Will Work for Loan Offset

Historically, one big difference between a professional and a tradesman is that the professional was supposed to provide pro bono services when he or she perceived a need and a wrong to be addressed while the tradesman was under no such ethical obligation. However, historically, law students and attorneys were not under such tremendous financial stress paying for their credentials as they find themselves today. Why do heavily indebted law students have to bear the costs of solving social problems?

There is a major push for debt servant law students and young graduates to provide pro bono services at law school clinics in order for the law schools to claim their students are "practice ready" and for everyone to "look good." Instead of law schools opening clinics to provide legal services pro bono at the expense of law students, why aren't they lobbying for increased government funding for legal services? And by that I don't mean solely to pay the law school clinic staff and overhead but also to provide actual paid employment to law students and young professionals or, better yet, credit against those federal student loans. Why is the cost of righting societal wrongs being carried by law students?

A case in point is a new push for law school clinics to be created to help reduce the VA backlog for veteran disability benefits. We as a nation are ending a decade of the war on terror. The VA is overwhelmed with processing disability claims as a result. The VA claim backlog reported is 570,000 disability claims are pending longer than 125 days. A large reason that the VA is overwhelmed is that each claim must be documented properly, the forms completed, and the paperwork properly pushed through the bureaucracy while someone advocates for the claim. When people who don't understand "the system" try to do this themselves, then delays and inefficiencies happen. Bureaucratic advocacy is exactly what lawyers do each and every day whether it be in the area of probate, personal injury litigation, social security or worker's comp, etc. Lawyers are uniquely trained, at considerable expense to themselves, to understand rules, apply a specific factual situation to those rules, and advocate for a particular result, all while paying attention to details so that the process runs smoothly.

William & Mary Law School has opened a pro bono legal clinic that between 2009 and 2012 has helped 46 clients with submission of 343 claimed injuries or illnesses for VA disability. Members of Congress are holding this clinic up as a "national model for inexpensively dealing with the Veterans Administration's backlog." Patty Roberts, director of clinical programs at Willian & Mary's law school, was quoted as saying: "At 50 clients you're directly representing at a time, that's certainly not going to impact the backlog in a way that it needs to be. But if you get more law schools across the country to do this work then you're exponentially leveraging the passion and experience of law students across the country to help with that backlog." William & Mary, after being contacted by White House officials to see if the program could be started in other law schools, created a "playbook" for starting similar clinics and forwarded that playbook to about ten other law schools.

A bill entitled "The Veterans Legal Support Act of 2013" has been introduced in the Senate to authorize the VA to spend up to $1 million a year to support to law school programs that provide legal assistance to veterans. Presumably, the funding will pay for existing space, faculty mentors, travel, out of pocket, etc. According to the article, William & Mary's program runs on a "shoestring" budget: "These clinics don't require that much of an investment, but they do require some." Thus, for a minimal $1M investment, the VA, the government as a whole, and the individual veterans, have shifted part of the cost to process claims onto debt servant law students who provide their services for free while their federal student loans add interest day by day.

Our veterans are heroes. These are volunteers who stepped up at great personal sacrifice at a time of war and are now bearing a more permanent cost in their lives from that service. The government should fully fund VA so that the infrastructure is there to process these disability claims quickly and efficiently. If we as a nation are going to engage in a war, we need to be prepared to fund both ends of it. However, funding should include not only $1 million to pay the law schools for overhead, but also sufficient funding so that the law students and young attorneys who have gone considerably in debt to polish the skill sets that are useful to assist in processing these claims are paid a living wage for their time and effort or at least given student loan debt relief for their services. Our Congressmen and their staff, the White House staff, law school staff, and the people who work at VA all are paid for their time. Law students and recent graduates who are using their education and skill sets to help process disability claims should also be paid a living wage, or at least a credit against their student loans, for their efforts instead of being treated like a free labor force to be called upon when the politicians don't want to properly fund a program.

Is the message we want to send our disabled servicemen and women that we value their service to their country so much we are going to find the cheapest solution we can to assist them in processing their claims? Is this even a sincere proposal to actually address the problem? Is the message our law schools want to send to their students that the skills that have acquired to this point and paid heavily for have no actual monetary value? Why do heavily indebted law students have to carry the cost of providing these services to society when everyone else in the system gets paid? Couldn't there at least be a loan reduction offset for amount of time worked? Seriously, if Congress and the American people don't want to fund a proper solution can't they at least give a loan credit?