As a law student at Ohio State,
Sarah Biehl always knew she wanted to help the less fortunate with her law degree. Given her strong academic record and her experience clerking for a federal judge, Sarah easily could have written her own ticket in the private bar. But her desire to serve low-income clients instead inspired Sarah to become a legal aid attorney and start the first high school-based legal clinic in Chicago at the North Lawndale College Prep High School, serving one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. At first, her Teen Legal Advocacy Project wasn’t met with great applause – her office at the school wasn’t receiving any visitors. “I realized quickly that the students really didn’t know why I was there,” recalled Sarah. “I had to spend a lot of time getting to know the students, explaining what I do as a lawyer and how I could help. And of course, I had to earn their trust.” Over the course of her tenure, Sarah helped students with a broad range of legal issues – from eviction to domestic violence matters. “I think what I have been able to demonstrate with this initiative is that a grass roots program can succeed with the right resources and the right talent,” noted Sarah.
Sarah was awarded a two-year Skadden Fellowship in 2004 to work at the Legal Assistance Foundation (LAF) and create this project. Her fellowship and her full-time work at North Lawndale Clinic was coming to a close when she was awarded The Chicago Bar Foundation’s Kimball R. Anderson and Karen Gatsis Anderson Public Interest Law Fellowship.
The Anderson Fellowship provides loan repayment assistance to legal aid attorneys with significant law school debt, and in Sarah’s case made it financially viable for her to stay in legal aid.
During her remarks at last year’s CBA/CBF Pro Bono and Public Service Awards Luncheon, Sarah summed up her feelings about her career choice. “Practicing public interest law full time is not easy, for many reasons. I feel fortunate, every day, because I have constant interaction with teenagers who are bright, challenging and resilient, kids who go home to a terrifying array of bad situations but still manage to smile at me in the morning. Every time I catch myself feeling down, I think about my clients and it reminds me of how lucky I am to have a family that loves and supports me, a home that is safe and secure, and a career that I find fulfilling. Helping kids figure out how to tap into their knowledge and demand the power to fight their way out of bad situations is a real privilege. Seeing a child’s face light up when she realizes that an adult is giving her a choice about how something in her life will happen – it’s the reason I do this work.”
Sarah’s work in the North Lawndale Clinic has prepared her, now as full-time staff attorney at LAF’s Westside office, to represent her low-income clients in cases involving family law and specifically domestic violence cases.
She is also developing a new program that would offer after school education and activities, health care services and a legal clinic all under one roof.However, her good work does come at a price. As legal aid and public interest lawyers find it harder and harder to make ends meet, many are forced to leave jobs they love because they literally cannot afford not to. For Sarah, she appreciates the initiatives the CBF is pursuing “We live in a world in which the need for public interest lawyers is acute, but the reality is that fewer and fewer law students can afford to make the choice to become full-time public interest lawyers. Kimball and Karen Anderson and The Chicago Bar Foundation, however, made the choice to address this problem head-on when they created this fellowship.” (The Anderson Fellowship has also served as the model for the new CBF/Sun-Times Public Interest Law Fellowships, which will be announced later this month) “This award is one example of how the CBF helps those of us who chose public interest law balance our own lives so that we can focus on providing assistance to our clients.”
Each year talented legal aid attorneys leave this work behind due to the pressures of simply trying to make ends meet. Your donation to The Chicago Bar Foundation helps sustain exceptional lawyers like Sarah and allows them to continue to serve our most vulnerable community members in the Chicago metropolitan area. Please
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10-08-2007
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