State Bar Honors Legal Community's Pro Bono Powerhouses

Securing medical care for low-income children. Handling divorces on a large scale. Making sure pro bono clients get the help they need. Fighting murder convictions. Those are the challenges tackled by this year’s State Bar of Texas honorees for outstanding pro bono work.

The State Bar’s Legal Services to the Poor in Civil Matters Committee recommended four recipients — two individual attorneys, a firm and a legal-services program — for this year’s pro bono and legal service awards, which will be presented at the State Bar’s annual meeting in Houston June 26-27.

The Bar first recognized lawyers for pro bono work in 1980, with the presentation of the Frank J. Scurlock Award. The award is named for the late Frank J. Scurlock, who was known for his efforts to provide legal services to the poor and served as the first chairman of the Legal Services to the Poor in Civil Matters Committee.

Frank J. Scurlock Award: Jane K. Swanson

by Jenny B. Davis

When it comes to litigation, Jane K. Swanson doesn’t shy away from the long and winding road. Thanks to her skill and tenacity in a class action originally filed in 1993, some 2.8 million low-income kids across Texas may finally get the medical check-ups they’re entitled to under the state Medicaid system. Swanson is being honored with this year’s Frank J. Scurlock Award in part for her contributions to Frew v. Hawkins, a complex, multiphase federal suit brought to compel the state to provide indigent children with early and periodic screening, diagnosis and treatment services as required by the Medicaid Act.

Between 2000 and the close of 2007, Swanson, a solo based in The Woodlands, logged more than 3,600 hours of work on the case as it wound its way from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court and back down to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas where it all began.

In September of last year, the state settled the suit with a consent decree setting out numerous corrective actions. Swanson remains involved in the case, helping make sure the state fulfills its promises.

In a perfect world, such a case would have had a team of attorneys pushing it toward resolution. In this world, however, “it has mostly been Ms. Swanson and me,” wrote Susan Zinn, a solo practitioner in San Antonio, in the award nomination letter she submitted in support of Swanson.

Zinn served as lead counsel on the Frew case and says she was happy to nominate Swanson, “because she’s been working so hard on this case with me for so long.”

Swanson and Zinn recently received attorneys’ fees for their work in the case, but Zinn wrote the two worked for years without knowing whether they’d ever be reimbursed for their time. “Despite the challenge,” Zinn wrote in her nomination letter, Swanson “never once flinched, never once said she wanted out, and never once backed down from her share of the work.”

Although Frew impacts the lives of an estimated one-third of all children in Texas, it’s not Swanson’s only significant contribution to the state’s low-income residents. She has spent much of her career in public service: From 1979 to 1993, she worked for East Texas Legal Services (now Lone Star Legal Aid) as the organization’s litigation director. She left and served as managing attorney for Kansas Legal Services in Kansas City, Kan., from 1993 to 1995. In the 1980s, she worked on several cases that Zinn described as “reshaping the landscape of legal rights for poor Texans,” including Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision that helped pave the way for children of illegal immigrants to be able to attend public school.

Private practice has done little to dampen Swanson’s commitment to public service. While volunteering on the board of directors of the Montgomery County Women’s Center between 1995 and 2001, she helped write the grant application that allowed the center to hire a full-time staff lawyer, and she helped supervise lawyers and nurture the fledgling program.

It’s a contribution that has made a real and lasting impact on the lives of the battered women who came to the shelter for help, says Pamela M. Kenner, the center’s managing director. Kenner describes Swanson as a “visionary” who is “extremely thoughtful from a process perspective.”

Although Swanson no longer officially works with the center, Kenner knows she can count on Swanson for advice, even when the call comes from out of the blue, or there’s an emergency. “She will take the time necessary to give you a good, thoughtful response to whatever the circumstance is,” Kenner says. One letter in support of her nomination came from Paul E. Furrh, chief executive officer of Lone Star Legal Aid in Houston. “She’s a wonderful person and a wonderful lawyer; there’s no one who deserves it more,” says Furrh, citing her career-long dedication to assisting low-income Texans and her willingness to help young lawyers do the same. “We’re all very proud of her.”

“She is brilliant, she’s professional and she’s a fabulous lawyer,” says Brenda Willett, who serves as Lone Star Legal Aid’s litigation director. Willett has seen firsthand the effects of the Frew case on her clients and their children, most notably in access to dental services, she says. “Almost all of our clients have children on Medicaid, and it sounds so simple, a child has a toothache, and they assume they’re going to be able to take that child to the dentist, but before the Frew case, that child may have had to wait days or weeks to get care.” Adds Willett, “I doubt that there is any single person who has had a bigger impact than she has had on the lives of children in Texas.”

It’s all in a day’s work for Swanson, who says helping the state’s low-income population “is what I find rewarding and fun about being a lawyer.”

Mentoring is part of that. “I’ve always thought that it was very important,” she says. “If we expect the younger generation of lawyers to continue the tradition of pro bono work and helping people who need help in the legal system, we can’t expect them to just do it, we have to show them how.”

But she acknowledges that juggling her private practice with the demands of her pro bono commitments has not always been easy — especially during the years when Frew seemed to stretch on without end. During those times, she says she’d draw support from her family, including husband Matt, and also from talking with Zinn. “We’d keep each other from being discouraged,” Swanson says. “But also when we’d hear from families who said that something we were doing was helping them, that gave us a lot of energy.”

It was just the energy Swanson needed to power ahead, and there are millions of Texans who are in a better place because of it.

Pro Bono Award: Community Justice Program

by Jonathan Fox

Before the creation of the Community Justice Program, rustling up Rio Grande Valley attorneys to take pro bono divorce cases was a challenge for the local legal aid office. Before CJP, if legal aid staffers found 30 to 35 attorneys to handle 40 cases in a year, “that was a good year,” says Pablo J. Almaguer, a legal aid attorney and branch manager of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid’s Edinburg office.

Kicked off in September 2006, CJP is a joint project of TRLA and the bar associations of Hidalgo and Cameron counties.

Now, TRLA gets 100 to 120 attorney volunteers a year through CJP, which means about 120 to 150 pro bono divorces, Almaguer says.

TRLA’s office in the Rio Grande Valley, says CJP coordinator Martha Hernandez, needs pro bono help to handle a constant stream of simple, uncontested divorce cases where a spouse is incarcerated or nowhere to be found.

Enter CJP, a monthly night court-style clinic that is helping TRLA recruit dozens of new attorneys for pro bono work and clear a backlog of unmet need in the Valley for free divorces.

Pablo J. Almaguer