Legal aid directors discuss their multi-faceted efforts to attract and retain high-quality attorneys and other staff on the latest episode of Legal Services Corporation’s “Talk Justice” podcast, released October 8. LSC President Ron Flagg hosts the conversation with Dori Rapaport, executive director of Justice North in Minnesota, and Lee Richardson, executive director of Legal Aid of Arkansas. Both Legal Aid of Arkansas and Justice North are funded in part by federal grants through LSC.
It’s no secret that legal aid does not lead to the highest potential salaries in the profession. Currently, the national median entry-level salary for legal aid attorneys is about $64,000, compared to the median entry-level salary for a mid-size private law firm at $110,000. Legal aid starting salaries lag behind the salaries for public defenders and other public interest attorneys.
While legal aid has much to offer in terms of opportunities for high-impact, rewarding work, program directors must be creative to attract and retain staff with their limited resources. For Richardson and Rapaport, their rural settings add another layer of difficulty.
“Historically recruiting has been a problem—it has been more of a compensation issue, but more recently over the last decade or so, it’s turned into supply and demand, rural versus urban,” Richardson says. “Arkansas is second lowest in the nation in attorneys per capita tied with South Dakota and North Dakota, we have 2.2 attorneys per every thousand residents in Arkansas.”
“Back in 2011 [or] 2012, we had a much higher rate of people going to law school than we have now,” he continued. “I know by 2018 that number was down 16%, and then you compound that with 25% of the attorneys in the country living in either California or New York and you see a problem in the rural parts of Middle America—a supply and demand problem.”
Rapaport says that high turnover has been a significant problem at Minnesota legal aid programs like Justice North. When she started there in 2017, the starting salary for attorneys was $45,000. When the pandemic came, turnover rates—which usually hovered around 20%—hit an all-time high at 37% in 2021.
“I mean we were bleeding—it was like crisis mode,” Rapaport says.
Justice North is a part of the Minnesota Legal Services Coalition along with six other state-funded programs. Together they educate the state legislature on the importance of civil legal services. In 2023, State Representative Jamie Becker Finn, who served as Chair of the House Judiciary and Civil Law Committee, asked the coalition how much money it would take to fully fund civil legal services.
“And so, we as a coalition started working on a six-year plan for how we could incrementally get to this ‘fully funded’ number where we’re prioritizing salary parity but simultaneously building capacity so that we’re able to help start to close some of that justice gap,” says Rapaport.
“Working on the salary parity was really what helped us stop the bleeding because every time you turn over another staff person, the number of people that you help goes down because that person leaves.”
“[In] the amount of time it takes to have somebody come back to working at that capacity you’ve lost so much productivity—and that happens over and over and over again when you can’t pay people what they deserve to be paid,” she continues.
She says that having a champion in the House made all the difference. Justice North saw an 87% increase in its state appropriation for 2024. Starting salaries for staff attorneys are now up to $80,000, and turnover has been cut in half from its peak. The hiring pool has also improved immensely.
“We are chasing a moving target though—let’s be real—because the other public sector opportunities, public defender and people at the attorney general’s office, county attorneys, city attorneys, they’re still ahead of us and they’re still growing,” says Rapaport.
Richardson is in a very different situation in Arkansas, where legal aid does not get any state funding. Still, they have found ways to compete, including raising salaries by 18% over the last three years. He has also put a lot of thought into employee benefits, including creating a sabbatical program in 2022 that is modeled after one he heard about at the Legal Aid Association of California.
For the sabbatical program, staff who have worked at Legal Aid of Arkansas for five years can have a three-week paid sabbatical in addition to three weeks of vacation. Then, after 10 years, they can take an eight-week paid sabbatical leave in addition to four weeks of vacation. They have access to a sabbatical every five years. Richardson has also improved the organization’s retirement vesting benefits and has given staff access to flexible working arrangements like compressed schedules or telework.
“And I think if you combine all these together, none of them still have the same impact as the ability to come in and do impact work that you’re not going to be able to do coming out of law school [and] going elsewhere,” Richardson says. “We’ve had attorneys with three years or less experience at the U.S. Supreme Court [or] arguing before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, doing work that impacts tens of millions of people around the country—and other people in law school and then the community see those opportunities and they want to be a part of that.”
Talk Justice episodes are available online and on Spotify, YouTube, Apple and other popular podcast apps. The podcast is sponsored by LSC’s Leaders Council.
It’s no secret that legal aid does not lead to the highest potential salaries in the profession. Currently, the national median entry-level salary for legal aid attorneys is about $64,000, compared to the median entry-level salary for a mid-size private law firm at $110,000. Legal aid starting salaries lag behind the salaries for public defenders and other public interest attorneys.
While legal aid has much to offer in terms of opportunities for high-impact, rewarding work, program directors must be creative to attract and retain staff with their limited resources. For Richardson and Rapaport, their rural settings add another layer of difficulty.
“Historically recruiting has been a problem—it has been more of a compensation issue, but more recently over the last decade or so, it’s turned into supply and demand, rural versus urban,” Richardson says. “Arkansas is second lowest in the nation in attorneys per capita tied with South Dakota and North Dakota, we have 2.2 attorneys per every thousand residents in Arkansas.”
“Back in 2011 [or] 2012, we had a much higher rate of people going to law school than we have now,” he continued. “I know by 2018 that number was down 16%, and then you compound that with 25% of the attorneys in the country living in either California or New York and you see a problem in the rural parts of Middle America—a supply and demand problem.”
Rapaport says that high turnover has been a significant problem at Minnesota legal aid programs like Justice North. When she started there in 2017, the starting salary for attorneys was $45,000. When the pandemic came, turnover rates—which usually hovered around 20%—hit an all-time high at 37% in 2021.
“I mean we were bleeding—it was like crisis mode,” Rapaport says.
Justice North is a part of the Minnesota Legal Services Coalition along with six other state-funded programs. Together they educate the state legislature on the importance of civil legal services. In 2023, State Representative Jamie Becker Finn, who served as Chair of the House Judiciary and Civil Law Committee, asked the coalition how much money it would take to fully fund civil legal services.
“And so, we as a coalition started working on a six-year plan for how we could incrementally get to this ‘fully funded’ number where we’re prioritizing salary parity but simultaneously building capacity so that we’re able to help start to close some of that justice gap,” says Rapaport.
“Working on the salary parity was really what helped us stop the bleeding because every time you turn over another staff person, the number of people that you help goes down because that person leaves.”
“[In] the amount of time it takes to have somebody come back to working at that capacity you’ve lost so much productivity—and that happens over and over and over again when you can’t pay people what they deserve to be paid,” she continues.
She says that having a champion in the House made all the difference. Justice North saw an 87% increase in its state appropriation for 2024. Starting salaries for staff attorneys are now up to $80,000, and turnover has been cut in half from its peak. The hiring pool has also improved immensely.
“We are chasing a moving target though—let’s be real—because the other public sector opportunities, public defender and people at the attorney general’s office, county attorneys, city attorneys, they’re still ahead of us and they’re still growing,” says Rapaport.
Richardson is in a very different situation in Arkansas, where legal aid does not get any state funding. Still, they have found ways to compete, including raising salaries by 18% over the last three years. He has also put a lot of thought into employee benefits, including creating a sabbatical program in 2022 that is modeled after one he heard about at the Legal Aid Association of California.
For the sabbatical program, staff who have worked at Legal Aid of Arkansas for five years can have a three-week paid sabbatical in addition to three weeks of vacation. Then, after 10 years, they can take an eight-week paid sabbatical leave in addition to four weeks of vacation. They have access to a sabbatical every five years. Richardson has also improved the organization’s retirement vesting benefits and has given staff access to flexible working arrangements like compressed schedules or telework.
“And I think if you combine all these together, none of them still have the same impact as the ability to come in and do impact work that you’re not going to be able to do coming out of law school [and] going elsewhere,” Richardson says. “We’ve had attorneys with three years or less experience at the U.S. Supreme Court [or] arguing before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, doing work that impacts tens of millions of people around the country—and other people in law school and then the community see those opportunities and they want to be a part of that.”
Talk Justice episodes are available online and on Spotify, YouTube, Apple and other popular podcast apps. The podcast is sponsored by LSC’s Leaders Council.
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