Loan plan helps graduates work in public interest law

It can cost a lot to change the world, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Just ask Tom Graham, a recent 33-year-old University of Washington law school graduate with a keen interest in public-service law and $70,000 in law school loans, on top of $19,000 in earlier graduate school loans.

That debt load is so high that without a new federal program, he, like countless other law students with similar financial obligations, might have opted instead to go to work for a big law firm or corporation to pay them off.

But a new federal program that helps graduates like Graham gain more manageable loan repayment terms might be what it takes to keep him and others like him in public-interest law.

It’s called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and it is one of the most significant breakthroughs for public interest lawyers in a generation, according to the organization Equal Justice Works, which works to ensure a steady stream of attorneys into public service jobs.

The new program that began July 1, established by the College Cost Reduction & Access Act, offers a lower repayment schedule and loan forgiveness on the balance after 10 years of both loan repayment and qualifying public service employment, the group says. In addition to law graduates, the program is also open to other crucial public-interest professionals such as police officers, those in certain medical jobs and teachers.

The program is critical for law students, according to Equal Justice Works, because “research on employment trends has shown an alarming shortage of public sector and social justice jobs that provide a reasonable standard of living for those with educational debt.”

That picture, of course, is complicated by the recession that has stagnated the jobs picture for every profession.

The odds are stacked from the beginning against new lawyers going into public interest law.

While a new associate at a major private firm can expect a salary as high as six figures, it’s not so for new public service attorneys, despite the critical nature of their jobs. The median entry-level salary for an attorney from the class of 2008 at a civil legal services organization was $40,000, according to Equal Justice Works, while the median entry-level salary for public defenders was about $47,400. State and local prosecuting attorneys started at around $47,800; the median entry-level salary was $41,000 for attorneys in public interest organizations such as those dealing with immigrant or civil rights issues, the organization reports.

Nonetheless, Graham said he’s determined to use his legal skills to improve the world.

“I’m determined to work for access to justice, urban environmental health, species preservation, and in environmental law relating to global warming,” he said.

To begin his foray into public interest law, he is now clerking for the Washington State Court of Appeals at Division One in Seattle. That job in turn also qualifies him for the new federal loan program, which he calls “brilliant.”

Without the new program, he’d be paying on his loans until he is 58 years old, and almost certainly could not stay with public interest law if he ever wanted to buy a home or have children, Graham said.

“The feds are showing awesome leadership in this,” he said. “It’s given me a chance to give back” to society.

“It’s really a wonderful thing,” said Michele Storms, executive director of the Gates Public Service Law Program at the UW law school. “You should be able to do the good you want to do, and this just sort of levels the playing field.”

The program is so new that its effects will take some time to be felt, Storms said, since it may influence how law school students target the jobs and externships they pursue during their studies. If they view public-interest law as a realistic career choice because their loans will be more manageable, that may well encourage more students to go in that direction, she said. This might mean passing up a summer job at a law firm, deciding instead to work in public service during the summer because the student wants to gain experience in that area, Storms said.

“It will enter into how students think about their summers,” she said. “It is a great, great opportunity for people.”

Graham is a bit worried, though, that real life may eventually intrude on his dreams.

“We’ll see how my professional dreams size up to my personal dreams in the long run,” he said, noting an American Bar Association study that shows the average tenure of a public interest lawyer is just three years. Graham has noticed that most of the longtime public interest attorneys he knows seem to have a spouse making good money, independent wealth, or the earnings of an earlier successful private sector career to subsidize them, effectively turning such work into what he calls “vocational philanthropy.”

This isn’t a new problem.

“My father, a one-time Legal Aid director and longtime access to justice proponent in Washington, tells me that in Legal Aid’s (earlier) day, they couldn’t really hire lawyers with families because there was no way they could make ends meet,” Graham said.