Open Door Legal co-founders on anti-poverty work, navigating public interest law, and finding your career path
Open Door Legal is pioneering the country’s first system of universal access to legal help.
This is the second article in a two-part series on Open Door Legal. You can find the first article here to learn about Adrian and Virginia’s journey to founding Open Door Legal and their current work.
What follows is a series of highlights from my interviews with Adrian and Virginia. This article is divided into three sections: anti-poverty work, navigating the difficulties of public interest work, and finding your career path.
Anti-Poverty Work
Adrian on why he was obsessed with poverty from a young age
We had this World Book Encyclopedia at home, and I would read it and I would memorize income tables for countries around the world. And it was pretty obvious that the US was very well-off. I was able to find my parents tax returns and estimate that we were actually pretty well-off, even in the US.
It just struck me as unfair. I became very passionate about it and did a ton of research. I wanted to figure out how I could make the biggest contribution. You know, I’ve got this one life. I think if you want to make social change, you have to focus. You can’t solve all social problems.
Adrian on why the US has higher levels of poverty than any other developed country
The US as a percentage of GDP spends about average on education and gets about average outcomes. On health, the weird thing is that we spend more than anyone else and we get average outcomes. And for specific groups or cities, we’re doing very poorly. But if you look at the overall population, we’re about average.
So those systems alone would not explain why the US has more poverty than any other developed country. Why is our Gini coefficient(measure of inequality) higher? We’re spending on things with low marginal returns and we’re missing the things with high marginal returns.
What is that thing? Well, our political system generally is fine. Our legal system is problematic.
Adrian on community development work
In the long term, the only thing that really matters [in anti-poverty work] is assets. Income inequality is important, but asset inequality is actually much more important. If you’re addressing incomes, but you’re not addressing assets in the long run, you’re not really doing anything.
With community development, the idea is we could basically generate assets through targeted interventions that will revitalize a community. There are a couple of vehicles for this. There are things like community land trusts and community owned corporations. I would say the record on these interventions is kind of mixed. I think probably community land trusts have been very successful. But it’s much more situational than you would think.
I worked in community development for three years and I realized that at the end of those three years, I hadn’t really gotten anyone out of poverty. There was no named individual.
The strategies used were very indirect. For example, I ran a mural program. We hired artists to paint murals for children. The impact this has on poverty is very indirect. You could say they reduce graffiti, which they do, which in turn improves the livability or the property values over time. You wouldn’t be able to point to an individual and say I helped this person.
I realized that through legal services, even just directly preventing expropriation would generate assets at a far faster rate than any other intervention. For example, if you invest in health care, health care will improve labor productivity which will improve earnings which will improve assets. Or you can invest in legal aid, which will prevent expropriation and that will lead to direct assets. Like with Antonio. It’s partly because it’s so underfunded that you have very high marginal returns on it right now.
Everything matters but you have to at some point choose how you want to work and direct your labor, and I think what I’m doing now is more impactful.
Adrian on measuring outcomes from social impact interventions
People have tried to put a monetary value on specific outcomes. Did you get a job as a result of this program? But that’s very difficult. You have to assess but-for causality . What percentage of help did this service provide in getting this job? 30 percent, 60 percent, 100 percent? Would you be able to get a job on your own without it? What is the price differential on the job you got versus the job you wouldn’t? It’s very fact-intensive and hard to get this data for one person let alone for everyone, let alone compare that to a difficult intervention like primary schools.
In my opinion, the best and only way to assess value in the absence of prices is through benchmarks. You can survey people: parents from primary school, patients, people who go to job training. They will honestly tell you how much of a life difference the program made. This isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty much going to be accurate. You can trust beneficiaries to tell you how important it was to them. If you benchmark this, you can use that as a foundation for a theory of value.
Adrian on making change at the individual and societal level
I’ve thought for a long time, if you can not make change in identified individual lives, can you make change? Is there a way to make change in the big picture that doesn’t change individual lives? I think no.
I think there’s a lot of thought and ink spilled over very abstract interventions but when you come down to it, poverty is addressed through human services. It’s teachers working with students, it’s doctors working with patients, and it’s lawyers working with clients. That’s anti-tech because tech feels like human services aren’t scalable.
Navigating public interest work
Adrian and Virginia on work-life balance in public interest work
Adrian: It’s hard. For everyone who goes into direct services. You have to compartmentalize. It’s hard because the work is so important so you’re always feeling it.
I would say it’s a professional skill to be developed and cultivated. At some point, my body kind of forced me to. I’m very lucky that I have a team that’s super supportive and I personally see how valuable it is because I’ve been on the edge of burnout.
You have to see it as a marathon because social change happens so slowly. It’s not like a start-up and you have an idea and boom you have a hundred million dollars. It takes decades to make meaningful change.
Virginia: I naturally had an easier time than Adrian learning the skills of boundaries and self-care. I never worked crazy hours. I never worked weekends but I did work until 8 pm sometimes. Adrian has more of a role that requires him to be like a pastor. His work and life is one identity. I had to do a lot of that at the beginning when we were both raising money. I’m glad I got to step off the money-raising role.
The thing that really changed things for me was having kids. I have 2 sons. When we started Open Door Legal, I wasn’t married. The second I had a kid, I had to be done at 5. I had to get more done during the day and protect my time. Still, management decisions are things that I am always thinking about. I use mindfulness and meditation to try to not let worry take over my thoughts. Open Door Legal has even brought in a lawyer that teaches us mindfulness — Judi Cohen.
Virginia on trauma-informed law and maintaining your own mental health in the process
Trauma-informed law is taking into account a client’s history and the problems that make it hard for clients and all people really to be able to handle stressful situations. When you are accused or trying to fight for your rights, it is extremely hard to stay emotionally calm and resilient. Basically, hurt people hurt. Sometimes that anger about the situation will be taken out on the lawyer and legal staff. However, we can’t take it personally and realizing the social factors behind the action can help us process and stay focused on the clients needs.
At the same time, attorneys work on being clear and setting personal boundaries with clients that are for the client’s best interests. It’s very hard when you want to be a helper and say yes to everything to realize that saying no is best for the client and best for you.
I remember to this day the first time I cried because I couldn’t help someone. I think the person wanted something that wasn’t legally possible and was a product of their mental health condition. But still I cried that I couldn’t give them what they wanted. When my whole life was around this goal of helping, and I couldn’t help, I questioned my whole identity. But I moved on, learned many lessons and have more coping mechanisms now. Learning this lesson the hard way will happen to most people who want to help but most are very resilient. However, you can’t keep helping people if you don’t also help yourself.
Finding your career path
Virginia on figuring out her path as a lawyer
I figured it out by interning at as many different legal different organizations as I could. I discovered that at most places, even as an intern, I was the person that taught the next intern group what to do or wrote up how-to guides. I found myself taking the leadership role.
I discovered I liked teaching and making things better and fixing systems and I really wanted to do something different every day. When we started Open Door Legal, I was working with volunteers and doing all the legal work.
But what I’m really good at, my superpower, is triaging a life problem and figuring out where it fits in the legal world. In law school. you take specific classes with exams that focus on one subject. For example, the exam from a contract class will be a legal contracts problem. However, in life, lawyers don’t know which class the exam is for.
Somebody may come to you saying: I have a housing problem. My housing provider is trying to kick me out because my son can’t sign the lease. So you ask why are they trying to kick out the son? Oh, it’s because the son just turned 19 and is disabled. He does not have the capacity to sign the lease to live in the apartment complex. So no housing rights law is not going to help me. What I need is to help the parent get a limited conservatorship over the son. Thus, it’s not really a housing issue at all. So it’s not really a housing case but at the end of the day, we kept someone housed.
