous leadership,
wonderful people, really focused on, again, public interest more broadly
than just the profession, and a long history of that. In fact the Boston Bar
had helped to establish one of the earliest Lawyers’ Committee for Civil
Rights affiliates there and one of my classmates was the head of that
organization, so it was really very interesting. The Legal Services
Corporation, when it was created in 1974, as a sop to the conservatives
because it was controversial, had agreed that it would do a study of using
private lawyers on a pro bono basis to provide legal services. This was
because for a lot of attorneys, particularly sole practitioners and
particularly in states like the south and the southwest, were concerned that
what would happen in legal services is that these wild-eyed, radical carpetbagging
lawyers would come down and, you know, sue every institution
in the state, which in fact did happen in some states. And that they would
be . . . and at the same time would be representing people for free and
taking business away from practicing lawyers. So when they talked about
using private lawyers to provide legal services and doing the study of that
delivery methodology, they were thinking about Judicare, or contract
lawyers where people would get at least partial discounted payment to do
- What somebody added in at the last minute was pro bono. And so the
Legal Services Corporation had put out like an RFP, it said we’re going to
fund six projects and, you know, here are the different models and the
Boston Bar, because of its experience with the Lawyers’ Committee,
which had been very successful and a community with a very strong
culture of giving back, had applied and gotten funded. $110,000 in
funding to set up a pro bono program and they were advertising for the
founder and first director of that program. I interviewed and I got the job.
And some of that was my experience both with the ABA Individual Rights
section and with the Cambridgeport Problem Center. It really made me
believe in volunteerism and the impact that volunteers could have because
the work that people did with the section was all volunteer work on top of
very demanding full-time legal jobs. Nobody had really thought about
what this should look like. I was lucky enough to have this amazing board
of people from many of the larger firms in Boston, but from different areas
of practice and was lucky enough to have colleagues at both the legal
services program, Greater Boston Legal Services and the Lawyers’
Committee who didn’t feel threatened by this at all. They thought this was
a great thing and were incredibly supportive and viewed this as a joint
effort that we could do together. We hired a couple of people and I think
my salary was $17,000 and . . . we started. There was no roadmap really.
The existing pro bono efforts that were around, first of all nobody really
knew what was out there, but they were mostly tied into the old Legal Aid
Societies that had started at the beginning of the 1900s. And they were,
what I would call Hey Joe Programs. Somebody’s secretary would call up
and say “hey Joe, would you take a divorce?” You know, very noblesse
oblige, very informal, certainly not looking at cutting edge. I thought, this
is a time where we could do something different. So we put together a
program, again with these wonderful advisors and supporters and Board,
that married volunteerism with the best practices in public interest law.
We recruited more broadly, we had a broader range of cases that we would
handle, we provided training and manuals and support and we did quality
control on volunteers and we fired volunteers if they didn’t do what they
were supposed to be doing. We tracked all of that and it didn’t seem
strange or unusual to us, but we were building something very, very new.
The Board and the staff of the Legal Services Corporation watched this all
happening and they thought, “wow this is really great.” So they funded
five more pro bono programs in the second year as experimental funding
and they were in New Hampshire, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York
and Washington, D.C. And the people who were running those programs
contacted me and we became the Pro Bono Six, again many of them are
still my friends. We felt like we had found something pretty incredible
and very powerful and that there was a huge promise to this delivery
method and so we would just get together on our own. Nobody brought us
together to talk about ideas and how do you do this kind of recruitment
and what do you do with the conflicts and that sort of thing, we just kept
improving our programs and learning from each other. At the same time,
the people in the Legal Services programs, the staff attorney programs
were very suspicious of all of these delivery models because – they
viewed them as alternatives, not supplements but alternatives to what they
were doing. Things that would take the sort of progressive proactive, you
know, legal reform aspects of legal services and get rid of it and of course
they were always under attack from Congress for exactly that so they were
very, very worried and we would go to conferences and nobody would
talk to us. We were seen as stalking horses for Judicare and nobody
would talk to us. What happened eventually was first of all, that there was
a study done that looked at the quality of these programs, the impact of the
programs, and found that what happened in terms of client outcomes and
that sort of thing, was very similar to the programs that were full-time staff
attorney programs. So the power and the capacity of volunteerism I think
really came through. But also what we kept saying as the Pro Bono Six,
(we actually had stationary with little fists. [Laughter] a sort of artifact
from our times.) What we kept saying was that pro bono is an incredibly
powerful force and it is a supplement—it can’t exist on its own. That the
only way that we were able to function well and effectively was by
aligning ourselves with and taking advantage of the presence in the
communities [END SIDE A] and of course the substantive expertise of
these full time lawyers who understood context, understood the law, had
to live with the precedents that were established. So we made it very clear
that we were complimentary and that I think helped to ease concerns plus
the fact that people could actually see that clients were getting helped. So
we moved ahead refining the model, growing the model and then the ABA
got interested in this and they funded, with the Legal Services
Corporation, another small chunk of programs that were in areas like
Austin, Texas and Honolulu and so not quite the usual suspects, although
I’m not sure New Hampshire would be considered the usual suspects. We
tried to look at some places that were a little more rural and then we
helped those folks out and worked with them. And things just started
happening. Wonderful people, the then-President of the State Bar in
Texas, a guy named Chris Dougherty, who was very engaged by this, and
people just started talking about it and leadership within the ABA and with
bar associations started talking about it because you could see that it was
really leveraging resources in a tremendous way. In 1980, we were told
that the Pro Bono Six were finally, instead of getting money year by year
as an experimental program, we were going to be permanently funded.
This was a big moment. My Board was really excited, and we were
getting great coverage in the media and everything else. It was terrific.
And then Ronald Reagan was elected. Ronald Reagan, when he was
Governor of California, had tried to basically destroy California Rural
Legal Services which represented migrant workers, and he came damn
close to doing it. He and Ed Meese. And when he came in, of course he
was trying to create a smaller government, and so his recommendation for
Legal Services was zero funding. He wanted to just eliminate the program
And the idea was that, if every lawyer in America would just do one case,
we could handle this, it would be fine. It was devastating. I mean, I still
remember I was at a meeting of the project directors in New England
when we heard about this and it was sort of like “My God, there was a 48
hour period where I actually had permanent funding for my program
[Laughter] and now it’s gone.” Now after years of doing public interest
work I just always assume I’m going to have to figure out funding year to
year and not worry about it but it was a shock to the system then. And you
can imagine the reactions in these programs. What had happened is in the
Carter years there had been money for expansion because originally the
program only covered certain areas, so they figured out a formula, there
were programs set up in more rural areas and in again, the south and the
west where these programs hadn’t existed and people were beginning to
really get a feel for what the potential was and then BOOM. Zero funding.
And so it was just a shock to the system. It turned out, I think, in a strange
way, to be really a blessing. Because a couple of things happened. And
one was, that the Bar which really had viewed the legal services programs,
continued to view them with suspicion changed. The ABA was supportive
but it was more lip service than actual activity but when this happened,
people came together. And Reece Smith who is from Florida, was
President of the ABA and a supporter of legal services and so he started to
work on efforts to push back on the Reagan recommendation. I was one
of the very few people in legal services that actually was bilingual, I spoke
Bar, I was active in the ABA, I understood how that organization worked.
So I became very involved in that effort to save legal services. And a
number of people in Boston, led by a wonderful man named Jack Curtin,
who then went on to become a President of the ABA, came together — we
originally called them the Gang of Eight, although they got much, much
bigger — Jack was President of the Boston Bar — it was really the most
respected people in Boston and what we worked on, they did and people in
other parts of the country and the ABA, was a march on Washington. A
lawyers’ march on Washington to go up to the Hill and make the case for
why Legal Services should continue to be funded. So I spent — we all did
— enormous amounts of time making this happen and here’s a very telling
thing — in some places we had a hard time getting one person to come. In
Boston, in Massachusetts the big problem we had was we had too many
people wanting to go. We couldn’t bring everybody. And everybody was
on their own dime, nobody was getting paid for this, so we set it up, we
coordinated it and we had set up a meeting with key members of Congress
and the day before or two days before was when Ronald Reagan was shot
at the Hilton. We went through this discussion of ‘what are we going to
do?’ Is this disrespectful, what can we do. We’re talking about how he’s
made this misjudgment, and we decided to go forward. It was incredibly
effective and what came out of it was a 25% cut in funding but that was
obviously a lot better than a 100% cut in funding. Still awful for the
programs. But what happened was that the ABA decided to own this
issue. And so did, in many cases state and local bars, and so the Gang of
Eight, just as an example in Massachusetts, which was by now a gang of
about 40, didn’t stop meeting. They started trying to figure out what else
they could do to deal with the 25% cut and one of the things was push for
state funding for Legal Services for the creation of Massachusetts Legal
Assistance appropriation for IOLTA funding in Massachusetts, really
amazing. It really was transformative. Suddenly people understood. The
Legal Services programs had been doing their own thing, not talking to the
Bar, not talking to the leadership of the profession, not talking to the
judges, pretty much not talking to anybody but themselves, which was a
mistake. And so nobody knew how grievous the need was and nobody
understood how much they had to do. People started doing legal needs
studies and doing all these things to clearly make the case for legal
services and Legal Services Corporation funding. It’s the best of the bar.
It’s what the organized bar does and does well. They don’t do it often but
it was dramatic and it was fabulous. And I continued to stay involved in
it.
There were several other things that happened. One was that there were
changes, some of them terrible restrictions on what legal services lawyers
could do, there are lawsuits that are still out there charging that that’s a
breach of First Amendment rights. Unfortunately, they haven’t been, for
the most part, very successful, but it is really offensive, obviously, to say
that you have to limit your ethical obligation to provide the best possible
representation by a client because you can’t do a class action suit or you
can’t represent a prisoner or you can’t get involved in redistricting,
whatever it is, but unfortunately, it’s probably not illegal, it’s awful but
it’s probably not unconstitutional, at least that’s what courts have said for
the most part so far. And Congress hasn’t been willing to overturn that.
In fact it’s gotten worse. It got worse in ’96. They also changed the way
boards of legal services programs had to be selected and it made bar
associations the people who appointed a lot of the lawyer members of the
boards and the programs were crazed. Because what they had were true
believers and clients and so frankly, nobody ever challenged them. It
turns out, however, and this is the power of legal services, that when
people get involved in legal services, even if they come in with the belief
that it’s social engineering, they become believers. They become quite
passionate about it. So that broadened the range of supporters and more
people understood about Legal Services even more. The legal services
program started to get really smart about working with bar associations.
One of the other things that happened was not the result of a Legal
Services Corporation but it was the LSC Board. And the LSC Board at
the time, Hillary Clinton was on the Board, a wonderful man named Bill
McCalpin, who is a Republican, I always say he’s my favorite Republican.
He used to say; he’s no longer with us. He was my only Republican, he
knew that. But Bill was very active in the ABA as well and Bill had seen
the pro bono movement happening, and so what Bill did was he basically
muscled through the Board a regulation that said that any nonprofit that
got funding from the Legal Services Corporation would have to use a
portion, a percentage of that funding to involve private lawyers in the
delivery of legal services — a private attorney involvement resolution. The
programs went nuts because — a 25% cut, they had to lay off their friends,
close offices and now they were going to have to take another 10, 12%
and use that for these private lawyers to help their clients, which they
didn’t think the private lawyers either wanted to do or could do. There are
still people who think that that was done by the Reagan administration to
kill legal services, and they don’t realize it was friends trying to strengthen
legal services. That was when pro bono exploded. Because we had,
probably by then 50 pro bono programs of varying degrees of quality. In
just a few years we went to 900 pro bono programs. Because people had
to do it and if they were going to do it, there are few programs in rural
areas that do Judicare, but for the most part, they wanted to do pro bono
because it would let them keep more of the money inside the program and
keep more of the control and that sort of thing. So the ABA put funding
into trying to figure out how to get bar associations up to speed so that
they could support this effort because this was massive. I mean there were
300 and some legal services programs that needed to have pro bono efforts
and you know, they had to have certain operational systems and Legal
Services Corporation people came to me and said “We want to give you a
grant to hold a series of conferences, joint legal services-bar conferences
and then to provide technical assistance to legal services programs to set
up their pro bono programs.” Thus was born the “pro bono roadshow.” It
was group of people from bar associations and from programs who
understood the mechanics of pro bono and other types of delivery. We did
regional conferences in the East, the Midwest and the West. We actually
did six conferences because we were so afraid of putting the programs and
bar associations together, that we did a separate program for the legal
services people where they could say all the nasty things about the bars
and then brought them together for a small amount of time and then did a
separate program for the bar association people who could trash the legal
services people and we literally were on the road for weeks and weeks and
weeks and weeks — there’s a wonderful picture I have of all of us wearing
our t-shirts. John Ferren, a former Hogan person, was Chair of an ABA
committee so he was involved in it and every once in a while I see him
running with his now pink, formerly red t-shirt from that road show. We
developed protocols and planning documents and everything else and did
a huge amount of technical assistance. I had a group of consultants that I
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
was managing, getting out there to set up these pro bono programs. Just
overnight. I mean it was incredible. It was 1982 through 1984, it just kept
going, Hillary was no longer on the Board but Bill McCalpin and the folks
on the board, there was a midnight massacre where the Republicans
kicked them off but the grant money was already with us so we could keep
going. The ABA created a pro bono support project as well that is still in
existence today and pro bono just started going to a completely different
level. It was really just amazing. And it was something good coming out
of something terrible.
So your career was going crazy at this point. What was happening in your
social life or at home?
Well, interesting question. My husband was completing his residency, not
around much and then had started working. When we first met — this
happens in a lot of relationships — we were quite young. I was 21, I think
he might have been 22 . . . and the way that we thought of ourselves was
that he was the practical, real world one who was very much in control of
his emotions and I was the big picture but not particularly practical person.
He was the steak; I was the sizzle. All these developments made me
realize that I wasn’t actually quite that unworldly and that I could
accomplish a great deal. I also developed a lot of very strong relationships
that he didn’t have any part of I was traveling and things just fell apart.
They really did fall apart and so in the middle of this, of all this, I just told
him I thought we needed to get divorced. We did a little counseling but
we needed to get divorced. This, by the way, was at the same time that
Brooksley Born was getting divorced and that Sally Determan was getting
divorced. So we used to have some very interesting discussions about
this. There was no rancor at all in it, although we didn’t stay in touch
because we didn’t have kids. It just felt like we were just very different
people at that point, than we had been. He was going through some, some
very tough times, I think. He was just emotionally going through a lot. So
we divorced and then I was living alone for the first time in my whole life,
because I’d gone from home to college and then to roommates and then to
marriage and I’d never actually lived on my own. I found out that I could
do it and like it, which was good. But I also felt, Boston is a big city but
the legal community’s kind of a village and so everybody knew me. The
joke was that I always had to leave an extra 30 minutes when I was going
to meetings because you’d walk places and you’d meet people and they’d
want to tell you about their pro bono case or whatever, which was great
and I loved people and I loved my program. But I had also been there by
then for, what, 8 years I think. And this big exciting thing was kind of
coming to something of an end and my marriage was ending and I felt like
I was kind of in a rut. I felt like I needed to shake up my life. Some very
good friends of mine, actually one of the people I had worked with when I
was at the ABA, he and his wife had become very close friends. He had
been a partner in a firm in D.C., and they decided they wanted a different
life, too. They had moved to Santa Fe where he was having a very nice
practice, they were having a wonderful life. I went out to visit, and we
also did the first national pro bono conference there for some of these
programs that had gotten started to provide more training and technical
assistance. One of the key people in that (some of the key people were
part of the Pro Bono Six) was somebody who was a leader in the ABA
Young Lawyers Division at the time who was chairing a pro bono
committee. She’s a little tiny person and she was very pregnant. She
became a huge part of this, a woman named Laurie Zelon who is now a
judge on the California Court of Appeals, who has chaired every ABA
committee on legal services and pro bono and gotten every award that you
can imagine. We’ve named an award after her, and she was very, very
critical in setting up our law firm project and then the Pro Bono Initiative.
She’s on my board to this day. I fell in love with New Mexico, which is a
very special place with a very special kind of energy. It’s very beautiful.
My two favorite places in the world are Paris and northern New Mexico.
And what they have in common is that when you’re there, even though
you’re not talented and you’re not an artist, you understand why people
are artists because you almost see the way they see. When you are going
down the River Seine in Paris, you’re likely to go “of course
Impressionists, and of course I see it, I see the trees.” Of course you
wouldn’t if the impressionists hadn’t showed it to you, but you can see
their vision. And the same thing in New Mexico. You know, you see
what Georgia O’Keeffe saw, you really see it. And the light is beautiful
Ms. Knievel:
and the place attracts very spiritual, creative people. I think part of what
was going on was not only that I was in a rut but that that whole part of me
that is, you know, more of a creative person, was not getting any attention
paid to it. So I decided that I needed to really break away and here I had
the Volunteer Lawyers Project that I’d started that was now really big and
very well-known and a national model and had gotten awards and we’d
gotten more money and we were doing great things and I knew that it was
going to be incredibly hard — it was like leaving your child or letting your
child be adopted by somebody else. And so I thought, you know, I can’t
stay in Boston and I don’t think I really want to. Where do I want to go? I
thought about San Francisco because I love San Francisco. But I thought,
I want to go to New Mexico. I want more balance, I want to kind of get
more in touch with my creative self, I want to go someplace where I don’t
know that many people and I can meet new people and be a different kind
of person and so that’s what I did. I went out there, I gave notice, II . . .
Well the first thing I did was I put my house on the market and then I had
to give notice [Laughter] because the — my real estate agent was Nina
Totenberg’s mother. And I knew Nina. Her mother told Nina and then
Nina told the world, I had to tell everybody. [Laughter] And I don’t think
she announced it on NPR [Laughter] but it was pretty damn close. So I
told everyone and I didn’t have a job.
What were their reactions?
Ms. Lardent: They were astounded. In fact the article about this in the Massachusetts
Lawyers Weekly, in very large letters said “Lardent Leaving Boston!”
Exclamation point. [Laughter] It was hysterical. And it was both that I
really had become a pretty integral part of this community and knew a lot
of people, was known by a lot of people, but it was also, you know, an
East Coast Massachusetts thing about “She’s going to some square state
out west? [Laughter] Where they have like Indians and cowboys and
horses? What’s that all about?” People were shocked and amazed. You
can only imagine, when that article came out the calls that I took from my
friends. I would pick up the phone and there’d be hysterical laughter and
somebody would go “Lardent Leaves Boston!” The great thing is that the
Volunteer Lawyers Project continues to exist. The question some had was
really, would it, would it continue to exist if I wasn’t there. I thought
“Wow, that would be such a failure” because I would never have
institutionalized it. It’s vibrant, it’s bigger than ever, it’s doing great
work. The woman who came in after me, who I knew although I played
no role whatsoever in picking my successor because I was the person who
was not going to have to live with that, stayed until, like a year and a half
ago. So she was there for like 18 years or something. It was like watching
your kid grow up and go “Oh look, it’s attractive and going to college and
doing great things and I really like it.”
I decided I would leave there with an amazing, [Laughter] particularly for
Boston, going away party. What they decided to do was they rented out a
nightclub right on Kenmore Square, right near BU, so very studenty, kind
of fun neighborhood. You know, nightclub area. On the sign out front,
instead of “wet t-shirt contest tonight,” it said “Lardent Farewell Party”
[Laughter] and they did a roast. And the theme of the roast was Why Was
I Leaving? [Laughter] People had some really funny, wonderful, amazing
stories about why I was leaving. They were hysterical. And all of these
very Brahmin Boston lawyers, you know, danced, [Laughter] we have to
dance, and drank too much and we had a great old time.
Ms. Knievel: Do you remember some of the stories?
Ms. Lardent: Well, yes.
Tape 4
This is Erica Knievel interviewing Esther Lardent on March 22, 2011. We are in Esther’s office,
and the purpose of this recording is to record her oral history for the Women Trailblazers Project.
Ms. Lardent: It was a difficult decision to leave Boston, not only because it’s a
wonderful place to live, but I made friends there obviously, and loved —
both the city and the legal community, and it was pretty wrenching to
think about leaving this organization that I’d founded, and that was doing
really well. But it felt like it was time for a change. I really did not love
managing an ever-growing organization. That was not always one of my
favorite things or I think one of my strong suits, and I’d also fallen in love
with the southwest which shocked me, and just wanted to try to have a
different quality of life, a different kind of life, and so moved to Santa Fe.
There was a little bit of culture shock involved.
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
Let me stop you right there, because I want to know about the farewell.
Oh, the party. When I left, the legal community in Boston did a farewell
party for me and it was wonderful because it’s a very decorous city and a
decorous bar, and what they did was they rented out one of the nightclubs
in Kenmore Square near where BU is, and it was great because on the
marquee for the nightclubs, which is right at the heart of Kenmore Square,
instead of “wet t-shirt contest” like it usually said, it was like . . it was
“goodbye Esther.” It was really very funny, and there was a lot of dancing
and a lot of drinking. It was really quite fun, and they did a roast, and the
theme of the roast was why was Esther leaving Boston, and it was
particularly funny because it did reflect the fact that Boston calls itself
“the Hub” and people honestly were shocked that I would leave Boston for
some strange square state out west that they couldn’t possibly identify on a
map. So people would get up and, you know, they said lovely things
about me, but also told some pretty funny embarrassing stories, but the
theme was “why was it that I was leaving” and my favorite theory was that
I’d had an arrangement with AT&T so that I got a kick back on every long
distance call made to me because in addition to doing the pro bono work
in Boston, I was also administering this technical assistance grant that had
been given by the Legal Services Corporation.
So, I loved all that, and then, now I was traveling all over the country and
all these people were calling, and so the theory at the roast was that if
somebody called me and said the words “pro bono” I got fifty cents for
every long distance call, but that . . . this was at the time when the long
distance providers were changing the way that they were billing. The
notion was I had lost this important piece of revenue, and so I was leaving
because I had to live some place less expensive as Boston is. It was great.
It was a wonderful night. I, you know, watching some of the most
respected leaders of the Boston Bar dancing to Material Girl was
something I’ll never forget. I was pretty apprehensive about going out by
myself to this place where I’d never lived. I had some friends there, but it
was still a little nerve-racking. So, we organized a caravan of friends who,
at various times, accompanied me on the road, and got me out to Santa Fe.
One person went with me from Boston to New York, and a second person
went from New York to D.C. From D.C., there was a conference that I
was speaking at . . . a legal services conference somewhere in South
Carolina, and then a friend did the very long leg from South Carolina to
Santa Fe, and it . . . definitely culture shock. The place that I was renting
in Santa Fe was what my friends refer to as a yuppie adobe. It was on the
Old Santa Fe Trail, and it was definitely built of adobe, but it had decks —
one that faced east and one that faced west . . . beautiful light of Santa Fe.
Just before I left Boston, somebody called me and said, “We hear you’re
coming to New Mexico. Would you like to teach at the law school?” And
I said, “great” — which is in Albuquerque by the way, 60 miles away. I
decided I was going to do consulting, and I was going to teach, and I was
going to work less and enjoy life, and it didn’t quite work out that way. I
did love teaching. The University of New Mexico is an amazing law
school — very diverse population. I had students who were Apache Indian,
and a school that’s very committed to public service. They require you to
do clinical work in order to graduate, and have just a really wonderful
faculty. That was really fun. So, a couple days a week, I would drive
between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, 120 miles, mostly on reservation
land, so no speed limits whatsoever — just put the petal to the metal and
- And then, typically, once a week I would get on a plane from
Albuquerque to Dallas-Fort Worth and then go consult some place. I was
working with the legal services programs and bar associations and quite a
bit with the Ford Foundation. And I really . . I must say, I enjoyed
consulting for a couple of different reasons. One is that, unlike having
your own program, you did the best you could as a consultant, and then
you just didn’t own it. So, you didn’t wake up at 3:00 in the morning
wondering if you were going to be able to meet the payroll for everyone or
what was going to happen with that particular staff person. There was a
kind of simplicity about it that I really liked, and it was fun to go into a
new situation — not necessarily knowing who all the players were and the
history and the dynamics, although I certainly tried to do my research.
The part I really loved was the diagnostics . . . figuring out what really was
going on, how well the program was running, and what could be done. It
made me a believer, and I very much am to this day, of the power of fresh
eyes on things, and the advantage of not having somebody who’s been
doing something for 20 years, comes in and sort of can scope out the
situation, and it really was terrific. The other part that was really
interesting was respecting the fact that since you weren’t going to live
with the outcome, you certainly couldn’t mandate the outcome. I brought
a certain level of knowledge and expertise, but it was the people who were
in the local situation who really understood what was going to work. So, I
could suggest things, but they would have to really adapt that in local
circumstance, and they really had to own the awareness of the issue and
the situation and, absolutely, the solution. That was really a terrific
experience for me because that’s essentially what we do at the Pro Bono
Institute. We really are . . . we’re technical support experts so we have
different ideas. We understand the benchmarks in terms of peer firms or
peer legal departments. We know what some of the opportunities can look
like. We know about other players often in the community, but we don’t
ever suggest the solution. We offer alternatives, and the final shape of
things really comes from the firm or the legal department, or if we’re
doing a city-wide campaign from the people who are going to be the
forces for change in that city, and so it really turned out to be a great skill
and approach to develop, and it taught me a lot.
Ms. Knievel: How did the legal community differ out west and how was that an
adjustment for you?
Ms. Lardent: Yeah.
Ms. Knievel: What was it like to be a woman in that environment?
Ms. Lardent: Well, it was interesting because I actually had met years before one of the
leaders . . . a guy who was then the president of the New Mexico Bar, who
was somebody who, after graduating from Harvard Law, had gone to work
for the Navajo Nation in Chinle, Arizona, and so very public interestminded.
I would say, and I’m not sure that New Mexico is typical, but it
was a very progressive bar, but the most interesting thing about it was how
everyone knew everyone. For example I did a little work — most of my
consulting was outside of New Mexico, but I did work with folks on legal
services for the elderly there, and you’d be talking to somebody, and
they’d say, “I’m going to call the Secretary of Health and Human Services
in New Mexico.” You know, “Joan, hi, how are you?” I mean it was the
most amazing thing, so it’s a much tighter community, and I will say that
people did achieve what lawyers in the large law firms on the east coast
and west coast didn’t. They really did have balance. You know, people
would take longer lunches or they’d go out and ride horses for a while.
The other thing that was wonderful about the bar, and I think this is
probably very specific to New Mexico was that there were a lot of people
who were lawyers, but they also were artists or at least . . . they wanted to
be artists. They were lawyers, and they wanted to be photographers. They
were lawyers, and they were writers. It allowed people to kind of fulfill
the creative side of their personality a lot more, that bar at least was a very
progressive bar, and women were very present. In fact the first woman to
become president of the ABA was from Albuquerque, Roberta Ramo. So,
women were really very much accepted, and at the law school — of course
my classes were filled with women. There was much less formality in
dress and in manner and everything else. There wasn’t as much of a
bifurcated profession. You did have big firms, but the differential I think
in salary and certainly in perceived status was very different. People who
did solo work were often very highly respected, and it wasn’t as though
somehow working with people was . . . in some way less intellectually
challenging or had less status than working with corporations. So it was
really a lovely place to be, and like I said, the law school was superb . . . I
mean wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people there. My favorite project
was some consulting with the Ford Foundation. One of the things that had
gotten lost in legal services with the funding cuts was a fellowship
program called the Reginald Heber Smith program, that was designed to
bring people into legal services who were more community-based in their
approach and often in their background. Geraldo Rivera, who was then
known as Jerry Rivers, was a Reginald Heber Smith Fellow, and many of
the people who ten years later were some of the leaders of legal services
were people who had been Reggies. Ford wanted to know whether or not
it might be possible to resurrect the fellowship program, but instead of
getting public money which didn’t look like a real possibility — using law
firm contributions. So I began to look at . . I looked at the Reggie
program and its history and talked to the people who had participated in it
about what it was about, and then I looked at some of the law related
fellowship programs that were out there, that were fairly small, and then I
went to Skadden because Skadden had started the Skadden Fellows
program, and looked at that program which was pretty remarkable. Before
I had actually filed my final report, a young African American Federal
District Court judge in Chicago, Ann Williams — she’s now in the
Seventh Circuit — was presiding over a major class action antitrust suit. It
was the folding carton case, and they had come in with a huge verdict in
the case, and after distributing it to the members of the class. Somebody
had mentioned fellowships, and she was really intrigued by it. I had
gotten to know a wonderful young man named Michael Caudell Feigen,
who straight out of law school had started an organization called the
National Association for Public Interest Law for law students who were
interested in public interest careers. I think it was at the time, just him.
They were operating on an absolute shoe string, but finding summer pro
bono opportunities. So, I brought him with me to Chicago to meet with
the judge and with the distribution committee. And she ordered 2.3
million dollars in cy pres funds to go to NAPIL which is now Equal
Justice Works, and that was the heart of and the biggest endowment for
the Equal Justice Works fellowships. The operational funding for EJW
originally came from Ford, and then Open Society, George Soros’
foundation took up the funding, and the number of fellows just increased
and increased. That was one of those wonderful situations that I think has
characterized my career — I seem to have this wonderful luck about being
in the right place at the right time. The pieces were there. It just required,
first of all, a very wise and wonderful judge, but also just somebody who
knew some of the different pieces of information. So, before the report
even was published, it had this amazing effect, and it continues to this day.
I served on the board of Equal Justice Works for many years. I’m now not
on the board any longer, but still very committed to it, and to the
organization, and particularly to these amazing young people who are .
it isn’t just that they want to do public interest law, it’s that they want to
do it in a different way, and they bring not only the sort of commitment,
but this amazing creativity to what they do. I enjoyed all of my work. I
really did some really fun things — sometimes difficult. Telling people at a
bar association who thought that they had a wonderful pro bono program,
that in fact, less than ten percent of the lawyers who were on the volunteer
panel, the much vaunted, very large volunteer panel, had never taken a
case, because the program just was not well run at all. So, you know,
important — not as much fun. [Laughter] You didn’t get a lot of thanks
for that. Thanks for making us feel bad, but an important thing because,
you know, obviously the clients were suffering because of it. I loved the
consulting. I loved being in Santa Fe, but in order to do what I wanted to
do, I was travelling constantly, and I started to feel as though I had no
permanent abode. People would ask me where I was from, and I would
say I was from DFW because that was where I spent the most time, and I
also was involved with someone there and we broke up, and it’s a small
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
town. So we saw each other . . . he and I saw each other all the time. It’s
not pleasant, and so I started thinking about what I was going to next,
much as I hoped to stay in Santa Fe forever because it was so beautiful.
Do you mind talking about him at all? How you met him or . . .
Well, he was also somebody who ran a legal services program in
California that focused on Native Americans, and he and I were both in
volunteer leadership positions in legal services advocacy organizations,
and got to know each other, and when I was moving out to Santa Fe,
somebody said, “well, are you going to see Bruce?” And I said, “why
would I see Bruce?” Because he was living in the Bay area at the time.
They said, “he was working for the Navajo Nation in the Justice
Department of the Navajo Nation, and he’s in Santa Fe now.” And I said,
“Oh, that’s great because I only know like three people in Santa Fe.” And
so, I called him and then we, you know, kind of went from there. He was
trying to become a lawyer/photographer [laughter]. So it was really fun
because we would literally just set out in the morning, head up towards
Taos and wait for the perfect light. We used to refer to it as God’s
spotlight. Then he would take these beautiful photographs, and we’d just
hike around. He was not a good candidate for a long term relationship,
sort of a rebound person definitely. So I was trying to think about what I
was going to do. One of my really close friends is a woman named Sally
Determan. I may have mentioned her before, and Sally was at Hogan, and
she kept saying you have to come to D.C. You have to . . . your policy
work, you know, you do public good. D.C. is your place. You really have
to come here. She was becoming the chair of the American Bar
Association Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, and one of
the things that was a focus for her was post-conviction death penalty
representation. She’s a dynastic tax and estates lawyer, and took on a
death penalty case because what could be more similar than death to law
and taxes. [Laughter] I guess death and taxes. So she started to do that
and she got . . . and she was, as I think virtually everyone is if they start
kind of looking at the capital system in the United States . . . appalled by
what she saw. And her client was somebody who had gone completely off
the deep end. She used to refer to him and a class action capital defendant
because he’d gone out and just killed many people — no question about
innocence. But the whole question about whether or not . . . you know,
what his mental state was and everything else, had not been dealt with
because the quality of representation he received was appalling. So she
was starting this project, and it happened in part because she had been
working with folks at the NAACP LDF through particularly, Elaine Jones,
who then later became the head of NAACP LDF, was very much involved
in providing representation, and they recruited people, but the numbers on
death row were growing so quickly that it just overwhelmed them. Sally’s
project was designed to recruit more volunteers to handle these cases in
states, and Sally’s theory was that I could sell people any kind of case, and
that I would be a good person to do this even though of course I knew
nothing, nothing, nothing about death penalty law, and had stayed as far
from criminal practice, which scared the bejesus out of me as a possibly
could.
Ms. Knievel: How did she convince you?
Ms. Lardent: She basically told me that there were two other people who were very,
very knowledgeable in death penalty areas. One of them was Russ Canan
who’s now on the D.C. Court, and I cannot remember the name of the
other woman who was very, very knowledgeable — and also a guy named
George Kendall who was working at the Inc. Fund, remarkable guy, was
helping us out. And she said, you don’t have to do this full time, but
there’s a tremendous need and you could do it, and I thought “I could. I
could do it.” So, I was in D.C. speaking at a conference at, of all places,
the American Enterprise Institute, and decided that I would take the job. I
agreed to do it as a part time consultant, and extended my day for two
days, found a house, [Laughter] went back to New Mexico, packed up my
things, and drove to D.C. with the person that I was going out with which
was a bad, bad, bad idea, really . having fights in cars on highways
across America is really not a good thing.
Ms. Knievel: Not as fun as the first caravan?
Ms. Lardent: No . . . definitely not. There was not a lot of laughing going on. Came to
D.C. in the middle of this amazing ice storm with ice inside my house and
of course no phone, no furniture, God knows where the furniture truck was
— I couldn’t communicate with them. It was before really cell phones
were operational — I and started doing that work, and really the people
who work in this area are amazing people. They’re extraordinary lawyers.
It is probably the most complex, counterintuitive jurisprudence I’ve ever
seen. There are 87 million ways to mess up one of these cases, and the
law is so harsh and unforgiving in so many ways, and then way too
forgiving in others. So for example, the awful case law that has been kind
of slightly eroded, but still exists in terms of ineffective assistance of
counsel. Death penalty cases at trial are bifurcated. So, you have guilt or
innocence, and then you have sentencing, and there were people who
would submit nothing at sentencing, and the court decision said, “well,
that was a strategic decision.” The fact that they were sleeping or drunk or
incompetent or on drugs or you know, then were suspended from practice
for other reasons didn’t seem to matter. So it was incredibly important
work and the people who did it were remarkable and we got more
systemic. It started out purely as sort of a recruitment effort, and I think
this is partly because again — right place, right time — the system was so
egregious that people were really beginning to take notice, but also people
were beginning to be willing to sort of approach this in a more systemic
way, and . . . that’s my approach. It always feels more comfortable. The
job kind of grew. It expanded, and we began to work on things like
standards for providing representation in post-conviction matters. You
know, what kind of training should these lawyers have? How much
independence should they have? What kind of experience should they
have? We worked within the ABA, but also with the various groups like
the Inc. Fund, and Death Penalty Information Center, and the ACLU’s
Death Penalty Project to develop that, and got those adopted and they
began to be used in court decisions, and kind of expanded some of the
ineffective assistance law. We started working with the Federal Judicial
Center and with the Judicial Conference on these issues because they
oversaw federal defenders, and there was also a federal death penalty as
well, and began to start working with the states, and in the middle of . . . I
think it sort of overlapped Reagan, and Bush I. We actually managed to
get $20 million in federal funding to set up death penalty resource centers
in states like Texas and Alabama and Virginia, to provide training and
resources to these lawyers who were taking on these cases that were so far
outside of their practice area and their skills sets. That was really very
exciting. It was a really good thing that this effort was within the ABA,
and the ABA didn’t take any position on the death penalty. People kept
trying to sort of get the ABA to bring a resolution opposing the death
penalty, kept saying, “don’t do it, don’t do it,” because we were doing so
much better recruiting people on an administration of justice platform.
You know, the ABA isn’t for the death penalty; they’re not against the
death penalty. They have no stand on that, but what they are saying is
when someone’s life is at stake, they should have competent counsel and
due process. We got presidents of the ABA to testify before Congress and
wonderfully brave chief justices and we worked with people on the Hill in
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
the Senate and in the House. It was a tremendously exciting time, and it
was wonderful work, but I missed the civil side. I missed some of the pro
bono stuff.
Did you ever think “Sally, what did you get me into?”
Well, yes. There were times because honestly, I’d be getting ready to
refer a case, and I’d be thinking, what if I can’t find somebody. I mean,
this guy is going to die. I mean literally, his life is in my hands. So I
would have nightmares, and it was very stressful. The other thing is, there
are wonderful people in the death penalty community. It is a very tight
community, and they go through amazing things. So, sometimes you call
people up at a resource center or at the Southern Center for Human Rights,
or Equal Justice Initiative, and they yell at you, and later on you find out
that one of their clients had just been sentenced to death or they’d actually
been, at their client’s request, there when their client was killed. So, there
were moments when I thought, “okay, this is just um . . this is a little
intense.” I enjoyed it, but something for me was missing, and I always did
other consulting. I kept doing some of the other consulting that I did as
well, because I didn’t want to just do this. I admire the people who do this
and have done it for ten and twenty years, and really there are lots of them
that stay in the community. But . . . it was very stressful, and I needed a
balance. One of the things I was doing that was tremendous fun was, one
of my mentors — remarkable, remarkable man named Bob Raven, was
elected President of the ABA . . . I knew Bob because he’d been President
of the California Bar, very involved in legal services and pro bono, the
head of Morrison & Foerster which had this incredible pro bono culture,
and he asked me if I would do the speech writing for him which I’d never
done before, although I had some experience with creative writing. He
wanted to provoke people, and he wanted to give a new perspective. I
remember Bob giving a speech on human rights, and a very progressive
Assistant Secretary of State came over to me and she said, “Are you sure
this guy’s President of the ABA?” Bob was Midwestern born, very
attractive, shock of white hair. He looked like what everybody would
imagine a managing partner would look like, and there was something
about his sort of Midwestern demeanor that meant that you could put
really strong ideas in his speeches. So, I had a great time with that. He
was very worried that the increasing pressure for large law firms to be
business-like was negatively impacting pro bono, and he pulled together a
conference of people from law firms to talk about pro bono. Mary
McClymont, the person at the Ford Foundation that I had worked with on
the fellowship study and had gotten to know well, attended, and then came
to me and said, I’m hearing from all of the groups, the Inc. Fund, the civil
rights groups, the ACLU, that use these large law firms that they are
becoming more resistant to taking on really big cases, really controversial
matters because it’s not business-like. And she said, “I wonder whether I
could convince you to work on a project to strengthen law firm pro bono
work.” And I said, “That would be fun.” And so they came up with a
$40,000 grant, but the catch was they needed to run it through a 501(c)(3)
couldn’t just give it to an individual, and at the time, Laurie Zelon was
the chair of the ABA Pro Bono Committee on which I had served for a
number of years, and she said, “well, we’ll sponsor it, and you just kind of
do your thing. I mean complete independence, and we’ll sponsor it.” So I
started doing that project. Sally Determan was the inspiration in many
ways for what we decided to do on the law firm project because she was
doing pro bono at Hogan, the best job in the world, and nobody knew what
most of the law firms were really doing. Nobody was writing about it
because it was the pre-American Lawyer days, and there wasn’t any place
where law firms shared that information. When we started looking at
what firms did about pro bono, we did regional listening tours where we
would bring people from firms together, and it was fascinating. You look
at D.C. D.C. was very active in pro bono. You look at Texas and that
region, and they thought United Way was pro bono, and you know, and
even then, it was probably like one tenth of one percent of their time. We
put together an advisory committee. We did this listening tour and I still
remember one day saying to Sally, “given what’s happening with billable
hours, you know, the increased expectations and also the fact that the
targets are becoming more firm, I wonder whether it would make sense to
give billable hour credit for pro bono,” which Hogan was not doing. And
she looked at me and she said, “oh, you’re so Pollyannaish. That’s so
sweet, but firms will never do that.” Well I knew that Arnold & Porter
down the street was encouraging people to spend up to 15% of their time
on pro bono and it was counted in the same way that billable time was. It
just made me realize that there was this huge vacuum of information on
best practices, and that’s where we went with the project — each firm was
unique and had a unique culture, had a unique structure, but what were the
common elements that allowed firms to continue to be very prosperous,
but to maintain pro bono despite changes in size of firm, because . . . again
this was the right place at the right time. I started doing this in ’86, or ’88
I think. I’m terrible at dates. Just as big firms were giving a whole new
meaning to big and as they were becoming increasingly the sort of power
center, dominant force and exemplar in the profession (albeit not always
loved by the rest of the profession). More and more of the law school
classes were going there, and the things that they were doing, whether it
was technology or types of practice filtered down to the rest of the
profession. There’s just no question about it. So they were becoming
larger, more prosperous, much more managed, much more focused on the
bottom line, much more aware of the bottom line, and then of course The
American Lawyer came and told everybody about what everybody else
was earning, and so then they became incredibly competitive and had to
keep up with their peers. It was a perfect time to begin to focus on this. It
was perfect time, and we looked at those firms and we . . . you know, we
could watch through a recession and a recovery. We’ve got this
wonderful wealth of longitudinal data. Now we have three recessions and
three recoveries — two recoveries, and whatever we’re in now, to see what
was working, and why was it that, for example, the four big D.C. firms
just seemed to stay committed to pro bono. It didn’t matter if they were
having the best times or the worst times. It didn’t matter if the managing
partner changed. It didn’t matter if they merged. Pro bono was a
constant, and that was true of Paul Weiss and it was true of MoFo, and we
wanted to identify some of the key elements. We tried to tease those out,
and then, without realizing how impactful this would be, our advisory
committee said, we’re in lots of different states, and every state has a
different aspirational goal about pro bono. What we really want is the
same pro bono culture across the firm. We don’t want to do different
things in different states. All the pro bono aspirational goals speak in
terms of individual attorneys, but we think as institutions, we have an
obligation. These were people like Jack London who was Bob Raven’s
protegee at Morrison & Foerster and John Pickering and Jim Jones who
was the managing partner of Arnold & Porter, and Scott Atlas who was a
very highly respected litigator at Vinson & Elkins who I’d met because he
did a death penalty case, and his client was freed. It was a really great
group of people, and they said we think we need a pro bono standard for
larger law firms, an institutional standard. We spent two long years
drafting and redrafting what became the Pro Bono Challenge ®, and it was
very much a group effort. I don’t think any of us would have ever
imagined that it would become the industry gold standard and how much it
would drive firm behavior. People said to us, three or five percent of
billable hours, are you crazy? That’s money right off our profits, and we
won’t be competitive anymore; we’re going to lose money. It’s like
money walking out the door. How can we do that? And now, it’s
considered, you know, entirely feasible and doable and everybody strives
toward it, and it’s really — it’s just amazing. The people on that advisory
committee, particularly Jim Jones and there was a guy named Curt Caton
who was at Heller Ehrman, which was another firm that had, the late
lamented Heller Ehrman, had a terrific tradition, literally just picked up
their briefcases, and they were like the Willy Lomans of pro bono. They
went out on the road [Laughter] to sell pro bono to firms. We had very
hostile reactions. There were some firms and some people who were just
furious about the Challenge, and sent us really hot letters and tried to stop
the effort, and it was very controversial. It’s funny to look back on it, but
very, controversial.
Ms. Knievel: Did you expect it to be as controversial as it was at the time?
Ms. Lardent: We knew that it was. We deliberately did not bring in bar associations or
the ABA House of Delegates, and we didn’t bring in public interest people
because we were very concerned that they would not be as aggressive and
onerous. One of the things about the public interest community is they
really value process — sometimes more than outcomes. They value
process, and the fact that they weren’t consulted made them furious. So
they were really angry with me, and yeah there were firms that probably
shouldn’t be named, but some of the New York firms that were appalled at
the idea. In some firms some conservative people were outraged because
they saw this as a takeover by the radical left, and there were just all kinds
of exciting things going on. What we did as a strategy which worked well
was, before we unveiled the Challenge, we got 48 charter signatories and
we got geographic diversity. We got highly respected firms. We got
firms that were among the most prosperous firms, and so when we went
out to recruit Challenge firms, we already had that base. There was a
rational justification for what we did, including the principles and the
definition which really very much tied into what we had seen about
successful, longstanding economic-cycle resistant pro bono efforts at
firms. We incorporated all of that. One of the great stories, and people at
Wilmer Hale tell this story all the time, was that John Pickering was very
much involved in this effort, and very excited about it. We were housed at
the time at Arnold & Porter. Jim Jones, who was one of the key people
involved in the drafting clearly was planning to have Arnold & Porter be
the first firm, and John Pickering, who was then probably in his late 70s,
signed the challenge on behalf of what was then Wilmer Cutler Pickering,
and hand carried it over to our office so that they were the first charter
signatory. And, as his partners always remind me, he then went back and
reported to the formal leadership of the firm what he had done and how he
knew that of course they were completely behind him, which they were.
He also was very close friends with Justice Brennan who had just retired
and was not in great health, but very excited about this, and Justice
Brennan agreed to write a letter on his Supreme Court Justice stationery to
all the firms. It went out to about 500 law firms inviting them to
participate in the Challenge. I still treasure my copy of that letter, and
then we did the visits, and we did road shows, and we talked to people and
we jaw-boned, and we got another I think 50 or so firms, and then we did
a kick-off event. The kick-off event was, I have to say, quite wonderful.
We asked firms that were Challenge signatories to send us stories to tell us
about what difference pro bono had made, all kinds of stories, and we put
them all together, and then we selected a few firms and a few people, and
we brought them and their clients in and we thought about doing this at the
ABA. We thought about trying to do at the Supreme Court. Where we
ended up was at a church that was part of N Street Village which is a . . .
it’s a multi-disciplinary support effort for women who have been homeless
and in prison, and it deals with their health issues, mental health and
physical health, helps them with résumés, helps them reconnect with and
stay with their children, provides legal help, provides housing and
everything else. And so we did it in the church with a wonderful pastor of
the church, and we had Justice Brennan there. We had leaders of firms.
We had Janet Reno who was the Attorney General at the time, and we had
the lawyers, but the lawyers sat behind their clients, and the clients told
their story. A wonderful community-based Latino woman talked about
the partnership that began when she and a group of families were
abandoned by the owner of their building who had not paid . . . they paid
the rent. He had not paid the utilities or taxes or anything else, and they
and their children were freezing in the middle of a Boston winter, and not
only did they get the utilities turned on, but their pro bono firm worked
with them to create owner-occupied subsidized housing, and new
affordable decent housing that ten years later, had led to 500 units of
owner-occupied housing. So the clients told their stories, and it just . . .
there was something . . . because it, I think it made the focus exactly right,
and it didn’t make the lawyers look like they were being self-important.
There was the bakery. There was a bakery in one of the boroughs of New
York, and the owners announced that they just couldn’t make it work
anymore, and so the pro bono firm helped the workers, you know, keep
the bakery open as a co-op that was owned by the workers. They were
amazing stories about the power of pro bono, and about law as a force for
fairness and justice and prosperity and better lives. It made you feel about
as good about the legal profession as you could possibly imagine, and then
we all went up with the Attorney General and she visited with the women
who were staying at the N Street facility. The press was incredible. We
got really positive press in the Wall Street Journal, in the New York Times
and all kinds of places. It was really terrific.
Ms. Knievel: How did it happen that Janet Reno was there? How did that transpire?
Ms. Lardent: A number of people were close to her particularly Chesterfield Smith who
was again one of my mentors. I have to say these people, Bob Raven,
Jack Curtin in Boston, Chesterfield were people who cared so deeply
about doing the right thing. It was so important. Chesterfield took a twoperson
law firm and turned it into a 1,400-person law firm, and yet, I think
his favorite thing was figuring out how to make the world a more just
place, and he particularly . . . he loved women. He just loved women . . .
just generally, and he believed very much in them. So he mentored an
amazing number of women lawyers, and I was lucky enough to be one of
them, but Janet Reno was another. Martha Barnett, who then became
President of the ABA, and Chesterfield, along with her husband Marty
was the reason that Ruth Bader Ginsburg got on the Supreme Court. He
fought for Ruth. We had him contact Janet and she said, “this is
wonderful. I love this. This is really incredible, and I’d love to be a part
of it.” That was in 1993, and the Challenge came into effect. We had
narrowed the pro bono definition. We took out, among other things, all
work with bar associations, and . . . and this was particularly controversial
in New York, service on boards, except if you were doing legal work, part
of the reasons sometimes people go on boards. So we gave people two
years, and we gave them the option of either three or five percent because
we realized firms were in such different places. If you were a law firm in
Dallas, Texas, getting to three percent was going to be quite a struggle and
an achievement. What is really fascinating is that we have the
longitudinal data, and over the period of time from 1995 when we had the
first reports to 2007, the amount of pro bono work that firms, that the
firms undertook was, I believe it increased if I remember right, 370
percent, and more than that, the kind of work that they did, the way they
structured pro bono, their policies around things like giving parity and
billable hour credit for pro bono time all changed — literally one of the
most profound sea changes imaginable. To give it its due, it happened at a
very good time for firms for the most part — there was another recession
obviously around the tech bubble and 9-11, but for the most part, they
were great years, and the firms experienced incredible prosperity. You
could argue that it was the easier time to do pro bono, but in fact, some of
the toughest . . . years were typically those where literally for some firms,
they were wrung out of excess capacity. So the firms that particularly that
were the go-to firms for the tech community in the late 90s, they .. .
people were . .. the average number of billable hours was beyond belief.
They were turning away paying work, and so pro bono took a hit — not a
huge hit, but a hit. But what is fascinating is through an interesting
combination of factors . . . again, I’d like to think that what we’ve done is
to be very opportunistic about what’s been out there — pro bono just
became more and more institutionalized and accepted. I still remember in
the late 80s, early 90s talking to the managing partner at a firm in Chicago,
who said, “Pro bono? Our job is to provide the best possible work to our
clients and to make as much money as we can for our partners. Pro
bono?” That firm now has a full-time pro bono partner. So even things
like the American Lawyer, the advent of the American Lawyer . . . we
went to them with our leadership, people like Bob Sheehan, who is
Executive Partner of Skadden, who we knew they would listen to, and our
message to the American Lawyer was, you are doing an incredible
disservice to the profession because every year when you publish your
results, all you talk about is profits for partner, revenues. What you’re
saying is that this profession is all about money and so . . . not only is that
appalling, it’s wrong. Some would say that profit . . . oh, I need to talk
about Judge Katzmann’s book . . . remind me. That profit — that stature
and profitability and durability are tied only to money, and it’s not the
case. Firms that are only about money will not succeed. You know,
because somebody else will always be there to offer you a little bit more
and so there won’t be the loyalty, there won’t be the sense of
connectedness, there won’t be you know . . and God help you if you run
into a bad year, people will start fleeing for the hills. So, we suggested to
the American Lawyer that they needed to start using our definition of pro
bono and reporting on pro bono and they did. I’m thinking ’93, I want to
say, they started reporting . . . now, you know they have the Pro Bono
issue and they reported on pro bono. And that was really good until the
reporting on financials became even more elaborate and complex. And we
went back again and said, you’re going wrong again . . different editor,
you’re going wrong again . . . you’re doing this snapshot of firms and you
know, frankly, you’ve kind of “ghettoized” the pro bono, and it seems like
an afterthought and that’s exactly what it shouldn’t be. It really needs to
be seen as part of the identity, and the value, and the fabric, and the goal,
and the character of the firm. And, they went away and came back with a
brilliant concept and that was the A-List — measuring not only
profitability, but measuring pro bono, diversity, and associate satisfaction.
And, they, God bless them, gave as much weight to pro bono as
profitability which was terrific. And again, talk about being consciously
opportunistic, so we went to the firms and we said, “Okay, everybody
wants to move up on the A-List.” So we said: associate satisfaction, pretty
hard to predict or control; you can try your best, who knows and you
know, it’s going to vary, you know, you have a year in which you’ve got a
big case and you have everybody doing document review in the basement,
you’re going to get cranky people. You know, your bonuses were slightly
lower than Cravath’s, you’re going to get cranky people. And sometimes
for no reason that you actually understand or can predict, you are going to
get cranky people. It’s important that you do actually want to make your
associates happy and feeling as though they are growing but it’s not going
to be something that you can really control very much. Diversity, you
know, is a 10-year, 15-year project and you’re all failing at it. So, none of
you are going to look so good in this. So, the easiest, most predictable and
least expensive way to increase your score on the A-List is pro bono, and
they brought it. In 2000, we published “The Business Case for Pro Bono,”
which again, was very controversial. That again became utterly accepted.
People believe it. There was actually a study that showed that there was a
positive correlation between profitability and pro bono. And we keep
tweaking it and changing “The Business Case” as different factors become
more important but it has become an utterly accepted part of the landscape
which is great. And the A-List certainly very much helped with that. We
also used the fact that at a certain point, competition for talent was getting
so intense that I used to say if somebody who was on Law Review at one
of the top 10 law schools, said to a managing partner, “I’ll come but only
if you paint yourself green.” The managing partner would say, “Pea or
lime,” and just do it. So we used that and we started sending the
Challenge and the list of Challenge signatories out to law schools right
before interviewing season, so the students could ask about it at all of the
law schools. Just luck, but this wonderful man, Bob Katzmann, who was
at the time at Brookings decided that he wanted to do a publication on pro
bono. So, I did a chapter, in fact where I mentioned Hogan quite a bit in
the CSD, on “The Typology of Pro Bono,” it was some very law review
sounding thing. That book was also where the studying on the correlation
between profitability and pro bono came out. Most recently, we are taking
advantage of the competition for clients, the change in the client-for-life
phenomenon. We started to go to corporate counsel to have them
encourage firms to do pro bono and then started the Corporate Pro Bono
project to involve legal departments in pro bono so they weren’t feeling
hypocritical . . . also so that when they said, we want to know about your
pro bono work in their RFPs and beauty contest and retention vehicles,
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which they are doing more every day; they could do it with a clear
conscience. So, we used the war for talent, the war for clients, the fact
that the legal press was omnipresent — anything we could think of we used
as a tool to help us. And we are still doing that — we are looking at the
whole change that’s going on in terms of how associates are evaluated and
the fact that legal departments will not pay for associates who haven’t
demonstrated certain skills. We’re promoting pro bono as the way to get
your associates up to speed with core competencies, experiential work,
confidence, skills so they can become more profitable to you earlier. And
we have general counsel of Fortune 50 companies saying, “It’s not that I
won’t pay for first- or second-year associates, I won’t pay for people who
don’t have the demonstrated skills. If you show me somebody who has
been doing pro bono work and they’ve actually done motion practice or
discovery or been involved, had actual direct experience working with a
client on a negotiation or working with a non-profit group on some of their
compliance issues, that person is worth paying for.” A lot of what I do is
try to understand everything that is happening in large law firms and now
in legal departments that has nothing to do with pro bono. It’s pretty
funny since I’ve never worked in one, but what we’re able to do is look at
the things that are unhelpful and try to minimize the impact and look at the
things that could be helpful and try to maximize that in terms of pro bono.
As we went along, we evolved our work. I think it was 1989, when we
said, “Gee, we might want to get people together to talk about how to do
pro bono because there’s a lot of learning out there in the firms, and they
could do peer-to-peer learning.” We brought together that first time, 20
people. We had, I think a two-and-a-half-hour schedule. I think we were
worried that we didn’t have enough content to fill the time, but we did and
they really liked it. Our latest conference had close to 350 people,
including people from Brazil, South Africa, lots of Brits, Canadians,
Japan, Australia, the people from large firms, and people from lots and
lots of legal departments and public interest organizations and some of
them are there for two-and-a-half days — just talking about how to give
their time away better which is pretty incredible. One of the things we
continue to do is we scan the pro bono scene, we look for models and
projects that are working well. We evaluate them with a very tough
critical eye and if we think they are really effective, we publicize them.
We’re conveners and popularizers, and we use all of kinds of vehicles to
do that. What we do hasn’t changed; how we do it has changed. And the
ways people do pro bono have changed. It used to be that people viewed
pro bono has one case at a time and now we have signature projects and
major collaborations and interdisciplinary work where lawyers are
working with doctors and social workers to help at risk families. My goals
for my work are three things. I want to make good things happen. I want
to make the world a better place even if I’m doing it three steps back from
the front lines and in fact, I think I actually feel more comfortable being
three steps back. And certainly, if you think about the concept of
leverage, we’re as fully leveraged as you can get here. I mean if I think
about what the 12 people here, if we were just doing direct client service,
how many clients we service versus potentiating other people to do it. The
second thing is I really want is to work with really smart, really good
people who can teach me and who are a pleasure to work with and that
again, this work is perfect because people self-select out. If you’re a nasty
screamer, who is totally focused on what your draw is going to be this
year — very unlikely that I’m going to have much interaction with you,
which is great; I don’t want to. So, instead I’m working with people who,
from a pure logic perspective, don’t have time for this. They’re juggling
families and, other interests and jobs that are insanely busy — particularly
the people that are in our leadership, if you think about people who are
managing partners or chairs these days and general counsel. The idea that
general counsel will come and stay for two days at our seminar is insane.
Their time is measured out in nanoseconds practically and there they are.
So, that to me is just wonderful. There are so many people that I work
with at so many levels that I just learn so much from and just adore. And
then the final thing is that I don’t want to be bored. I get really easily
bored. I think I have law ADD. When I would be reading long decisions,
even if they were interesting, most of them I didn’t find that interesting
. . . it was very hard for me . . . to focus but because this is a profession,
and a legal system that flux, we at PBI rarely do the same thing twice. I
love doing different things; I need to. So in the . . . some kind of
– 107 –
wonderfully lucky way I’ve sort of hit on what for me is the work that
gives me exactly what I need and I feel very, very blessed by that. Really.
It’s incredible and it’s very intellectually challenging. It’s really
challenging to figure out . . . how to respond to these changes. One
example that I’ll give you is when everything went awry in 2008, 2009;
we began to do what we always do, which is on an individual confidential
basis, working with firms that were laying people off and/or deferring
incoming associates or both. We did a late-breaking session on the issue
at our conference and we realized it was such a huge phenomenon that
doing individual technical assistance was not really addressing the need.
And so we literally stepped back, did some research and the week after the
conference, put together a paper to provide guidance to firms and to public
interest organizations on what their options were in terms of deferred
associates and sabbaticals and that sort of thing related to the economy.
We tried to show them how nuanced the issue was, both for firms and for
public interest organizations; some of the hidden costs, some of the
concerns, some of the issues and the continuum of options all the way
from the firm actually helps place the individual with a particular public
interest organization that they know, have worked with, or vetted, to the
free-agency model, which is, you can get $60,000, go out there and find
something, and the pros and cons of each — definitely not loving the free
agency situation. We got that out in a week and then did conference calls
and training sessions and webinars around it for like all of the legal
directors at the ACLU, people from a range of public interest groups, all
the law firms in a particular city, to try to help as much as we could.
There wasn’t one central place that people could go and it was chaotic and
even with that help there were missed opportunities and some wasted
opportunities definitely and some people who got caught in the middle in a
not good way. But fundamentally we really tried to help rationalize the
phenomenon and make it as productive as it could possibly be, and then
we surveyed the legal services organizations about their experience. They
were, many of them, initially unbelievably skeptical about this. I mean
these were after all not firm people who had chosen to go to public interest
jobs. They didn’t have a lot of choice, and so the feeling was they don’t
really care about our mission; they don’t care about our clients. There was
the issue of people who even at a reduced compensation level were
making more than far more senior people at the public interest
organization. Some of the legal services programs were unionized; how
do you deal with that, and even though they got the person for free there
were student loan issues, there were insurance issues, there were “where
do you find the space,” “where to find a computer for them” issues, and
these very beleaguered programs. Almost 98% of the organizations that
reported to us in the survey, and we got a very good response rate, they
said the experience was incredible and they would absolutely, absolutely
do it again; that these lawyers had added so much. Not only in terms of
the clients that they helped but just what they had brought with them in
terms of enthusiasm and new ideas and new approaches and the .
slightly above 2% who were not satisfied it was because they didn’t get
any deferred associates.
Tape 5
This is Erica Knievel interviewing Esther Lardent on November 9, 2011. We are at Esther’s
office at the Pro Bono Institute, and the purpose of this recording is to record her oral history for
the Women Trailblazers Project. This is Tape Number 5. Esther when our last tape ended we
were discussing your move to D.C., your work on capital punishment which Sally Determan
persuaded you into doing. I’d like to talk a little bit more about the Pro Bono Institute and its
birth; its evolution and your time here in D.C.
Ms. Lardent: Absolutely. Well Sally for years had said to me you really have to come
to D.C. It’s the right place for you and I think she was absolutely right. I
mean I am after all a policy wonk, and D.C. is filled with policy wonks
and I love being in a place where the cab drivers can tell you what the
burning issue is in Congress that day. So I came as we’ve discussed to
serve as a chief consultant for the ABA Post-Conviction Death Penalty
Project. But I also continued to do different kinds of consulting. I think
we’ve talked about some of that. I did consulting for the Ford Foundation;
I consulted sometimes for state bar associations. I worked, as I always
had, part-time on the death penalty project, part-time on the law firm
project and then also did other consulting. For the law firm project, we
put together an advisory group because the ABA project didn’t necessarily
have people from firms at all, and we wanted people from firm leadership
who could not only tell us what was going on but also be effective
communicators and missionaries for whatever we found out. We did this
series of listening tours and in order to attract firm people to them, we
looked for in-house general counsel to speak because even then the client
voice was a very important voice and one leader of a law firm who would
send the right message about the importance of pro bono. It was really a
struggle to find these people because most legal departments really were
not involved with pro bono and frankly there were firm leaders who really
cared about pro bono, but it wasn’t something that was being discussed.
What we found were some terrific firm programs — many of them in
Washington, D.C. and in San Francisco. There were enormous regional
variations. One important concept was this notion of institutional support
— that just as the firm is an institution rewarded and acknowledged and
pushed lawyers to help meet the firm’s revenue goals, the firm would have
the same role with respect to pro bono. The notion that pro bono wasn’t
just left to a tiny segment of the usual suspects. There needed to be much
more broad participation, and frankly we thought it should be both
associates and partners. Because . . . well, to broaden the nature of the
work, to give it heft and responsibility. Having some kind of some focus
within the firm on pro bono, so it wasn’t utterly decentralized and ad hoc,
whether that was a pro bono committee or just a couple of people who
cared about pro bono or a non-lawyer coordinator or in a very, very small
number of firms then, a lawyer who spent part-time or very, very rarely
full-time of their work or, in some firms, very, very few like Hogan, an
actual practice area, a pro bono department. And we saw what some of
the impediments were. And one of the impediments was that as firms
were growing, even in D.C. where you saw a lot of certainly litigation and
regulatory work, their transactional and business parts of the firm were
growing very quickly. And, with the exception of the late great Howrey,
you know firms just were not dominated by litigators anymore, either in
terms of firm governance or certainly in terms of work. It was like the
New York-ization of firms, if you will. And yet most pro bono work,
whether it was a simple individual matter or a big class action suit, was
very litigation focused, the people who were active in pro bono, people in
pro bono leadership positions, were all litigators who really understood
nothing about [Laughter] business and transaction work and really just
didn’t see a role for pro bono there. And, out in the public interest
community, very little awareness of or interest in providing transactional
opportunities, because it was all litigation based as well. What we began
to do was to try to look for ways to overcome that. We looked at
malpractice insurance, because there were some questions about
malpractice insurance and many, many public interest organizations didn’t
have malpractice coverage for pro bono lawyers, so we worked with
insurers, not my strong suit — [Laughter] insurance coverage — but were
able to get reasonably affordable policies. At every stage we’ve tried to
figure out what was working for pro bono, what was working against pro
bono. And for the people who were doing it well, the firms that were
doing it well, what could we learn from them and how could we use them.
Once we figured out that law firms are competing and conforming
institutions, though, we had it knocked. Because there were enough law
firms really doing great work that we could talk about what was possible
and replicable. So a couple of other things we did that were, I think
critical, and one came from the field and one came from us. So the firm
said to us, what does it mean, I mean, how much pro bono is really
reasonable? We don’t know because in Connecticut they say . . . but in,
you know New York and then in Los Angeles and, you know, it’s even
different throughout California, and we don’t know. And so we came up
with this idea of Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge and a number of people,
Jim Jones, who was then the head of Arnold & Porter, Curt Caton who
was the head of Heller Ehrman, Jack London and Bob Raven from MoFo
and then Scott Atlas actually from Vinson & Elkins in Houston, and Jack
Martin who was then the General Counsel of Ford Motor Company,
because we just thought it would be good to have somebody who cared
about pro bono from the in-house world, started a process of drafting and
redrafting and redrafting and redrafting what would then turn out to be the
law firm Pro Bono Challenge. We decided on the 3 or 5% option in part
because there were firms that were doing nothing and there were firms that
were doing 10%, you know. The other thing I would say about the
Challenge was the most important and the most difficult thing was the
definition. You know, get a group of lawyers together and basically, you
know, write a statute and a statutory definition, and it’s a piece of work.
The good news was that at the same time that we were doing this, because
I was on the ABA committee on pro bono, we were rewriting Model Rule
6.1 on pro bono and I did a lot of the drafting of that. So what came out of
the ABA process was very much a compromise. It includes time spent on
bar committees as pro bono and it includes work done at a discount as pro
bono. So when we looked at a definition through the filter of large firms,
we said, it can’t be the same standard. First of all, people in large firms
tend to be bar junkies, so including bar work would accomplish little.
Second, discounting, you know, then probably $600-$700 hourly fees,
doesn’t actually meaningfully increase access to justice; I don’t even want
to think about how many drafts it went through.
Ms. Knievel: What were the primary criticisms?
Ms. Lardent: Well, there were a couple. I mean, to some extent you had firms, Cravath
is a great example, who simply felt that they were so unique that they
would never sign on to anything that anybody else would sign on to. And
they’re still not signed on to the Challenge. There were a lot of places that
thought that 3 or 5% was too much, that that was just a crazy idea. In
New York there were a lot of people who were angry because we
wouldn’t include service on the Board of the Legal Aid Society, which is,
you know great, but includes fundraising for the Legal Aid Society, which
does not use legal skills. To some extent it was just the idea of who’s this
ridiculous little organization with one-and-a-half staff people who are
telling us what to do, right? We asked for more hours and we asked for
them as a progressive standard, which I think was exactly right for law
firms. And, unlike almost anybody else, we articulated a benchmark, and
we actually made people report to us and themselves on it. There are pro
bono standards all over the place and they mean nothing. Because nobody
ever really looks at them — certainly doesn’t look at them, as in our case,
in a disaggregated form, and do things like kick people off if they don’t
meet them. Now we have a long trajectory before we do that. But still,
we do do it. Everything in the firm world was moving toward
benchmarking, so the Challenge was a good strategy. What we didn’t
expect was that we would then become a quasi-regulatory agency that
would issue decisions on whether things counted or didn’t count. It’s
gotten to the point now where it’s literally like angels dancing on the head
of a pin. But we have hundreds of pages of explanatory answers about
what counts and what doesn’t count. We’re about to do a renewed issue
of it. And we’ve almost never changed the Challenge, and the result,
which is, again another thing we didn’t anticipate, is that we have almost
20 years’ worth of longitudinal data so that when, for example, pro bono
hours dipped in 2010, we didn’t lie about that or try to fudge that. That
was a significant, you know, 8.4 or so percent drop, but we also didn’t get
crazy about it because what we’ve seen is, we’ve now been through four
recessions in those years. And what we’ve seen is that when you do have
an economic downturn. We say to firms, you really don’t want to RIF
everybody because then you’re going to have to hire back those same
people, and it’s an incredible waste of money and resources and
everything else. So for people that you really want to keep but maybe
they’re in a practice area that’s going through a little bit of a downturn,
you can keep them busy with pro bono. They can keep up their skills and
expand their skills and be visible and their morale is good. And firms do
that. It’s that year of recovery where everybody’s sort of sitting there
going, “I have to do work. I have to show people I can bill.” And where
the firms are too nervous to staff up so that people are very tight on time,
at least in certain specialties, then it’s always tough. And so we saw that
as just another tough year, but it is so wonderful, I think, to have actual
data and fact-based information and longitudinal trends. It really helps us
to understand what’s going on. And obviously the folks that we work
with, we now have such a depth of understanding of individual firms, of
what’s changing right now in firms, so that we understand a lot about
firms that isn’t about pro bono, so that was great. And what all this led to
was the firms taking the kinds of things that we had talked about, breadth
of participation, leadership from the top, projects that would . . . like
signature projects or rotations or externships that would frankly boost
hours pretty quickly, but that also are good, I mean they’re not just good
for boosting hours, they are actually good for boosting productivity and
impact, firms began to take those far more seriously. They started to
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professionalize their pro bono staff, and things just started to build
tremendously, so that was an incredible boost. I think we can talk a little
about and where we’re going in pro bono, but maybe also talk about the
corporate stuff and then maybe also talk about women in the profession
and diversity a little bit where that’s going too.
Tape 6
This is Erica Knievel interviewing Esther Lardent on February 22, 2012. We’re at Esther’s
office at the Pro Bono Institute, and the purpose of this recording is to record Esther’s oral
history for the Women Trailblazers Project. This is tape number six. Now Esther as we
discussed the last time when we ended we were discussing the Pro Bono Challenge and the
development of the A-List.
Ms. Lardent: We had a number of people who were leaving law firms and a couple of
legal department leaders who spent a lot of time in shaping and drafting
and finalizing the Challenge, and I think I may have mentioned that it was
really quite controversial in so many ways. I mean there were a lot of
people who thought that the 3% or 5% level was simply not feasible; that
that would bankrupt firms or you know really reduce profitability and that
sort of thing. There were people who did not like the definition that we
created partly because we excluded things like service on bar committees
and service on boards except when people are actually doing legal work
and so that was really controversial. And there were a lot of people whose
attitude was, you know we’re a private partnership and how dare you tell
us what we should be doing. And so we really weren’t sure whether it
would have legs and what I think is interesting is that we still don’t have a
majority of big firms who signed on. Primarily honestly because we
simply haven’t had the resources to go out and beat the bushes because it
is a kind of one-on-one salesmanship that you need to make it happen.
But what has happened is that in part because of the American Lawyers’
use of our definition and in part because we began to issue reports about
the Challenge that were more than simply statistical reports but did some
analysis of where firms were and what the trends were and what was
going on, it became essentially an industry standard. So even firms that
are not signatories to the Challenge will often use the Challenge as their
goal or their benchmark for their pro bono work, which I think is really
interesting. But the thing I think that we didn’t expect, and if I repeat
myself just stop me, was that, and we should have, with all these lawyers
involved that what we would be spending an incredible amount of our
time doing is answering questions about what counts. I almost feel like
we’re a regulatory agency that issues decisions and opinions. We actually
have a publication on what counts and people ask us questions and that’s a
significant portion of the work that we do with firms and what we’ve also
seen which is very interesting is people like law schools and others again
adopting the definition and then using it too, the “What Counts”
publication to do it. And given lawyers’ natural tendency to parse
language as much as you can we get some pretty amazing questions, and
our philosophy at some level is you know let’s not figure out how many
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
angels can dance on the head of a pin; let’s just do the right thing and not
worry. I mean there are things that are clearly outside the scope and you
know let’s not spend a lot of time arguing around the edges. People want
a level of precision and want clarity, and so we keep saying it’s a factbased
process and so we try to not issue any kind of broad ex cathedra sort
of opinions but it’s amazing how creative a bunch of lawyers can be about
well, does this count, what about this, well I would argue this, and it’s
very funny. The other thing that people do which is quite interesting is
that they use us as the bad guys in making some hard decisions so you
may have a partner’s pet project that is a perfectly lovely thing to do but it
really is community service and not pro bono, and they don’t want to be
the person to tell the partner, and so they call us up knowing what we’re
going to say, and then they say well you know we think it’s a great project
but really you know those mean people at the Pro Bono Institute won’t
count it.
But I think that says something about the level of authority that comes
from PBI, because if it wasn’t universally recognized that way then there
wouldn’t be this deference and these consultations, right?
Yes, and we spend a huge amount of time getting those statistics right.
We’re now working, of course on a pro bono basis from them, with
Deloitte with what we lovingly refer to as our very own math geeks who
have helped to create a program and formulas that will allow us to slice
and dice that information both for the current year and many years of
longitudinal data, slice and dice comparisons with AmLaw; information
on revenues, profits for the partner and that sort of thing. So we can do
some interesting, not causation, but correlation and look for patterns in a
way that I think is really exciting; I can’t believe I’m getting excited about
this since I’m not exactly a math fan, but it’s really quite wonderful.
Ms. Knievel: How did that come about?
Ms. Lardent: We’re actually working with them on two projects which is really quite
exciting. What happened was I got a call probably 5 years ago, out of the
blue this guy called or emailed me and said I’m trying to create a culture
of pro bono in professional services and the corporate world outside of
lawyers; I think this is a great thing and why should lawyers be the only
ones to do it and would love to talk to you about it. So we started to talk.
He’s somebody who is a tech person and he’s kind of got a systems and
engineering approach so what he was doing was taking what we did which
was honestly sort of instinctual and opportunistic and reactive and he saw
it as all part of one great fabulous strategic plan. Which I wish it were but
it wasn’t. He had started an organization called the Taproot Foundation
and the theory behind it is that giving time is like giving money and you
should spend the same kind of care and have the same kind of impact. I
ended up going on their board, and I was the only lawyer on the board and
it was fascinating figuring out how they could get IT professionals,
marketing people, HR people to provide free services doing exactly what
they do for their corporations or professional services firms for non-profit
organizations and I think they’ve done their thousandth project now. So
it’s very, very exciting that they did that. And they’re working with . . .
the Corporation for National and Community Service. They put on a
program in New York on pro bono, and they do call it “pro bono” you
know, and how companies could kind of do more of it. And one of the
people who spoke was a man named Barry Salzberg, who at the time was
the U.S. CEO for Deloitte. He’s now their worldwide CEO and he was
talking about pro bono in exactly the way that the best firms talk about pro
bono. They give billable hour credit; they try to be strategic about what
they’re doing; it was really incredible. And with him was the person who
was in charge of community affairs and corporate social responsibility
who’s in the D.C. area who I just thought was incredible, and so I
encouraged him to go on the board of this organization and we got to
know each other through the board, and I just loved the work they were
doing. They really do big time-intensive projects where they bring their
consulting and accounting and business skills to bear. For our annual
dinner, we have co-chairs and I thought it would be great to have a CEO
rather than just a GC; I mean I thought sort of pushing it up the ladder
would sort of signal something really important to the legal community
and so I asked Evan Hochberg who’s the CSR person, whether or not we
might be able to get Barry to be our co-chair, and for scheduling reasons
he couldn’t do it, but he suggested the man who is the CEO of their
Financial Advisory Services division, which works a lot with law firms
and legal departments. The CEO is a guy named David Williams, and
David came to town, and we had lunch so that we could kind of get to
know each other a little bit better, and definitely it was the work version of
falling in love. He’s this amazing guy who has been one of the real
drivers of pro bono. He’s a Wharton MBA; not a lawyer but knows firms
and legal department because he’s worked with them for years. When the
tsunami in Indonesia hit, he basically went to the company and said here’s
some things that we can do to help and committed them to something like
$50 million in pro bono work out there, and he himself took off a big
stretch of time and went to work in the area. And I just find him to be a
really remarkable person because he’s just . . . he’s very thoughtful but he
explains things in a very clear and simple and wonderful way. He became
a dinner co-chair, and we started talking about ways that we could work
together. One of the things that we’ve been thinking about for years but
that really has been accelerated by having more contact with companies
and with legal departments, is the whole question of what difference is pro
bono making, and how can you use transparency and measurement to
improve and hone pro bono programs. The mantra in corporations and
legal departments is “what gets measured, gets valued; what’s valued gets
done,” and I what I saw was that we had done a wonderful thing with
respect to the Challenge in articulating a benchmark and this idea that
large law firms would have a single unitary goal, but the downside was
that what we were measuring was hours and we were measuring
participation. We weren’t measuring anything else, and while that was
important and meaningful information, it was not sufficient, so the vision
that we had was you could have two firms each with 500 lawyers each
doing an average of 100 hours per lawyer. It was great, right. And one
firm in terms of what it was doing externally was certainly helping some
people but doing it in a pretty random atomized unstructured way. So
people got help but the larger problems didn’t get solved. The other firm
could be doing it in a strategic way; the example I always try to think
about is you could do 200 landlord-tenant cases for clients, and it would
be important work, it makes a huge difference, those clients have
benefited, but in terms of any kind of larger impact, you might not
succeed. What if you did 200 landlord-tenant cases but you did them
where the landlord was the worst slum landlord in the world and what you
were basically trying to do was to do targeted litigation that held them to a
particular standard and made it at a certain point economically unviable
for them to have this horrible housing. A lot of people think we’re talking
about class actions versus individual matters. That’s really not what it’s
about. But it is about having an impact beyond simply the immediate
benefit to the client. We started to think about the firms’ best year, was
over five million hours of pro bono contributed, but the number of people
who still couldn’t get legal help was barely moving and the number of
people in poverty certainly was getting worse. It’s not like lawyers have
the magic key to take people out of poverty, but creating better solutions
seemed like a very important thing, and yet what we were getting from
people was here’s how many people we helped and here’s how many
hours we spent and here’s how many people did it: inputs and outputs, but
not outcomes and not impact, and so I was just very frustrated because I
felt as though this was the next natural thing for pro bono, and I didn’t
know how to get there so what Deloitte has done is committed thousands
of hours of pro bono work to help us to work on doing a couple of things
to aid in metrics and measurement of pro bono. The first is to develop a
generic but hopefully tailorable framework for law firms and legal
departments to be able to measure meaningfully what difference their pro
bono is making. And we’re actually doing it in a way that looks at two
different things. It looks at business benefit and it looks at social good.
Because we talk a lot about the business case for pro bono; we think
people have really bought into that, but we don’t have any really hard
data. I mean it’s all very impressionistic, and so this is a way to actually
track things like skills development or reputation, visibility or enhanced
relationships with clients. It’s also a chance to take a look at what
difference are you making in terms of the benefit to the individual client
and some of the ripple effects of that. So if you keep a family from being
homeless; if you keep them in their home; there are all kinds of things that
happen that are very positive in their lives that are not easy to measure, but
they actually can be measured, and then beyond that you may be having an
impact on the overall functioning on the legal system. Maybe by doing
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those 200 cases you have really gotten the attention of the housing court
judges, and so they’re not going to do the kind of gavel ’em in, gavel ’em
out on housing cases. So we are spending enormous amounts of time and
Deloitte is spending enormous amounts of time figuring this out. Our goal
is to be as realistic and limited and as careful about what we’re trying to
measure as possible so that we don’t take up a lot of time measuring
instead of doing, and we only get the information that really is meaningful
and that people can use. The most important thing about it though that we
think is what happens before you measure, and what happens after setting
goals; it’s amazing when we ask people what their goals are for their pro
bono program. They typically give back to us the Challenge goals — a
majority of partners and associates — and 3 or 5% of billable time. And
again that’s useful, but you should sort of drill down and do more in terms
of goals so we want people to be thinking about for your pro bono
program looking back a year from now what would success look like for
you. And setting some goals, some of them quantifiable some of them,
probably not so, doing that work before you start measuring and then
figuring out how you’re going to measure progress towards those goals
right. And then at the end, most importantly, taking what you’ve learned
and actually taking a long hard look at it. Not because the statistics are
determinative but because they cause you to ask the right questions, right?
And then from that doing this continuous improvement loop. Thanks to
David and to Evan. They’re giving us literally thousands of hours of free
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Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
time to do that. And then . . . I put David on my board because I loved
being around him and learning from him, and he was at one of our board
meetings and we started talking about the report we do on the Challenge
and our frustration that we know we could go deeper but we don’t know
how to do that. So he said, well you know I’ll give you a bunch of people
to do this, and so they’re our math geeks which is great.
Over the course of your career one common thread running throughout is
that you seem to develop solutions and innovative ways of thinking about
issues that others haven’t come up with themselves that haven’t been
articulated the same way previously. How does that process happen for
you?
Well I think . . . it doesn’t sound very modest, but I think you’re right. I
think there are really two things I think that drive that. The first is that I
don’t seem to have the group-think conventional wisdom gene. I just
don’t. I mean even in my politics which you know are clearly very left
there’s inconsistency and heresy. So I think some of it is that it’s almost
like being a little bit outside of things and being a little bit of an observer
and looking at things from that distance. The second think — do you know
the movie “Working Girl” at all; you probably were about three when it
came out. There is this scene in “Working Girl” where Melanie Griffith is
sitting on the Staten Island ferry and she has like one newspaper and a
magazine and she cuts them out and puts them together. I spend a lot of
my time reading different things or listening to different people and then
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trying to see if they can fit together. It was just like what I was saying
about what law firms can learn from corporate social responsibility. To
me I just see those connections, so I think some of it is just that I like to
think in quirky, unorthodox, in-your-face ways a little bit. But the other
thing I think is; one of the things I think that is also fairly consistent in my
career is that I’ve been lucky enough to work with different segments of
the profession or society. One of the great things about what we do is we
talk to public interest people, and they have certain perspectives, a way of
doing things that are really terrific and interesting and useful. And then
we talked to corporate people and they bring other perspectives to the
table, and then we talk to law firm people and we can take all that and
integrate it. We’re very siloed — a very siloed profession — so people don’t
talk to each other about how do you establish value or how do you do the
very best you can. I think it’s not only a missed opportunity, it’s almost
dangerous because people can get very blinded by what they do every day.
One of the things that we’re doing at the conference is we’re looking at
other ways that law firms and legal departments can help public interest
organizations because they’re so hard pressed. Obviously money,
obviously pro bono service but they don’t often even realize how much the
wealth of resources and information and knowledge that they have, and so
we’re using as a case study as an example not limited to this but I think
it’s intriguing. You know a lot of legal departments use a Six Sigma as
sort of a tool for planning and design and continuous improvement and
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
everything else and there’s a firm that uses Six Sigma Lite, and they’ve
used it as a firm very successfully. So they ended up training a pro bono
program in Six Sigma Lite and it has changed . . and so the program has
made these changes, some big, some small in how it operates, and that
makes it a much more effective institution. So I think that’s what it is. I
think some of it is just the way I think and some of it is literally
opportunity and exposure that I’ve been very lucky to have.
Would you say that some people have more difficulty talking across
groups; across title; across silos?
Yes. I do think so. When they’re talking to people in a different part of
the profession or in a different profession completely they come with a lot
of preconceptions and I have to say the one thing I think has been
consistently true for me is I judge people not by where they sit but by what
they do in terms of good works. When we first started working with firms
there were a lot of people in the public interest community that basically
were like well these people represent the establishment, I mean they’re on
the other side of cases which is true somewhat, but actually turns out not
to be very much true when you look at what legal services programs do.
And so how could they possibly understand and feel compassion for poor
people or really be zealous in the way they’re doing it. It certainly helped
me that I did the death penalty work because here you had people bonding
with and committed to and just killing themselves advocating on behalf of
the most unlikely clients. I mean clients who were terrible people who
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had done terrible things in some cases but in more cases were just deeply,
deeply troubled people and you watched people bond with them and care
about them. The other thing is the fact that in the first four years of my
life I was surrounded by a lot of languages and a lot of varied people. It’s
almost like having language facility. I can corporate speak. I can law firm
speak and I can public interest speak, and I sort of feel as though some of
what I do is literally translation across those communities. And I really
love . . . not only can I do it but I love it like learning new languages and
then the context for them. There’s a wonderful book by a woman named
Tina Rosenberg called “Lost in Translation.” She comes from a family
that survived the war. She moved to Canada from Poland when she was
young but not an infant, and one of the things she talks about in the book
was how, having come late to English, she just loved the language, and I
think some of that really may be literally language facility in the same way
that if you learn German or Italian when you’re three . . . it is still there
somewhere in your brain so I think that may be a piece of it too. But a lot
of it really is that this notion that I view everybody regardless of where
they work or what they do as a potential public interest lawyer. I just
assume if they’re not doing it they just haven’t been asked yet or we
haven’t found the thing that excites them yet, but I know that there’s a
public interest lawyer wanting to get out there and our job is to sort of
empower them to do that.
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
In one way you were beginning to talk about what you did that was
through corporate counsel departments; it might seem an unlikely
audience for some, but can you talk about how that came about?
Sure. And to the extent that the public interest community is suspicious
about large law firms, you can imagine how they feel about large
corporations, right. When we were still working with law firms we would
occasionally have somebody that we had worked with at a firm who then
had moved to a legal department and who asked us to help. As I think I
mentioned to you, one of the things I think we’re very clear about is what
we know and what we don’t know, you know I sound like Rumsfeld, and
we knew that we didn’t understand how legal departments worked; that
they were very different from firms and we didn’t understand them and so
we really shied away from doing any of that although I did even before we
had any formal project, one of the people that advised us on the Challenge
was a man who was the then General Counsel of Ford Motor Company,
Jack Martin, lovely guy who had come from one of the white shoe New
York firms and gone in-house at Ford and who looked like a New York
white shoe lawyer; you know the immaculate suit and had kind of a
daunting presence. But he and I met; I don’t even remember how,
probably like some ABA thing, and it turned out he just had a tremendous
passion for pro bono work and for legal services too and so he helped us
with . . . we pulled him into the Challenge because we thought it would be
great to get some legal department perspective. He was bound and
determined to get in-house counsel involved in pro bono, and Ford had
one of the earliest pro bono programs, and I worked with him to kind of
help spread the word, and we went to meetings, and we talked about what
it would look like and that sort of thing, and he was just very far ahead of
his time. And then the other person that kind of piqued my interest in this
was a guy named Tom Gottschalk who had been at Kirkland and then
became the General Counsel of GM. And I was speaking about pro bono
at some ABA event I think, and this guy came over to me and said, “Will
you help me start a pro bono clinic for GM in Detroit,” and I said, “Sure
I’d be happy to,” and so we worked on that, and then GM ended up having
quite a vibrant program, and we became quite close. He ended up being
one of the co-chairs of our corporate advisory board once we formalized
the project. So we’ve been thinking about it but in a lot of ways it was a
little bit like the metrics thing; we didn’t have the skill and capacity, and
we didn’t want to do something if we weren’t going to do it with
confidence that we knew what we were talking about. At the end of the
Clinton administration I think the President was very much concerned
about legacy, and as somebody who had always been very committed to
civil rights and affirmative action, he had this One America initiative. The
goal was obviously to increase diversity and to reduce the income gap, the
education gap, the achievement gap for people of color. And one of the
initiatives that he focused on was Lawyers for One America, and Eric
Holder, who was then Deputy or Associate Attorney General under Janet
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Reno was very much involved in it, and so Eric pulled together a group of
people to talk about it, and the goal was increasing diversity in the
profession so people from the bars of color were all very involved but also
increasing pro bono to people in communities of color, so they pulled me
- I’d been working with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under
Law; they were involved, so they pulled me in and various groups from
around the profession were a part of it including people from the
Association of Corporate Counsel, and we were in Eric Holder’s office
probably once every two weeks trying to make this happen, and what he
wanted were very clear commitments of what we were going to be doing.
As I started talking to people at ACC, I really got excited about the
organization and what they were doing. It’s a very well-run thoughtful
organization, and they know their membership base, they know how to
give value, and they’re very highly respected, and so they have a voice
and they have communications vehicles and everything else. And as we
were thinking about sort of what commitments we were going to make,
the ACC folks came to me and said, “You know we know in-house, you
know pro bono, let’s do in-house pro bono together.” They compared it to
the Reese’s peanut butter commercial where one person has chocolate and
one person has peanut butter, and they run into each other, and that was
the visual. So they did a proposal for a joint project to their board, and the
board thought it was a great idea. We jointly hired a director of the project
who was actually somebody who had been Hogan, a woman named Lily
Garcia, and we developed a website and we began to figure out . . . our
goals — we had two things that we wanted to do. The first was we wanted
to increase the visibility and the sense of feasibility of pro bono for inhouse
departments by highlighting departments that were actually doing it
because there was no place where that was happening. So, for example,
we ghosted a piece for Ken Frazier when he was the GC at Merck about,
“Why I Do Pro Bono.” Our goal was to turn the notion of in-house pro
bono from an oxymoron to an inevitability. The second thing that we
wanted to do was to figure out why; pro bono was more difficult for inhouse
legal staff — what were the obstacles and problems for people inhouse.
We set out to identify those obstacles and to figure out solutions.
We put together, as we had with the law firm project, an advisory board,
except that because it was the corporate world and it’s a very hierarchical
world we made it all GCs. No substitutions, nobody at a different level,
which was quite controversial again, but we did it. And we just started
researching and talking and understanding in-house departments. Now,
when we talk to a legal department that wants to set a pro bono program,
we can tell you the first six things that they’re going to say or ask about.
We know. The answers and the solutions are different for different
departments. It’s very much kind of individualized, expert consulting. In
some ways, we’re really a consulting firm in a lot of ways. But we know
exactly what the problems are and we really set out then, to solve some of
the problems. Some of them are pretty easy — malpractice insurance. We
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figured out simple ways for legal departments to get coverage because
they often don’t cover their folks through a policy but rather
indemnification, as employees and agents of the company. The whole
notion of skill sets and the size of departments and therefore the need for
small, finite, predictable pieces of work initially so that they wouldn’t, you
know, worry that they were going to bite off more than they could chew.
And also trying to find sources of transactional pro bono opportunity, not
that that was all people wanted to do, but to make sure that there were
ways in which they could add value by doing what they do every day.
What started to happen was that all these incredibly supportive pro bono
people started to come out of the woodwork. It’s like they’ve been
waiting for somebody to whisper “pro bono.” It took a while. For a while
it was a little quiet. We were pushing a lot of stuff out. We weren’t
necessarily getting stuff back, and then all of a sudden people just started
coming to us more and more and more and people were talking about it,
and they wanted to do programs and we did a pro bono summit in
Tennessee, and that led to this consortium of legal departments in
Tennessee that began working to strengthen pro bono and to raise funds
for legal services programs. It just felt like everything you touched just
bloomed. Now, what we’re doing, is taking a very long hard look at it all.
I should say we started that project with one full-time person, that was it,
and then as much time as I could sort of dedicate to it, and Susan Hackett
who was then the Vice President at ACC, could dedicate to it. And then
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we used other resources, so we used the ACC Docket, which is read by all
these in-house people, to publicize what we’re doing. We used the ACC
meeting. They have a listsery of chief legal officers — we used that. There
were all these tools that ACC had that we didn’t have. And they
understood corporate speak, so the pace of our work increased, and the
pace of the requests increased. And then we started thinking about more
sophisticated projects, more sophisticated work, what happens when you
have a program that’s been around for a while and it’s going to the next
level. We still have only three people in that project. We have the
Director and Assistant Director and a project assistant. And I — just as
with the law firm project — I just continue to be astounded at how much
they’re able to get done. We’re trying to do more and more off-the-shelf
work, so that when we’re working with departments individually, which is
obviously time intensive and high touch, we’re doing it in a way that is
tailored to them, and the initial steps and information, you know we’ve
taken care of in a much more time efficient manner for us and for them.
Ms. Knievel: And that’s what I was wondering because in a sense, the development of
this project sounds like a microcosm for PBI where you start off with
limited human resources.
Ms. Lardent: Yeah.
Ms. Knievel: And then the demand develops . . .
Ms. Lardent: Um hmm.
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Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
To such an extent that it requires going to the next level. How have you,
how has that happened and how have you leveraged those resources to
accomplish much more than you thought possible?
I think some of the fact that we’ve focused and limited what we’ve done is
very important. I look at organizations like Law Works, for example, in
the UK and say, “Wow, how do they do it?” Because they’re looking at
banisters and solicitors, they’re looking at law students, they’re looking at
legal departments. We’ve got a very clear mission and very clear
stakeholders, so it’s legal departments and large law firms. It’s a lot easier
to sort of do that than to try to figure out how to take 1.5 million lawyers
individually to get them engaged. It still is a massive amount of
information and contact. One of the things we’ve talked about is too much
of it is in our heads and we need to, like, every legal institution or every
institution, do knowledge management so that we’re getting that
information across. But I think that clear focus really helps and honestly,
if somebody from a 40 person firm calls us, we say we can’t help you.
The other thing that we’ve done some, but I think we’re now thinking
about doing better, is basically leveraging more peer to peer efforts. One
of the things that I always tell my friends in the public interest world when
they sort of say “Well I don’t know about using pro bono and blah, blah,
blah.” What I keep saying to them is you have a wish list. You have
things that you’re dying to get done, and you never get to them as an
institution. You never get to them, and with your resources, you never
– 136 –
will. So why don’t you think about engaging with pro bono people to get
that done. Yes, you know, you have to still be involved to ensure that
your vision is being carried out. It does mean managing resources and
sometimes prodding people or whatever, but it’s a great way to leverage.
And I came to the realization a while back that we were guilty, to some
extent, of the same thing. So because the volume of requests at both the
law firm and legal department is so huge, what we’re now doing is we are
experimenting with peer task forces. Some of them are only law firms,
some of them are only legal departments, some of them are both. And
we’re still in the early stages of learning how to do it right, but the idea is
they want to be more connected to our work. And they have a tremendous
amount of expertise and knowledge and so, for example for the metrics
project, in addition to having a live lab, we’ve got about 10 law firms and
legal departments that are just going to help us walk through the process,
so that we know that it’s applicable to a range of settings, and it makes
sense for them, and we deal with any unintended consequences. We have,
I think I mentioned this, the global corporate task force. There are people
on there that are just getting started and there are people on there who are
spending 20% of their pro bono time outside the U.S. Pretty dramatic.
And so it’s just kind of sharing information where there are areas of focus
and at a certain point, we’ll start to put them to work. You know, we’ll
have them write things, we’ll have them do research. So I think that’s one
answer, and people are just incredibly generous with their time and
knowledge, too. A lot of what we know, we know because people in
firms, legal departments, have shared that with us. And they do these
great things. Verizon did a year book, a pro bono year book. It’s
fabulous. And so, with their permission, we then blasted that out to as
many people as we could. The other thing that we do is we use trainings
and convenings, to share the information we have and to do peer-to-peer
sharing. So you’ll see when you go to the conference, it is immersion pro
bono. I mean it is all pro bono all the time, and it’s lots of people. We
have people whom we ask to speak and facilitate but the expertise is all
over the room, and it’s amazing what comes out of that.
Ms. Knievel: And how many years has the conference been?
Ms. Lardent: We’ve been doing it probably close to 20 years, I think. Maybe even a
little more. And the first one, 20 people in a room for two hours at a—I
still remember the room because it had like Mylar wallpaper, near O’Hare
Airport—and we were worried that we wouldn’t have enough time and
now we get close to, you know, somewhere between 315-400 people, and
they’re there, some of them are there for three, two-and-a-half days. So
it’s, you know, it’s pretty amazing. So we really do try to think about
leveraging. And we write. The other thing we do is we research and we
write and that’s another area where we’re really talking about how can we
link up with, you know, maybe a think tank or an academic institution to
really even go deeper in terms of research so that we’re not just talking
about things anecdotally. We’ve got evidence-based information and data.
We can say this has worked. We can’t say it will absolutely work for you,
but we can say this has worked and we can also say this is what the trend
- This is what’s happening. You know, you may think pro bono is X,
but you know, our data shows pro bono is actually X and Y. We did a
conference call on best practices in pro bono committees. Or we’ll do a
session on working with the courts. You know, just whatever sort of
seems to be happening and working. The tough thing is that everybody
here is very flat out busy. I worry a little bit about that. The conference
is always a very important moment for us. Not only because we get to see
in person people that we otherwise talk to over the phone or electronically,
and also because we’re putting out information definitely. We always say
we try to look descriptive but be prescriptive. So we have a viewpoint,
and we put it out there. But we’re also listening as hard as we can. I mean
we have staff assigned to every session to figure out what’s going on out
there and what’s working and what are some new ideas and what are some
innovative models and that sort of thing. But we also feel the
disadvantage is we’re not front line. We’re not doing this stuff hands-on.
We’re not in firms, we’re not in legal departments, and so there are things
that we don’t know because we are simply not hands-on. But again, just
as with sort of battling conventional wisdom, the fact that we’re outside is
also a strength. It’s a weakness and a strength and what we try to do is to
be in some ways, ahead of the curve to identify areas and changes and
innovations and issues that maybe people in the firms and legal
departments don’t even know yet that they have. And that takes time, it
takes an ability to sort of step back and it also takes a lot of understanding
of content and what’s going on at firms and legal departments that has
nothing to do with pro bono. And sometimes we’re too early ahead of the
curve. So, for example, last year we did a session on project management
pro bono. I don’t know if project management has hit your firm yet but it
is huge. It’s been driven by the clients and the idea is it’s not just about
the quality of the work you do or your expertise, it’s how you execute it.
It’s are you thinking four steps ahead? Are you putting the pieces
together, are you creating efficiencies? And it’s not something that any
lawyer ever gets taught in law school. And so there is now a growing
movement to train people in project management skills. And we thought,
what a cool thing for pro bono. It went over not at all. People didn’t get
it, and I think that we were a little too early and maybe that in two years
we’ll look at that again. We literally try to take some of the things that
would work, we’re very focused right now on sort of core competencies
and how firms identify that and how people get, you know, the level of
skills and experiential base and soft skills and everything else and tying
that into pro bono. Because we see that — I mean, not every firm is doing
it, they’re certainly, of course, all doing it differently but it is something
that is clearly, you know, you can see it kind of rippling through the law
firm world and what we want to do is figure out how to align that with pro
bono, right? So it’s—and that’s the thing that I worry that we could lose
touch with because we want to be very responsive to our stakeholders but
there’s a way in which we just need the ability to step back a little bit, and
it’s hard. It’s hard to find that time to do that. It’s getting harder and
harder to do that.
Tape 7
This is Erica Knievel interviewing Esther Lardent on August 3, 2012. We’re at the Pro Bono
Institute, and the purpose of this recording is to record Esther’s oral history for the Women
Trailblazers Project. This is tape number seven in that recording.
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent
Esther, when we left off, we were talking about the amazing expansion of
PBI and the Challenge and we ended talking about your annual
conference. Are there any memorable conference experiences that you’d
like to talk about?
Well, I think there are several, although they do, at this point kind of blend
together for me a little bit, but just thinking about things that were really
particularly striking. I think we talked about the fact that we started with
this tiny, very brief gathering of people and didn’t know whether it would
work and then that became much more expansive in terms of size, in terms
of length, in terms of topic. Probably about, I would say maybe about 10
years ago, I was really struck by two things that happened. The first was
we started, not through any efforts of our own, but just kind of because of
interest on their side, having people from outside the U.S. at our
conferences. It wasn’t something we had thought about; we didn’t
actually invite people — we wouldn’t have known who to invite, but all of
a sudden there were people with these fabulous accents from, you know,
the UK and South Africa and South America and Australia and Canadians
coming and, it really brought another dimension to the conference for a
couple of different reasons. To the extent that people thought of this as
solely a phenomenon to be developed in the US, that really broke the
mold, but the other was that in a number of these places, people were
doing things that were frankly far advanced from what we were doing.
And so to the extent that people worried that pro bono going forward and
looking globally would be, sort of paternalistic — you know, we’re from
the U.S., we know everything and we’re going to tell you exactly how we
do it and you should do it exactly that way — there was really a pushback
because it was so clear that in many respects, simply because they came to
it with fresh eyes and because they honestly had some really positive
things happening in their countries, or some very difficult things that they
had adapted to. These people had a great deal to teach the U.S. and we’re
seeing that more and more. And we see it not only at our conference, but
there’s a group called Pilnet that is a European pro bono forum and while
you don’t want people from the U.S. to dominate that forum — that would
be very unfortunate, and they don’t — you do see people from the U.S.
coming more to that, just because they’re learning and they want to learn.
So it’s really pretty terrific. The other was when we realized that we use
the conference for two reasons. One is, in a way, we test whether we’re
listening well and understand where things are with the audience. We
generate the topics and the sessions based on what we’ve been hearing in
our conversations with people and our calls, and our house call visits and
our regional conferences all year long. And so it’s a really interesting test
to see if we’ve got it right. Sometimes we don’t, but mostly we really are.
And we push a lot of information out at the conference. The notion is we
want to look descriptive while being somewhat prescriptive. So we hope
to change hearts and minds as well as impart information. It is valueladen
and again about 10 years ago, I think was when, what I saw was that
the pushing was coming from both directions; that the level of
sophistication, the level of creativity, the level of maturity among the law
firm participants was really dramatic. That we were a catalyst, but . . .
information, ideas, great things were happening all around us that we had
nothing to do with and I thought that was pretty incredible. I was just
really struck by that, that we were still an important player, but there was
just a very different dynamic. This thing had its own organic capacity and
growth, which was incredible. The other really memorable, or two other
memorable conferences that I would mention. One was the year that Eric
Holder came and spoke at the conference and was our honoree because, in
a very real sense, our corporate project was very much due to his
leadership in a Clinton administration initiative in the last years of the
Clinton administration that got us together with ACC and got us really
moving in terms of reaching out to the in-house bar. And he was
somebody who, when he was at his firm, was a very strong supporter,
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
when he was a judge, was a very strong supporter, so he’s always been
somebody who is great. So we, he agreed to be an awardee, which I
thought was wonderful, and he came and spoke and this was about the
time when Congress and some of the conservative particularly the talk
show hosts, were hammering on people in the Justice Department, who
had either been directly involved with Guantanamo Bay inmates’
representation or whose firms had been, and of course the AG’s firm was
one of those, I mean Covington was involved in Guantanamo Bay, very,
very deeply with a number of their partners. And the AG gave a speech.
We had a huge media presence. And so we had bomb sniffing dogs, and
we had T.V. cameras and you know, things that we generally don’t have at
the conference.
Not typical PBI? [Laughter]
(Laughter) Yeah, we really don’t usually have that so much. But his
speech essentially talked about how lawyers should do pro bono, the value
and the importance of lawyers doing pro bono. And he specifically said
that lawyers who are representing Guantanamo detainees were patriots and
heroes. And it was all over everywhere. It was really amazing. And I
thought, an incredibly courageous thing for him to do because . . . clearly,
he was going to pay for it and it went everywhere. We get quite a bit of
media coverage here and we use the media a lot to get our message out,
but I’ve never seen anything like that level. And then what happened,
which was really wonderful, was that night at our reception, by somewhat
happenstance, our honoree was Brackett Denniston, who is the General
Counsel of GE, and who I believe to be, I think he’s still a Republican, I
don’t know, but I mean definitely has been a registered Republican at one
point, and obviously one of the largest corporations in the world and
enormously respected legal department, sort of the sine qua non of a great
legal department. And Brackett — a couple of years ago when there had
been an effort by people at the Department of Defense to get corporate
clients stirred up about the fact that there are law firms who were
representing Guantanamo detainees, there was a guy at DOD, who literally
on the news listed some of the firms that were most active, and he said “I
wonder what their clients think about the fact that their money is going to
represent these people who want to kill us?”
So we worked with ACC to get a wonderful statement from the
Association of Corporate Counsel Board that said, we believe in pro bono.
Pro bono is incredibly important; it’s essential to our system of justice that
both sides be fully represented. We do pro bono, we promote pro bono in
our own departments and we value pro bono including pro bono on behalf
of detainees, which is a huge thing because if people feel as though they’re
doing something that is, you know, going to affect their corporate clients,
it has a huge impact. So, we did that, but Brackett had been in touch and
on his own, he issued a personal statement about the importance of this
and GE among other things, works as a military contractor. A very
courageous act. I had told Justice Ginsburg about it, and Justice Ginsburg
– 145 –
Ms. Knievel:
in her remarks talked about what he had done and also talked about the
importance of providing pro bono representation to people at Guantanamo.
And then Brackett talked about it and it was really, to me, just an
extraordinary moment because what it showed me was, I think what it
showed everyone, was that this wasn’t just about the easy stuff. This was
really about people saying, you know, sometimes you have to take a risk.
And as a lawyer, you have to remind people what justice really is all
about. Even when it’s going to make you unpopular, even when it’s going
to be controversial, and we had three highly public individuals in very
politically sensitive positions. I was just so proud to be playing even a
little bit of role in all of that, and so proud that we, I mean this would not
have happened 10, 15, 20 years ago, I don’t think. I mean there’s
certainly, and D.C. is one of the places where it happened, firms that in the
`50s represented people before the House Un-American Activities
Committee, and there’s certainly people who have been doing that with
death penalty defense for years, but this cuts so close to the bone, and it’s
so intense and emotional. For me the other high point is, for many years,
we’ve had Justice Ginsburg come and speak, and she’s come when she
was getting treatment for cancer, and she’s come after three days of oral
argument on the Affordable Health Care Act. We got too big to do this,
but one year we had the formal program in the actual Supreme Court
courtroom.
Oh wow!
Ms. Lardent:
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
And the people who come to this event are, you know, they’re not easily
impressed. They are people who have met a lot of superstars in the legal
world. Many of them are superstars in the legal world, but there was
something about being in that courtroom and talking about pro bono and
the best of what this profession is about. That was just — it was really
quite a moment, and so that really, you know, stays with me as well.
That’s incredible. You mentioned that the conference started to be a place
where you were learning from law firms as well as providing an agenda.
Are there things that law firms were bringing to the table — ways that
they’ve changed that have surprised you or inspired you?
The Conference is where we get the ideas, the content, the grist, the vision
that then feeds our work for the next year, and — what I’ve been struck by
is just that law firms, again most of them, you know, in earlier years have
been very receptive — many of them have been very receptive to pro bono.
But they’ve been sort of passive vehicles. So, if you came to them and
you had a problem or you had a matter, they would review it, and they
would take it and that would be great, and what we’ve seen is they’re not
that anymore. And I think, actually, in many ways 9-11 was the turning
point for that because many of the legal services agencies in New York
were right near ground zero. And not only were they overwhelmed with
the client demand, they couldn’t go back to their own offices. And if
people were going to serve the different clients who needed help, you
know, including families of survivors; families who had illnesses or issues
related to that; the small businesses who were there, who were almost
financially destroyed; undocumented workers; and obviously the families
of those who were lost, the impetus couldn’t come from the public interest
community, and so the firms basically developed their areas of expertise
and their projects, and they reached out not simply to the legal services
providers, although they certainly included them, but they reached out to
labor unions, and they reached out to other groups. And that’s what we
saw was that all of a sudden, you had firms thinking really big about how
to do things. So, just thinking about things like education projects. So
you’d have, for example, Bingham McCutchen taking that model that
George Lang had of, “I’m adopting this class, and for any of you who
have at least an X average, I will pay your tuition to college.” And so
they’ve done a version of that which is we’re adopting this school, and
what that means is that we’re going to provide legal help to the families in
this school because we think that intervention in terms of preventive legal
work, helping people with problems that are causing stress and dislocation
for the family, will help kids to be able to be educated better. Or, Akin
Gump saying, KIPP academies, we’re your lawyer for anything and
everything that you need, and we’re going to help you be a stronger
institution because charter schools are like little businesses and need all
that assistance.
So all of a sudden this amazing kind of creativity that was reaching deeper
into the community and that was no longer reactive — they became
significant players which caused a little discomfort on the public interest
side because it means less control, and which has to be done with some
finesse because you want to be sure that this isn’t just a firm saying, “Oh
we’ve got a great idea for a project,” and not looking at whether it’s really
a critical need, who’s already working in the area, where are the experts.
But what we’re seeing is people doing this work and doing due diligence
and with appropriate, I think, respect and care for people who are players
in the area, but really owning this effort in a much more significant way.
And in a way that means, I mean it’s signature projects, and you know,
frankly signature projects on steroids to some extent. So, what it means is
you can’t be a dilettante about this. You can’t say, “Oh my gosh. We’ve
suddenly gotten so busy. We’re really sorry, but we’re going to have to
walk away from this project.” That doesn’t happen. So, it’s a level of
commitment. It’s a sense of being central to this as opposed to just
ancillary, that is really profound, and that’s what we’re seeing. That’s
what we’re – that’s what I see that is tremendously exciting, and you
know, honestly, isn’t something that people in other practice settings have
the human capital to do, and so, to me, it’s particularly exciting that big
firms do this. I think all pro bono is good, but I do get kind of sad when I
see a big firm doing — because this is what their legal services program
told them to do — doing uncontested divorces, because it’s just
underutilizing who they are, and it’s at odds with who they are as an
institution with how they generally work. Yes, there are benefits to the
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
client, but it doesn’t use their efforts in the highest way, and it doesn’t take
account of the fact that they have a lot of people that they can kind of
command and push at something and make a big difference — and a range
of skills, and a range of experiences and everything else. I have great
respect for people who are sole practitioners or small firm people who do
pro bono work, and they do a lot of it. They don’t get nearly the coverage.
I sometimes feel guilty because we push very hard to make sure that
American Lawyer covers pro bono more. We push for more and more and
more, and nobody’s kind of doing that as much for people in other practice
settings. But, I will say that there is just some unique work and unique
approaches to work that only these firms could do, and when we realized,
it was just breathtaking to realize that they were taking this stuff on and
owning it without reservation, which was terrific. It’s not all firms, but
it’s a growing number of firms which is very, very exciting.
It is exciting. And corporations — we’ve talked a bit about that, but
corporate legal departments and the way that PBI has expanded, as their
interest in pro bono has expanded. Can you talk about that a bit?
Sure. Well, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about the fact that there
were things going on. In fact, there were some organized programs. The
oldest is 30 years, and the next oldest if about 18 or 19 years old, and there
are a couple that are around 10, I think. At legal departments, there were
always people doing something, but they were generally doing it
informally, and those obstacles. Two things I think made a real
difference: one is that people then assumed that there was a lack of
interest. You know, in some ways, and I apologize if I’m repeating
myself, but in some ways, when we started working with firms, what we
got back as push back from public interest people was these people have
made a choice. They’ve made a choice to represent the establishment, and
the establishment is at odds with poor people a lot of the time, and
therefore these are people who really cannot — we don’t believe that they
have either the commitment or the will to really provide representation. It
just isn’t part of their makeup. You know, they’ve just gone down this
path, and in a very real sense, when we started working with corporate
people where there were even fewer examples to show, you know, then
there were in the law firm world, so say well, if that’s the case, then why
is it that Hogan has had since 1969 this department, why is it that Arnold
& Porter is doing 15 death penalty cases as we speak. Why is it that
Morrison & Foerster, you know, we could go on, and it wasn’t a majority
of firms by any — in any way, but we could point out those firms. With
fewer legal departments that we could point to, and what we heard then
with the public interests people and with the firms was, these people have
made a choice. It felt like an instant replay. It was so funny. They
haven’t been doing pro bono, and they really don’t care about it. You
know, they’re just very focused on their client’s agenda and that’s it. And
of course that turned out not to be the case at all.
– 151 –
I think the other thing that really was tremendously important with the
legal departments just as it was with the law firms was we somehow
lucked into being in the right place at the right time. So, when we started
working with firms it was a time of growth of big firms, the really go-go
years, their greater importance, their greater size, more human capital, and
frankly, just I think on the part of the firms, more of a sense that they had
to play a larger role in the profession and the justice system because they
were such increasingly important players, and taken so seriously — that
was when we started. So, it was perfect. Same thing with legal
departments. You know, after decades of being considered by people at
firms as sort of second-class citizens, all of a sudden, these were the folks
that were not only highly powerful because they controlled big chunks of
work and money for the firms, but also they were the folks who were seen
as the forward-thinking people. They were integrating business practices
with the legal side and therefore, you know, instituting things that law
firms would look at and say “Hah — maybe we should do Six Sigma Lite
because we’ve seen GE’s legal department do Six Sigma Lite, and maybe
we should try to figure out metrics, and maybe we should XYZ.” So, in
some ways it was the same kind of thing, and so, by the time we started
working with legal departments in 2000, there was that same sense that
we’re bigger than simply our clients, and when it comes to larger issues of
the justice system, we certainly have our own interests in making sure that
we’re getting out client’s goals accomplished there, but it also was things
like diversity and then pro bono because they were bigger, and they
frankly had a larger obligation. I think was really important to the push
that we did. The time was right, and then the other thing that I think I
mentioned before is, 10 years of people in law firms hearing pro bono, pro
bono, pro bono and then migrating over to legal departments and thinking,
“Where’s the pro bono?”
I wish I could say we had planned it and staged it that way, that we would
make pro bono really strong in law firms and that we would follow them
over to legal departments. It was not planned, but it was kind of a
wonderfully perfect time because everything had aligned in the right way,
and the fact that ACC, which is only about 20 years old itself, had
morphed from the need to get respect and visibility for people in-house as
real lawyers, to we need to be a player in the larger justice system, meant
that they were the perfect partner for us in that sense as well. So, taking
their knowledge and their credibility in the community and then our
understanding of pro bono, we then did what we did with the firms. We
stepped back again to try to understand where were the obstacles and
where were the opportunities. It’s a very simple formula, and it works
each and every time. I wish people would do it with like small firms and
solos in a more thoughtful way and figure out what are the obstacles and
what are the opportunities or the triggers or the catalyst for pro bono for
them. I think we haven’t even yet begun to figure out where the corporate
world could go, although we can see certain indications. So they, for
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
example, probably have more obstacles, but also incredible interest on the
global side for reasons I think we’ve talked about that relate to the fact that
they are all looking outside of the U.S. for growth and revenues.
The other thing that I think is really exciting is — and this is another reason
that the time was right, was the growth of corporate social responsibility —
so analogous to pro bono, and the fact that that was happening and the
ability to use pro bono as sort of the wedge in companies to develop
interdisciplinary efforts that will focus not just on individual clients. So it
would be more focused on community-based nonprofits, but that can help
those organizations in such a huge range of opportunities so that you give
them legal assistance, but you also give them assistance in strategic
planning, in HR, in IT, and you sort of, you know, instead of sort of
shoring up one piece, you’re kind of just taking them to a completely
different level in what they’re doing.
I don’t know where it’s all going to go. I really don’t, and I think there are
some clouds looming on the horizon for both law firm and legal
departments that worry me a lot, that could undermine the potential, but I
think the potential is enormous, and I think particularly, these partnerings
between legal departments and law firms where there can be incredible
synergy are really tremendous. The clouds that I see . . .
Yeah, I was just going to ask.
There are three elements to it. One is the financial picture. Part of this job
that I really do not love is I have to read to the financial pages and read
reports on what the legal market looks like. Is client demand up or down?
Are law firm expenses up or down? What are legal departments doing?
Are they outsourcing more? Are they looking for alternatives to firms?
Are they bringing people in-house? We need to know all of that. And
honestly things are so precarious, I think is the way I would put it. I mean,
the demand is more than it has been, but the whole thing feels like it’s just
slower, and everybody’s nervous, and everybody’s kind of overwhelmed,
in the same way I think that companies are sort of holding onto their
money just in case, and not putting it into R&D or increasing headcount or
investing in new locations unless they really think they can make money
there.
You see legal departments kind of doing the same thing. How can we
lower our costs? How can we control our costs? It’s like squirrels putting
away nuts for winter because they think winter is coming. That worries
- It worries me for law firms. It worries me for legal departments that
there is this sort of trepidation. And so it’s hard to say to people, open
your hearts — give us more time, open your wallets, when people are
feeling that kind of concern. They don’t feel grounded enough, so I think
that’s one piece of it.
The second is at firms in general, billable hours are just nowhere like what
they were in like, 2000, and yet people feel more distracted and busier and
more overwhelmed than ever before. Some of that I suspect is a function
of technology, social media, information overload — all that. But I do
worry that that sense of franticness makes it even harder. It’s just harder
to get people’s attention to say, “Here’s a project.”
It’s what’s happening with everybody, and that kind of overload and
distraction, I think, is a problem because we haven’t figured out the tools
to kind of regularize pro bono enough so that it’s just in people’s
schedules and easy to take on, and part of that is the way that public
interest groups do pro bono and the way they offer pro bono opportunities
which needs to be shifted, but that’s a big concern of mine.
And then the third is really the big issue, and the big issue is that the entire
sort of legal system from how we educate lawyers to how we deal with
end-of-career issues with them and everything in between I think has
gotten really dated and tired and not productive. There’s a way in which
what we’re doing in terms of pro bono is kind of the great little thing over
here, but we’re not addressing bigger issues. I mean, how do you deal
with pro bono generally in a world where 55% of law students are getting
legal jobs and the rest can’t. So, one of the discussions we’ve been having
with people, and one of the pressures that I’m feeling personally is a lot of
people who want us to somehow address those bigger problems. Can’t we
change law school to something more like the English trainee model, and
use that training period for public interest fellowships so that students
wouldn’t be in that catch-22, of, you can’t get experience without a job,
you can’t get a job without experience. Law schools should, you know,
help to pay for that because it’s in their interests to have their students
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
actually learn and maybe at some point, it would actually back up and
you’d see law schools who understand that teaching people to be lawyers
is as important as teaching them to think like lawyers.
Employers should pay for that because it turns out to be a very
inexpensive way of getting people who can then add value to client work
and they can get compensated, but there’s so many pieces of the puzzle.
The problem is so much bigger, and I really worry that because nobody
kind of is dealing with that — that we’re getting as a result, we’re getting
this nasty, I think, terrifying cycle where more and more, for more and
more people in this country, justice is inaccessible and unattainable for
them, and their willingness to have their tax dollars go to the justice
system, keeps getting weakened. The profession, because it doesn’t
reinvent itself, it feels increasingly sort of defensive and tired and is
sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Pro bono so far has been pretty
protected and buffered, but I worry that those bigger issues, if they go
unaddressed are going to — they’re going to crash the legal profession in
some really profound ways, and transform it, and that pro bono can get
lost in the middle of that.
What about nonprofits? I mean, you’re — PBI also consults with
nonprofits, and you’ve seen nonprofits change over time. Are there
lessons to be learned there?
Well, you know, it’s interesting. I was having a discussion with our sadly
departing head of strategic communications, and she’s leaving because she
started her life as a teacher, and then did communications work for
education-based nonprofits, and she is going to — one of the new breed of
education advocacy organizations out there that are really looking at
shaking up supporting public education, not walking away from it, but
shaking up education and particularly focusing on STEM education — and
she was saying that what she hears and sees from public interest people
reminds her of what she’s seen with teachers’ unions, and that is that they
started out very focused on mission, and now they seem very focused on
members, and protecting the status quo, frankly at a time when it isn’t
defensible. Teachers are vitally important. Society has not given them
respect or the acknowledgement that they deserve or the compensation,
but having said that, the vocal part of a profession is all about, let’s go
back to 1960 — it’s not going to happen and shouldn’t — or don’t change
anything, don’t change anything.
And that’s what the public interest groups, and again I’m overgeneralizing
because there are people who are really doing important and
transformative things, but that’s what they remind me of, and so what you
see is declining budges, declining staff, increased client case loads and
they’re in a defensive crouch. They’re really tired. They’re really
emotionally just bereft because their life’s work is being taken away from
them, and they’re being told that they don’t really matter. They’re
overwhelmed and saying no to people day after day, moment after
moment. So I completely understand it, but I also think that they’re a part
of the legal profession that needs to transform. They don’t have enough
people. If you look at the ratio of public interest, nonprofit lawyers to
low-income people or more broadly, just people who need assistance and
can’t access it for whatever reason — financial or because they’re too
controversial or whatever it may be. The reality is I think that the public
interest folks need to transform themselves from people who are doing the
hands-on work. I mean they still have to have — they have to do some
hands-on work because in order to understand systemic issues and change
and help other people do the work, you have to know what’s happening on
the ground. But the percentages of time spent on hands on work, I think,
have to drop, and the percentage of time spent being strategists, and
trainers, mentors, co-counsel — that needs to increase because you’ve got
leverage, and I think there are two problems with that. The first is that a
lot of people who go into legal services or public interest law, go into it
because they are what I refer to as “hands-on helpers.” Their satisfaction
comes from touching the lives of these people, and if you tell them that
they’re going to have to pull back from that, that’s a lot of the reason that
they’re willing to do what they’ve been doing, and work for far less
money and endure some real financial hardship and that sort of thing. Not
to mention the fact that the costs of law school are also kind of — not only
do we have fewer public interest jobs, we have fewer people who can even
slide into those jobs because of the increasing costs. But the other thing is,
in order to do that, they have to be able to believe that the leverage is
gonna work, and pro bono still feels to them so unpredictable and so
untrustworthy, and I can understand why. Frankly that’s the case in pro
bono too. When we talk to people in pro bono about focusing on better
outcomes and higher impact, there are immediate concerns. You’re taking
away our client base, and we’re going to have to say no to all these
individual cases and only do the class actions. What we keep saying to
them is, “It’s not that you’re not going to do individual work. It’s just that
each individual case has to bring you closer to a bigger systemic goal.” I
mean you’re only representing two percent of people who are being
evicted — threatened with eviction. So, have your goal be, let’s represent
the two percent where we can really make some significant changes and
let’s see if we can get another 10 percent that aren’t getting represented
right now, and work with DAs and AGs to see if we can use criminal
violations and fines to make slum lords step up and do things lawfully or
make these apartments decent or let’s — I don’t know enough substantively
anymore to know what the tactics are, but doing something different.
Number one, they don’t want to change. It’s like their comfort level. It’s
like telling academics at law school that you should be teaching, you
know, you should be teaching people with real legal cases and real clients.
That is not what they want to do. I mean, they went to teach partly
because they love law as an intellectual pursuit, and because they never
want to be in a courtroom. “So how can you possibly ask me to do it.” So
it’s really to me a tremendous problem, and I love the public interest
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community, and I get so frustrated with them. I keep waiting, I keep
thinking that there’s going to be a point where it just gets so bad that
people say, “Okay, we have to do something different. We have to.” It’s
a — with a small “c” — it’s a conservative community.
I wrote an article once, because I love making myself unpopular, for
something called the MIE journal, which is, MIE is sort of the — it’s the
trade association for legal services project directors. And I wrote a
column saying, “Here’s what I’ve noticed about legal services. The
response initially to any new idea — use of technology, pro bono — you
know, whatever it may be, is no. It’s always no. Could you just like for a
minute say, well, maybe or I’m withholding judgment until I learn more.”
Ms. Knievel: “Let me think about it.”
Ms. Lardent: Yeah, exactly. But that is the reaction, and we’re in a very conservative
profession, and with people who feel that little by little, everything, every
capacity they have is being stripped away from them, they’re
understandably like holding tight to whatever they can, but I do — I am
concerned about that as well. I also think it’s one of those things where
the firms’ — well the profession more generally — have to step up and say,
we’re not fair-weather friends, we’re not — you know, we’re gonna be
there. You can count on us. We’re making that commitment, and I don’t
really know how, you know, that’s gonna happen, but again, it’s another
reason why, with law firms, again not all of them, but a bunch of them, I
think there is a growing sense of confidence that they’ll be there, but of
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
course they’re — if you’re living in North Dakota, that doesn’t help you a
lot.
And you see women who are players in all of these various entities now in
a way that they weren’t when you were starting your career. Can you talk
about how you’ve been affected by that evolution or what you’ve
witnessed in that?
Well you know, the public interest community itself is really, well I would
say, woman dominated, but it’s interesting because you still, in some of
the sort of entities around, there’s still — you don’t see women as — women
are still less proportionally at the very top in leadership positions,
although, for example, a woman just became the head of the National
Legal Aid and Defender Association. In about two days, a woman is
going to become President of the ABA. So it’s definitely better, and I
would say that what excites me — I mean law firms obviously are still
terrible. We have an advisory committee for the law firm project, and we
scour lists because we want to have people who are the very top of their
firms or at least number two positions. It’s so hard to find women who are
running major law firms. It’s very, very troubling, but we are seeing, you
know, managing partners of offices. We are seeing heads of practice
groups and so hopefully that’ll start to happen. But it is definitely the two
areas where we’ve really seen women and we’ve seen honestly a different,
and I would say a greater flexibility, a greater willingness for change. In
the corporate world, women are still a minority of corporate general
counsel, but they are growing every single day, and Fm convinced that
they’re going to use their purchasing power and their clout to break
through in terms of firms because the numbers are there in the firms. Its
just, you know, the proverbial glass ceiling. And then judges — women on
the bench. A majority now of the state supreme court justices are women.
Ms. Knievel: Wow.
Ms. Lardent: And we see them taking a very different approach to their role, and very,
very interested in access to justice issues, and so I think that’s an area to
me that’s a really positive area. A majority of clients of legal services
programs are women. So I think, what I’m hoping is that people will
begin to focus their energies there and understand that these low income
client issues or the disadvantaged client issues really have such broader
implications for our society and I really do see women leaders in all
segments of the profession, honestly more open to that. I mean I’ve
worked with, and I’m incredibly grateful for them, amazing men who are
very, very sensitive to these issues as well, but there doesn’t seem to be
sort of a growing critical mass of people who understand in the same way
that I think people are beginning to understand that what had been called
the soft values of pro bono and associate satisfaction and quality of life
and balance and diversity, turn out to be incredibly important in terms of
productivity, in terms of keeping people that you want to keep with you as
an institution, in terms of really, that sense of connectedness between the
individual lawyer and wherever they’re working. So, I do think that there
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
are some real possibilities for improvement in part because of women with
vision and with kind of, you know, a little different slant on what’s going
on in the profession.
You mentioned judges. Can you talk about the role that they’ve played in
conjunction with PBI and the way that their perspectives —
Well, you know, it’s interesting because we — I mean we’ve obviously had
support from a number of the Supreme Court justices which has been
wonderful, but until recently, we really haven’t viewed judges as a key
constituency for us, and one of the things we try to do is really focus our
efforts. We are not about pro bono at-large. We’re not about access to
justice at-large. We have key constituencies, and everything, even our
work with public interest groups, we wouldn’t work with a program in
rural North Dakota. In fact, I know we wouldn’t because there aren’t big
firms, there aren’t legal departments, and so it all comes back to that, and I
think in a lot of ways that’s been helpful to us because instead of sort of
skimming the surface, we can really go deeper and understand those
constituencies and I think do a better job at serving them, and ultimately
then serving justice. But what we’ve seen is that a number of factors have
brought judges, federal judges and state judges, to the fore in this whole
area of access to justice and pro bono. And I think there are couple of
different factors. I think one is in fact the number of people who are
leaders on the bench for whom these issues just matter personally and
that’s important, but also you have with courts, I think, a real
understanding that their isolation from the political process, from the
community, and from the profession which seems like a very highminded,
you know, “we’re above the fray,” thoughtful approach, turned
out to be I think a limited approach because what it did was — they got
lost, honestly. And — they were presumed to be aloof and distanced and
not part of the solution, and so we’re seeing judges everywhere at all
levels engage far more than they ever have and really reach out to the
community, to the courts and the legislature and government, to the other
segments of the legal profession, which I think is incredibly important
because they are still the most respected part of the profession, and so I
think that they can be incredibly missionaries in support for pro bono for
access to justice issues. There are two other reasons I think that they’re
looking at this, and that is while this isn’t universally the case, in a lot of
the states, judicial budgets have been slashed as well. And so you have
furloughs, you have lower headcount, you have longer delays, and in some
courts, in some states, they literally close the courthouse down, and to me,
courthouses are like churches. They should always be open. And so the
idea that you know, we’re sorry, but justice is closed today, you know, is
just terrifying.
So there’s that piece of it. It’s their own self-interest. And then the other
thing that has happened is — and it’s a function in part of lack of resources;
it’s also I think a function of where we are as a society and of technology
— but more and more in some states in a majority of matters, at least one
party going into the courts is unrepresented. So not only do you have
courts with more clients, more poor people, more complex situations,
they’ve become the emergency rooms of the justice system. This view of
the courts which is two parties come in, each of them represented by
counsel, we have a level playing field, people present their best arguments
and justice is done, and good law is made, is in fact the exception, not the
rule. It’s like a society — we still have the society that assumes that every
family is a nuclear, two parent family, and that’s not the majority either.
And all of our systems of child care and school and everything else are all
based on that. So, same kind of thing with the courts, and so they are just
overwhelmed. They are completely overwhelmed because it’s not just
more people in the system and fewer resources for the court, but it’s
people who are utterly new to the court system, have no idea what to do,
and are pushing the boundaries of — I mean the judges can watch bad
things happening, unfair outcomes, bad law being made, and their ability
to address that is so limited. It is really, really stressful and very, very
difficult. So, I think for them, reaching out to the rest of the profession to
try to — because this is not a problem that’s clearly going to be solved just
by the courts, and frankly just as with legal services, it isn’t going to be
solved with some more money either. I mean it has to be more resources,
but more resources to do things in a different way.
And so, what is really striking to me is the impact that judges are having
on pro bono and that pro bono is having potentially on judges. In our last
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couple of conferences have focused on pro bono in the courts, pro bono
and pro se. In many ways, those were like separate siloed things. You
had the courts over here. You had pro se litigants over here. You had pro
bono over here, but more and more we’re trying to figure out, is there a
way to use pro bono resources to improve the pro se system, to figure out
how to do diagnostic and triage, and figure out where clients should be
going in much the same way that good emergency rooms work, so that,
okay, one person needs a full soup to nuts representation and you have to
have a lawyer. Another, on the other hand, just needs some legal
information and some help filling out forms and we simplified the forms
so you can do that. You need something somewhere in the middle. You
need unbundled services. You need somebody to help you fill out those
forms, you know, show you how to, you know, make your case in the
courts, but not with a lawyer going with you. And so what we’re really
talking about now, I think, is the situation where pro bono and the courts
have really become sort of mutually dependent in a good way, and it isn’t
necessarily even just pro bono lawyers representing those folks or
providing some kind of limited assistance, unbundled assistance. It may
actually be they’re running the pro se program in a court or helping to
design the pro se system so it goes more smoothly. And we’re seeing that
for example in Connecticut which has a very good pro se system, but it is
just being drowned because of the flood of demand and people. In a
couple of their courts, law firms have basically taken on an administrative
Ms. Lardent:
role in those courts, and so it’s pro bono as infrastructure rather than just
pro bono as client service, although the two obviously relate to each other.
And you know, it’s a smart thing to do because if you’re doing something
directly with the client, with the courts, you’re going where the clients
already are. [END SIDE A]
What I think can be helpful in terms of efficiency, you have a group of
lawyers who said, okay, we’re going to go down to the court every
Thursday afternoon and our role is going to be to interview people who
have come in looking for protective orders because of domestic violence,
and we’re going to do that diagnosis and triage and then we’re going to
give them assistance. What we’ve seen is systems like that work much
better for lawyers because having a legal services program call up and say,
“Hi, we have a woman here who’s really seriously abused. Can you help
her now,” doesn’t work very well these days. I mean good luck getting
anybody even on the phone, whereas if you’re there, and the court systems
are such that, you know, people are being slotted in, you’re going to help
more people. You’re going to use your time much smarter, and you’re not
going to go down to court for one person and then come back, and then a
week later go in for another person, and then come back. Those four
hours or whatever you use are much more effectively used, and you really
become part of the mechanism of the court. So we’re definitely seeing
that. The other thing that we’re seeing with the judges, well two things
really. The first is, honestly, there are places that have fabulous pro bono
cultures — D.C. would be a great example of that — and then are places that
have not so fabulous pro bono cultures, and part of our goal and part of the
work we do is while we do a lot of our work with individual legal
departments or individual law firms, there are places where we just want
to improve the pro bono culture. We want to have people’s vision of how
to do pro bono and what it means to be a firm that’s good on pro bono, a
legal department is a strong pro bono provider, their vision of that, become
much more ambitious and much more expansive. And so how do you sort
of do that kind of culture shift, and how do you get in the people who are
able to make that culture shift happen, which means the people at the very
top of the firms and the people, the general counsel of corporations? Well,
it turns out that the one person who can get those folks together is the
chief justice of the state supreme court. That is an invitation that — and we
found that years ago when we did an event with the D.C. Bar, where we
had the four the two chief district judges, and the federal district chief and
the federal appellate chief, and the four of them sent an invitation to the
heads of the law firms in D.C. We also had a client who did a lot of work
with law firms in D.C., general counsel was a client, to come and say, we
know you’re doing great stuff. D.C. is in crisis. You have to do more.
Here are some ways that you can do more pro bono work, have a greater
impact, etc. . . . , and everybody showed up. Then the judges said, and we
want to know, we’re going to come back next year and find out what you
did. So, accountability was really good. And so we’ve used that model
now in a number of other states. So, they become really at the heart of
that process, and one of the places where it’s working really well, very
well, is I mentioned Connecticut, where they had a pro bono summit. The
chief had everyone who should have been there. It was every managing
partner of every firm; it was the general counsel of all the departments, all
prepped to say the right things and do the right things, but also had all the
heads of the various divisions of the court there to talk about what they
could do differently, and one of the things that she did — she, an appellate
judge who was sort of, was more hands-on with this effort — was that they
then went out and individually visited all the large firms and the legal
departments and did follow-up visits to say, let’s talk about what you want
to do which is more than simply a string of individual things. What are
you going to do? What project? And that’s how they go then, we’re
going to own the pro se clinic for the landlord tenant in Hampden County,
whatever it may be — so, really tremendously important in that way. And
then also, changing court processes and rules so that it’s easier for lawyers
to take cases. So one classic example, and it’d work some places, but not
everywhere, is you’ll have pro bono lawyers come into a very busy
courtroom. Let’s say it’s housing court or district court, and they’re on the
call for the day, and then they wait. I get crazy just thinking about how
much time I waste in the jury room waiting to get called or not called for
service. Imagine these folks. And so things like scheduling, giving them
priority in scheduling, which sends an incredible message; helping to
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
recruit them. We talked about changing the rules that create obstacles for
in house counsel to do the work, figuring out how to deal with issues like
fee waivers so that it’s easier for people to — if your client doesn’t have
$65, is that a reason that they can’t get justice really? And do you really
want to spend your time doing fee waivers as a voluntary lawyer? That’s
insane. Holding ceremonies to thank or being part of ceremonies that
thank people for participating in pro bono; doing training on what the
court wants to see in certain kinds of matters. So, all of that I think — you
know, that participation by judges both on a symbolic and very practical
level means that states can become much more pro bono friendly, and the
culture becomes more pro bono friendly.
Absolutely. And you said something a moment ago that I just wanted to
come back to. You said something like courts should be like churches.
They should always be open. That’s such a poignant thing to say. What
do you think — how do you think that developed — that concept of really
you know, exalting justice and valuing justice the way that you do?
Well, you know, honestly I think it really, it comes back to two things. I
mean, the oldest is my parents’ experience, and this notion of people who,
this notion of what the legal system is at its best and at its worst. At its
best, I think the American justice system when it works right and isn’t
dependent on the resources of the client, and at its worst, it was the
judicial system in Nazi Germany where the judges swore fealty to Adolf
Hitler — not to the law, but to Adolf Hitler — and where there was
– 171 –
absolutely no mechanism for people to, who were imprisoned, to
challenge that. So I think some of it’s that. I think some of it really goes
back to my experiences in Boston watching public interest lawyers and the
power that that had, and seeing the ability, for things to change, to really
be different. You know, I worry sometimes since I’m at a certain age
about, you know, sort of false nostalgia for the past and that sort of thing,
and there are some things that I think did work better, but the reality is that
the law really has been in so many respects a force for good in this
country, a force for change, and the problem is that again, the analogy to
education sort of comes up, that if you think about it — I mean there are a
lot of factors that made this country, you know, the place that people want
to be, and want to emulate. Even if they resent us, they still want to be
like us. But the two, I think, really most significant were the rule of law
and sort of fair treatment as exemplified by the legal system and the
courts, and public education which meant that regardless of where your
parents were in terms of positions and economic situation, you could be in
a very different place, and I experienced both of those very graphically in
my family and in my life. So I think that’s really where it comes from. So
that I really do think of the law and the legal system as sort of a sacred
place. It’s a sacred task, and just like public education because it’s
imperfect, and because people feel that it’s not as accessible and available
to them, we could lose it. We could lose it in a second. And so that’s —
and I think this idea that, I’m sorry we only do justice on Mondays,
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
Wednesdays and Fridays is terrifying. You know, it really is. And it
sends absolutely the wrong message to people in this country. So I think
that it really does come from personal experience, but it also comes from
watching what’s happened in terms of the law and people’s rights and the
fact that we really do move in the right direction — sometimes imperfectly,
sometimes we step back a little bit, but we do move in the right direction,
and I worry about what will happen if that’s — you know if we lose that or
if that’s impaired or if we hold on to — instead of holding on to, sort of,
what the legal system should be, we hold on to what the legal system was.
I think that’s my biggest concern.
So what do you think is going to happen next for you in your professional
life, in your personal life — what’s next?
Well, I’d say a couple of things. One is that I really, I’ve told folks in my
office and on my board that as long as I am able physically and mentally
to do this job, I really want to continue with it because it is — it’s such a
gift to do this every day. I mean I get very impatient sometimes with
things in part because if I’m dealing with something that’s sort of trying to
avoid somebody doing something that’s silly or negative, my frustration
with that is that I could be using that time to touch something else and
something really tremendous would happen. It’s an incredibly enviable
position to be in, but people in my office are also under instruction that if I
start saying things like, “We tried this 20 years ago, and it didn’t work,”
that they are to bring out the letter that says I have loved my time here at
PBI, that I hereby resign and wish you the best and send me out, because,
unfortunately, there is the tendency for people in the public interest world
to stay past their due date, and I don’t want to do that. But for right now, I
want to continue in that, and as much as I can. I would though love to,
well there are two things. One is I really can’t actually work as many
hours as I have worked in the past. So, I really need to shepherd my
resources a little bit more and be realistic about that, but also, I would like
to be able to step back from some of the kind of more detail-laden things
which are not my strength as anybody in this office will tell you, and
really focus on bigger opportunities which, and so one of the things we’re
talking about is bringing in a COO here, which was something I
suggested. That person would be much more involved in employees and
finances and that sort of thing, and I would pull out of some of that, and be
able to spend more of my time on the substance and the content and
relationships, and I also want to really, without in any way designating my
successor because that’s what my board should be doing and the staff, in
consultation with the staff, but to begin to transfer more relationships and
use the fact that I know a lot of people, because I’ve been around a long
time, to other people in the office to make sure that those relationships are
institutional and not just personal.
So, I would really like to do that for a number of years, and then get to a
place where I feel as though I can step back and there’s enough of the
transition work that’s gone on that the organization won’t be harmed by it.
The transition can be really as smooth and seamless as possible. And that
may mean, you know, at some point, not immediately, but in a number of
years, stepping down from my job. In terms of what I could do next, I’ve
been watching other people — my friends who are a little bit older than me
and looking for object lessons and trying to figure it out. I don’t think I’m
somebody who could ever retire and play golf or even be a docent in a
museum as much as I’d love that. So I’ve thought about the possibility on
a more part-time level, or maybe some teaching and maybe some writing.
There’s a part of me that really would love to write about the profession
and the issues impacting the profession, and there have been some very
good books on that. I don’t want to cover existing ground, but I do think
that those bigger issues that I talked about really need to be addressed — so
I have this vision of maybe doing a book, which is a pretty ambitious
undertaking, and that I think might be something. And then I really love
teaching. I just haven’t had the ability to do it, just because it’s time
intensive, and so I’ve had to, sort of, step back from it, and give my
courses up to other people. The idea of giving people the right approach
and the right vision, I think, in law school is going to be so important —
especially over the next few years as we take a profession that is, in terms
of careers and opportunities, just way out of balance, and figure out where
we’re going to take people. So something like that would be like teaching
research and writing I think might be really appealing for me. Although,
the other part of it for me is kind of coming full circle, going back to
creative writing, and like every lawyer in the entire world, I have this book
that I would like to write. It is fiction, but it is about the Holocaust and the
impact of the Holocaust, and getting deeper into that too, and sort of really
doing more research on my family than I’ve done, maybe visiting some of
the places that in the past, emotionally, I haven’t been able to handle,
getting back to that other part of my brain.
Ms. Knievel: Relationships right now that are important to you — who are they? How do
they affect your life right now?
Ms. Lardent: Well, you know, one of the things I do worry about, again having watched
some friends that are older, is how many of my most critical relationships
are work-based, and it’s one of the reasons why I think I keep thinking, “I
don’t want to leave, because I would miss these people.”
Ms. Knievel: It’s very common.
Ms. Lardent: I think particularly, and I’ve never seen the statistics about this, but
anecdotally sort of looking, at my friends and colleagues, it is, it seems to
be the case that, this age cohort of women are less likely to have
traditional family ties. You know, there’s more divorces and that sort of
thing. And for me, of course, my family of birth doesn’t exist. There’s
nobody around anymore. It’s trying to kind of create a different network,
so one of the things I’m actually trying to do both to create balance, but
also to try to have connections with people that are different and not just
focused on the work is doing things as simple as just joining a book club
with people who are, yes, there are a few lawyers there, but it’s D.C., there
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are a few lawyers everywhere, but people who come from different
backgrounds, and just spend time not talking about work at all, but talking
about books and talking about our lives, and talking about, you know,
mostly we’re about the same age, so talking about kind of what that feels
like. So I want to do more of that, but also figure out if there’s a way to
sort of regularize the time I spend with people who are really important to
me — getting season tickets to the theatre or doing that sort of thing. And
the other thing that I am trying to do is to, and I really love it, is spending
time with people who are younger than me. In some cases, it’s not a lot
younger. It’s like 10 years younger or 15 years younger, and so I’ve got
more friends who are sort of in that age cohort, but I also love really
young people — we have summers here, and this year we had just a
particularly fabulous group of people. Some were undergrads and some
were law students, and they were just — they help us so much. We
couldn’t do what we do without them, but they’re also just terrific
individuals. And so I really like the idea of figuring out sort of socially as
well as work-wise, spending time with more people at that age because
they’re coming into a world that’s very different obviously than when I
grew up, but there are things I think that I can offer looking back, and
there are connections so for example, one of our students is — really wants
to work on women’s issues in emerging countries, in post-conflict
countries, and one of the women that I’ve gotten very close to, is actually
a lawyer who’s in her mid-30s who is doing a lot of pro bono work in
Ms. Knievel:
Ms. Lardent:
Africa, and she’s just fabulous, and I try to see her when I’m up in New
York and we hang together, and so I hooked them up, because I think she
can be a tremendous resource and mentor to this young woman, very
young woman. And I’d love to do more of that, I’d love to figure out how
to create those networks outside of work, and I think honestly for my
generation, just generally figuring out how to create social networks that
are a little bit different is going to be part of the challenge, and we have to
kind of spend some time and energy on that.
What sorts of advice do you have to give to your mentees either outside
the office or within the walls of the profession?
Well, I think there really are sort of two things, and the first one, and you
know, I just saw an article about what baby-boomers shouldn’t say to
millennials, and this is something I say and really do believe it, but it
really — and this was one of the five things you shouldn’t say, but follow
your bliss I think really is a really important part of it because I’ve just
seen too many people who, at a certain point of their lives, it’s almost like
they wake up and they go, what have I been doing? I feel like I’ve been
on automatic pilot, and kind of on a kind of work and life treadmill and all
of a sudden I’m 50, and I feel very empty, and I feel, you know, regretful,
and you really don’t want to do that. There always will be things that you
wish you could have done better or differently, but to kind of just lose
yourself because you’re just not letting yourself Think about this —
there’s somebody I know who is retiring and who has spent the last I think
15 years since I’ve known her — the vision I have of her is like a prisoner
in jail who crosses off every day, and I just think, you know, honestly, that
you just can’t do that to yourself. So I do think it is really trying to figure
out what makes you happy, and how to get that, I’m not supposed to say
follow your bliss, but I do think that that’s incredibly important.
And then the other thing I think really is making time for relationships
which I think can be again really difficult. You know, you think about
work-life balance and I think what happens is that, you know, if you’re in
a marriage or relationship, you need to work very hard on that to make
that work, and having kids and doing this kind of work I think is amazing
and challenging and requires the most organized compartmentalization
I’ve ever seen, and I’m in awe of people who do it, but what it means
sometimes is that you don’t then, sort of, focus on other relationships. I
think you know, and I would say that those — it’s amazing how enriching
those other relationships are, and the other thing I’d say is honestly taking
full advantage of the people you meet as you pass through because they
keep popping up again in some really wonderful ways and that’s one of
the great things is really the happenstance of meeting somebody — they’re
interested in what they do, you’re interested in what they do, and then they
kind of follow you through your life which is really pretty incredible.
So, I think those are the really important thing — figuring out what matters
to you — both in work and in life. And not letting yourself kind of just
unconsciously keep from doing that. Having as enriching relationships
with people as you possibly, possibly can because that’s where you learn.
I mean I, you know, I always say that I went to law school, but didn’t get
my education there. I got my education from Chesterfield Smith and Jack
Curtin and John Pickering and Sally Determan and Brooksley Born and
Alex Forger, and I’m still getting my education from different folks — I
think it’s time that people will never regret and it’s incredibly well spent,
even if you don’t have quite the high affiliation needs that I do.
Ms. Knievel: I think that’s a wonderful place to end.
Ms. Lardent: Yeah. Well that’s great.
Ms. Knievel: I can’t thank you enough Esther for all of your time.
Ms. Lardent: Oh well, same to you really.