 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. So Thursday at 9 o'clock block, Ron Flagg, the president of the Legal Services Corporation on the mainland joins us. Welcome to the show, Ron. Thanks, Jay. It's good to be with you. I wish I was really with you because I think I'd be more comfortable wearing a lo-ha wear and enjoying the weather there, but I'm happy to join you. Thank you. Well, thank you for not wearing a lo-ha wear, leaving it to me. Maybe next time you can wear a lo-ha wear. Excellent. So, Ron, you're the president of the Legal Services Corporation. What is that and where is it and what does it do? So Legal Services Corporation is the largest funder of civil legal aid in America. What's civil legal aid? When people, low-income people, have problems, housing problems, maybe they're going to be evicted. Maybe they are potential victims of domestic violence. They have family law issues. They have custody issues. A grandparent may need to get custody of a grandchild. Maybe they have debt collectors after them. Maybe they're veterans and they're owed benefits from the VA. Those sorts of problems need help and LSE is the largest funder of civil legal aid in America. We fund legal aid programs including the Hawaii Legal Aid Society across the entire country. We're funded by Congress and then we grant out the money. And then the other thing we do is try to identify innovations, help practices for all the programs we fund to consider to help them in providing services that are efficiently. How did you get into this? This is not an ordinary legal type of job. Is it? How did you wend your life into it? Again, the people we fund are doing the legal work. Hawaii Legal Aid Society has dozens of lawyers who help flowing Hawaiians with the kind of civil legal problems I described. LSE, the organization that I'm the president of and work with in Washington, provide fundings to these legal aid organizations across the country. Is it a government agency? No, we're a private nonprofit but we get 99% of our funding from Congress and the amount of money we have available to provide in Hawaii and the other 49 states and the territories is dependent on how much money Congress gives us. So COVID has affected everyone and we have yet to learn all of the effects that it has had on our institutions, our society, our people. How has it affected LSE? How has it affected legal aid in general around the country? So let's take, I mean the short answer is it's made a bad situation worse. It's made a challenging situation worse. Let's go back to the good old days prior to the pandemic. In the good old days, a study that LSE did a few years back showed that 86% of the problems faced by low-income Americans were at with either no assistance or inadequate assistance. It was before the pandemic. We've had obviously a spike in unemployment. It's gotten a little better but it's still well above pre-pandemic levels. That means more people qualify for the legal aid that LSE funds and the people who qualify for legal aid are seeing surges and things like evictions or at least potential evictions in domestic violence. We really have a perfect storm for domestic violence. You have great economic stress. You have great health stress and the pandemic requires or puts limitations on people's ability to move out of their homes. So you put those together and inevitably, unfortunately, you get an increase in domestic violence. Any issues a whole host of is have got that were bad before the pandemic have gotten worse. When you say gotten worse, what's the dynamic? We have two years of experience here under our belt. The first year there was a sort of blush about it and the second year it sort of settles in on you, us, and I wonder, has it gotten better, has it gotten worse? It is the same between year one and year two. It really varies across jurisdiction and across problems. Let me just address two different areas, domestic violence and then evictions, which are prevalent across the country. Domestic violence, if you look at the statistics for 2020, in a lot of instances, we weren't in the statistics, that is the reported cases or the reports to police and other law enforcement. There didn't seem necessarily to be an increase in domestic violence. But what actually was happening on the ground was that there were increases in domestic violence, but people weren't reporting them because they were, you know, stuck at home with the perpetrator of violence. In 2021, the communications has gotten better and the reports of domestic violence have caught up with what's actually happening on the ground and we're seeing, in many instances, multiple two or three times the number of domestic violence incidents that we saw prior to the pandemic has not abated. That's only gotten worse. It has had a very kind of up and down run because people, so many people lost their jobs at the outset of the pandemic and lawmakers recognize that, oh my gosh, if everybody who lost their job also loses their homes and are forced to live with friends or families or in homelessness, that would be a bad thing during a pandemic. That would not only be a housing disaster, it would be a health disaster. So what happened is we've had both state and local governments and then the federal government, the Center for Disease Control, established these eviction moratoria, which put a pause on evictions so that we weren't throwing people out of homes during the middle of a pandemic. And so throughout 2020 and through 2021, through around September, the level of evictions was well below the level of evictions prior to the pandemic. The concern about evictions was very high because people were six months, 12 months, 18 months behind in their rental payments, they've lost their jobs, didn't have a means to pay landlords, many of them small, not necessarily wealthy themselves, had mortgages to pay and they weren't collecting rents. So the federal government has provided $46 billion in emergency rental assistance, which was intended to get into the hands of tenants and ultimately landlords so that tenants didn't lose their homes, landlords didn't lose their homes and the buildings that they were operating. It took a long while for the emergency rental assistance across the country to get out. These were basically cooperation, state to state, sometimes area to area, it didn't exist and all of a sudden we have collectively billions of dollars going out that needs to be distributed to landlords and tenants and it took a while to get that up and running, but it has gotten up and running. And so again, through most of 2021, we've seen eviction rates stay below the levels they were prior to the pandemic. The Center for Disease Control moratorium terminated in September of this year. Most of the state and local moratorium have also ended. A few states have continued to have moratorium. But the rental assistance is helping keep down the level of evictions. They're still below pre-pandemic levels, but they're creeping up because there's now not a moratorium in existence in most places. And so we're seeing eviction cases go up. The real fear is the money is running out. The emergency rental assistance was for 12 or 18 months while we're now 18 months into the pandemic or nearing two years come early next year. And so the real question is what's going to happen when that money runs out? And that's the great concern. Well, it strikes me that you're a kind of executive who needs to read the paper closely every day because what's happening in our community, our national community, affects the need for services by legal aid societies around the country. And you have to anticipate, based on what is happening on the ground, what is happening in those legal aid societies. And I don't know how you can tune it up. Can you change the way you distribute your funding to meet problems in different areas and cities and regions? Actually, surprisingly, no. In large measure, no. The funding we get from Congress, the great bulk of it, I'd say 90% of it go out under a formula. The formula is pretty simple. You get from the Census Bureau the percentage of people in each service area whose come is 120% or less than the poverty level. In the 48th of the continental United States, the poverty level that enables you to get laid is for a one person household, just 16,000 dollars. And for a person household, it's 32,000 dollars. And why the numbers are a little bit higher, not much higher, a little bit higher. So you have the quite poor, really, to qualify for legal aid. But our money goes out under that formula. So if a state has or a service area, say if Hawaii had 1% of the people living in poverty in the United States, then Hawaii Legal Aid Society's share of our funding would be 1%. We have no discretion. That's what Hawaii Legal Aid Society would get. The only way for Hawaii Legal Aid Society to get more from LSC is for Congress to increase our overall appropriation. Wow, that is really interesting because let me ask you this. If you had your druthers, if you had discretion in a very, what do you want to call it, dynamic challenging time, such the time that we live in, where different areas have different problems, and then they may change. I mean, the numbers on COVID, for example, change. And there's got to be a correlation between COVID domestic violence, the need for civil legal assistance, and so forth. How would you change the formula if you could? Yeah, I wouldn't be in a rush to change it because I'm not sure we could come up with anything better than that. When we got $50 million in COVID emergency funding in March of 2020. And remember, you know, it's we all know how things within a week or two change dramatically during the pandemic. So when we got this funding, you'll you'll recall Washington State had really high cases and mortality. New York City had unbelievably high mortality rates and high case rates. So we got this first $50 million. We granted out pretty much in equal amounts to all of our funding recipients, relatively small grants in the range of $25,000 to help them get up and running remotely. So if they needed laptops and cell phones so that their lawyers could work from home, they were able to purchase that. But the bulk of the money, the $46 million was largely distributed based on population, but we made an adjustment to the population based on the COVID cases that were occurring at the time of our grants. Well, it turned out and we did that. And, you know, and had we granted out the money three months later or six months later, that adjustment factor would have been very different because lo and behold, rates in New York were still high, but they came down a bit. You know, rates in Washington State were still high, but they came down a bit places like Texas and the South, which had very low rates at the outset of the pandemic, you know, had peaks in their in their rates. So our funding is is there for the long, the long run. And, you know, just as you asked it in your question, the conditions pandemic have changed so rapidly. And one place that seems really immune from the pandemic for a week or two, the next week is is really in a bad place and places that were suffering terribly earlier, you know, are relatively better off. As any granting agency, I'm sure you require reports to come back. So you can you can know and you can analyze how the money is being spent by every grantee in every state. So where where does it go? Does it go to you mentioned earlier, maybe equipment, maybe salaries, maybe rent? Where is it going? How have those proportions changed in terms of the way the various legal aid societies in the country are spending it? Well, it by and large, I think for any organization, there there are two major expense categories, human beings and rent. And that's also true for legal aid. And LSE's funding, by and large, is for operational expenses. So these four milligrams enable our legal aid programs that we fund to operate and so they can be used for any reasonable costs of of of lawyers and staff or rent or other expenses, including technology, the pandemic really hasn't changed that too much. That the rent didn't go up. In fact, the buildings weren't being used by and large, but they still had to pay rent with the influx of funding from LSE. Many of our programs were able to hire more lawyers and other staff to help out with the increases in cases. Before the pandemic, the three or four leading categories of cases were housing, family law, consumer issues. Those were really the three biggest housing and family law across all of our programs account for about 60 percent of the cases. I think during the pandemic, they still accounted for over 60 percent of the cases, probably housing creeping up a little bit higher than the pandemic because the loss of jobs lead to the potential for evictions in other housing problems. It strikes me that, you know, we have had, according to the newspapers, a great resignation. And there is, you know, a call of disturbances in the labor market. And that would include the professional labor market. I imagine some civil law firms have dispatched lawyers because they didn't have the work. Some some government agencies probably, too. And the question is, how is the market for lawyers who might be hired or might be terminated by legal aid societies? Is it harder for legal aid societies to hire new staff? I mean, professional staff, is it easier? How are the numbers of lawyers in those organizations changed in the course of covid? Couple of things there, Jay. First of all, because our funding has has, you know, remained steady and we even got a relatively small influx of money at the outset of the pandemic. Our funding recipients have been able to retain their staff. They had the money to retain their stuff. They didn't have to. I'm not aware of any of them laying off staff during the pandemic. In terms of resignations, most legal aid lawyers are pretty much the lowest paid lawyers in America. They're paid less than government lawyers. They're often paid less than public defenders. They make less far less than people in law firms. So they're doing it. Obviously, they're doing it for the money in the sense that they have to keep themselves and their families fed and and clothed and housed. But they're doing it their mission base. They're they're they're doing it because they believe in the mission. They believe in the value of justice and making sure that people of all income levels get justice. So I don't certainly at LSC and as best I can tell within our grantees, we have not seen the level of of resignations that we've seen across other sectors. If you're in it for the money, you know, you might conclude, gee, it's not worth the money anymore. If you're in it because you want to help people in need and those needs have gotten bigger, you're not going to leave. Yeah, I would imagine that a lot of them have doubled down on that mission. They've seen the strife in the lives of their clientele and they're even more dedicated. Having seen that now in the time of covid, if I were there doing that, that's what I would. That would be my reaction. As long as I could make it work on my own, you know, my own life with sufficient funds to live my same life, I would not only stay, but I would be more active, more dedicated than before. You see signs of that? I guess you do. Yeah, no, again, at LSC, we've that's exactly been the case. If there's sort of a lag between what happens in our in the legal aid programs we fund and our learning of what happens. But I think, by and large, people are staying with with this caveat. All of us, all of us, every single one of us have faced increased and in many cases, enormous stress as a result of the pandemic. Those of us, and for me, that would would have been a few years ago, but those of us who have school-age kids trying to help their kids with distant education or maybe had family members we had to take care of during the pandemic, whether it was elder care or self care. You know, that created a lot of stress and, you know, certainly the combination of that stress and the burnout. You know, we see of ER workers who are certainly dedicated and mission-oriented who are, you know, burning out. I think on occasion you'll see among civil aid lawyers. But with that caveat, you know, I don't believe witnessed a larceness from the civil aid court. You know, it strikes me that, as I said before, you know, everything is changing around us and including the institutions. And it strikes me that going forward, we're not going to ever get back to what we think might be normal. But on the other side, light at the end of the tunnel, I think it's going to be revealed that legal legal services corporation is more important to our society, more important to those particular elements of our demographics than it was before. People will take note, perhaps, by what you are doing now on the other side. Do you think there's a chance of that? Yeah, there certainly been many silver linings from the pandemic. But one benefit, if you want to call it that, is people are far more aware of civil legal issues and civil legal aid in twenty twenty one and they were in twenty nineteen issues like a jins, unemployment and domestic violence, which in twenty nineteen, somebody else's problem. And, you know, nobody paid much attention now or our front issues. The possibility of five or ten or fifteen or twenty million people being thrown out of homes, that's a that's an intense grabber. And so we've got more attention from the media, from political leaders than we have before. So I think there is a chance that following the pandemic, that attention to those subject of issues of housing, employment, family issues, you know, my hope is it's we're not going to. We're not going to, you know, our attention span is not going to be too short. Yeah, the mixed blessing, but it is a blessing for LSE. OK, we have to get to Hawaii now for a minute. You gave a couple of grants to the Legal Aid Society in Hawaii and my recollection of the newspaper article was that these grants had an effect on on technology, as you mentioned earlier. Can you talk about the size of those grants and the technology involved? Yeah, I'm happy to. So LSE has a program where grant out about four million dollars a year throughout the country to the programs that we fund generally. And Legal Aid Society in Hawaii is receiving two grants in the coming year. It's going to receive a ninety three thousand dollar grant to support a program called Legal Navigator, which employs artificial intelligence and other cutting edge technologies to help states guide low income individuals to really the best form of legal systems or is available and the grant will enable Legal Aid Society to develop and maintain Legal Navigator for the long term. And it will also create ways for new states and partners to use Legal Navigator. So that was one grant and then a separate grant before you go to that. What exactly does Navigator do? So imagine you need help and you you you go to the internet and you Google losing my home or you Google my spouse is hitting me or you Google. I've lost my job. Legal Navigator is meant to recognize that as a potential legal problem and then ask you questions to flesh out, you know. Things about you, where you live, what your income is, the nature of your problem, and then direct you to a resource that can help you, either a human resource that can provide assistance or a self-help tool. It might lead you to a tool sort of like TurboTax will ask you, what's your name? My name is Jay. Jay, what can I do for you today? I've lost my job. You know, where did you work? How much money did you make? When did you lose your job? How long did you work there? And then, you know, here's the here's the form you need to fill out and it'll help you fill it out. So that in its most ambitious form is how Legal Navigator is designed to work. Yeah, that's that's good because it saves staff time and it gives you that is the client in an accurate direction about where to go. And of course, it gathers the data that can be used by the lawyer later. Exactly. So what about the second grant? So the second grant Legal Aid Society will use and it's about seventy six thousand dollars to redesign its case intake system to really better use technology to ensure that intake is possible to helpful residents. If you go back in time, you know, a number of years ago, most legal programs, if you wanted to get help, you had to go walk into their office and, you know, stand in line and talk to somebody or maybe, you know, call them on the telephone and, you know, annoyingly listen to music for a long period of time. And then they would ask you a bunch of questions. So most intake systems now are designed to to be more user friendly and to use technology to expedite that system. For example, our programs help people with civil cases, not criminal cases. So if you had an automated system and one of the questions the automated system asked right up front would be, you know, do you have a civil or a criminal problem? And if you said criminal, it would say automatically, sorry, we can't help you. Here's the public defender or the other resource that could help you with that problem. And we wouldn't use a civil legal aid staff member to to direct you. And anyway, so this grant will help the legal aid society with its intake. You know, Think Tech, Hawaii, our organization has changed this way of doing business over the past couple of years. We have a studio, but we don't use the studio. We use Zoom just like this. And the one hand, we've, you know, we don't have the high risk, higher resolution that we would have in the studio. But on the other hand, we can reach all across the world, including you, Ron, and talk to you and people respond to us. And, you know, it has had a permanent effect on the way we see our mission and the accomplishment of our mission. And I can tell you, I know a lot of lawyers and law firm managers where the same kind of thing has happened. It's not total, not 100%. There are, yes, there are person to person meetings, of course, and, you know, you have, so forth. However, as we come out the other side, hopefully soon, you know, their lives, their professional lives will be different. And I imagine that the professional lives of the lawyers in the legal aid societies around the country will be different. Have you observed that? Is that a side effect of these technology grants that they're using Zoom or other such products in order to make their connection with people more efficient? Absolutely. I mean, again, it cuts a lot of ways. I mean, prior to the pandemic, legal aid programs would do outreach to potential clients by, you know, posting liars in churches and community centers and, you know, reaching out to people in percent and inviting people in their offices, you know, for a long period of time, churches weren't meeting. People weren't able to go to community centers. The physical offices of legal programs were often closed. So we had to come up with different means of outreach, social media. Now all of a sudden, people are hearing about programs and can watch programs on the internet, Facebook, other social meetings that used to be face-to-face, can be face-to-face, but where clients have their with all on their phones or if they can get access to a computer, you know, they can meet. And that's a very powerful potential tool. And it was pre-pandemic. If you look at a place like Hawaii, that certainly has urban centers, but then has population dispersed across multiple islands or, you know, a place like Alaska or Montana, where the population is very dispersed and the lawyers are concentrated in a few cities. You know, the challenge is, how do you serve somebody who's an island away or, you know, 500 miles away in, you know, Alaska or 1,000 miles away in Alaska, Montana? You need to come up with ways of overcoming, you know, the digital divide, getting, you know, providing them access to technology tools that will enable them to communicate or who might not be physically proximate to the clients. You know, healthcare face same challenges, but healthcare has actually done a better job. You know, you find health clinics in a lot of remote areas. You don't find law offices in remote areas. So, you know, one thing to do is put a kiosk in those healthcare clinics. Where they could, they communicate with a lawyer that, you know, was located somewhere else. Very interesting. Well, do you feel that Hawaii is a place that has a special need for technology grants? I mean, what would the alternatives, what would the alternatives be in lieu of giving Hawaii technology grants? Well, again, you know, I think in terms of the legal navigator tool, that's not unique to Hawaii. Every jurisdiction, people in poverty, or not everyone in every jurisdiction that has legal problems and doesn't have the financial wherewithal to hire a lawyer at, you know, $100, $200, $500 an hour to help them, it goes to the end and tries to figure out where they can get help. So we need tools like legal navigator to help wreck people to the right resources. And that's not... That's for everybody in the country, every legal aid society. That's not unique to Hawaii. The intake system that legal aid society is gonna use its technology grant for, again, it's not unique to Hawaii in the sense that every legal aid program has to come up with a way to reach out to potential clients and to communicate with them and understand what their needs are and figure out whether they can serve those needs. I think, you know, something that Hawaii has to face, which many states do, but not all of our legal aid programs do is the dispersity of the population where, you know, you do have people living in smaller towns and villages, you know, away from population centers. And, you know, those folks have civil legal problems like everybody else. And the question is how to get them service. And technology can play a role there. Again, that's not unique to Hawaii. You would face similar issues in Montana or Alaska or Texas or, you know, any part of the United States where there's a geographic dispersity. We have some programs, for example, we have a program in Cleveland or New York City or we have a program in Los Angeles. Obviously their population dispersity is not an issue, but certainly the programs that serve dispersed areas, rural areas, including Hawaii face those challenges. Well, it sounds like these technology grants raise all the boats and it's something the whole country could use and is using now or will use by virtue of grants like this. Yeah, go ahead. It's really critical because, again, the amount of money that Congress appropriates to LSC is not nearly enough. I mentioned at the outset of the program, 86% of the legal problems faced by low income Americans are responded with no assistance or inadequate assistance. So the question is, how do we leverage this relatively small number of legal aid, lawyers and staff? How do we make their numbers bigger in addition to just hiring more? And one way is to make their work more efficient with technology. One way is to enable them to reach, you know, rather than having somebody in a remote town that is a live lawyer in a remote town, maybe they're only 100 people. None of our programs are able to have an office in towns of a few thousand people or a few hundred people. So how do you reach those folks? And you can do it, you know, technology can help. Technology can provide the kind of interactive tool that we were talking about, the sort of TurboTax tool that will help you fill out a form. You know, it may not be as good as having a live lawyer, but it's better than having no help at all, which is often the alternative. Leverage, that's what it is, leverage. That's what we're talking about. We're almost out of time, Ronald. I wanted to ask you one last three-part question. I'll object this compound. Go ahead. This is really relatively subjective. So, Ron, how long have you been with LSC? How long do you plan to be with LSC? Am I right in, and my third part is, am I right in concluding that the same sort of psychic benefit that holds lawyers who legal aid societies around the country applies to you? Absolutely, yeah, well, the answer to the last question is absolutely, Jay, all of us, all of us during the pandemic have felt helpless at times. We've felt helpless vis-a-vis our own health, the health of our family and friends and loved ones. We've felt helpless about lots of things. And to be in a job where every day, at least at times, I feel like I'm being helpful, that is a blessing being a measure. And so that's been terrific. I've been at LSC for eight years. I was the general counsel for the first six and a half and for the last 20 months, I've been president. And as I say, I have found being here to particularly during the pandemic to be an absolute blessing. Thank you, Ron Flagg, president of LSC, Legal Services Corporation in Washington, D.C., which funds our legal society and the late society with technology grants and other grants. Thank you so much, Ron. Thanks, Jay. Stay well. Aloha.