When low-income individuals and the elderly come to Western Mass Legal Services seeking help, they don’t come with one problem, said WMLS Executive Director Christina Elzeneiny, “they come with a big chunk of problems.” And because they do, this unique nonprofit agency serves as what one of its lawyers called a “bridge” between the law and social work that meets a critical need while also providing work that is challenging, rewarding, and often frustrating.

Ali Bers calls it “impact work.”

That’s not an industry term, per se, and you won’t find it on the mission statement for Western Mass Legal Services (WMLS), which provides a host of legal services for the elderly and residents living below or just above the poverty line. But this is phraseology used by most all the lawyers at this private, nonprofit corporation to describe not only what they do, but also, and perhaps more importantly, why they do it.

Bers, who joined the agency in 2002, but only after applying for and then receiving a two-year fellowship that enabled her to essentially pay her way onto the staff, cited her legal specialty — benefits work, mostly (especially in recent years) involving Medicare and prescription drug programs — as but one example of ‘impact.’

“You’re providing help with issues involving some very high stakes,” she explained. “Imagine walking into a drugstore and being told you have to pay full price, maybe $300, for a drug you need to stay alive — that’s terrifying …”

Her voice tailed off at the end to underscore the plight of those who find themselves in such situations and turn to Bers and others for help with appeals that might get those prescriptions covered. And there are countless other scenarios — from fighting to keep a roof over one’s head to battling to maintain custody of young children — that help explain why providing legal services to this constituency is both challenging and highly rewarding.

Christina Elzeneiny, executive director of WMLS, summed things up another, quite effective way:

“It’s hard to be poor — people are always on a crisis wheel,” she said, noting that the agency’s clients are, in a word, ‘vulnerable.’ “When people come to us, they don’t usually come with one problem, they come with a big chunk of problems.”

And they’re almost always deeply intertwined, said Jennifer Dieringer, an attorney specializing in housing, family law, and other specialties, who has been with WMLS since 1999. And because they are, lawyers must often deal with a mix of legal and social concerns when trying to serve individuals.

“Our clients come to us with a huge array of issues,” she explained. “They come to you with a legal matter, but when you have a conversation with them, you learn that there’s this whole other set of issues that they have, many of which are non-legal. For us to do our jobs well, we have to address not just the legal issue, but the underlying social issues as well.”

Handling this broad assignment can be frustrating at times, said Dieringer and others we spoke with, because these social issues are complicated. Meanwhile, the number of people helped each year by the agency doesn’t approach the number who need help but can’t get it because they don’t meet strict income requirements or because WMLS simply doesn’t have the resources.

But there are plenty of rewards, said Dieringer, noting that work within WMLS can take several forms — from advocacy for a single client that can make a huge difference in quality of life for an individual or family to what she called ‘systemic’ efforts that can result in broad change to laws and policies that will impact perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of people.

In this issue, BusinessWest talks at length with lawyers who work with WMLS about what they do, and also about what motivates them to take this rather unusual path within the legal profession. For some, this is a few years on a resume before moving on to other, more traditional legal work, but for others, it’s a career.

Underdog Episodes

Dieringer described work for WMLS as a “bridge” between social work and the law — which is exactly what she was looking for after graduating from Northeastern University Law School and then taking a few years off to work at a battered women’s shelter in Quincy, among other places.

“Some days, you wear your social-worker hat as much as you wear your law hat,” said Dieringer, who told BusinessWest that what motivates her is a desire to help people who are disenfranchised and who would otherwise not receive assistance, coupled with a strong belief that access to justice can’t, or shouldn’t, be limited to those with the wherewithal to pay for it.

“I always knew I wanted to work in public interest in some capacity,” she said. “I wanted to help people in some way, and it was a choice between social work and the law. I felt then, and I still feel now that the law is a very powerful tool for social change, which is what I was really interested in doing.”

Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, who took a rather circuitous route to her position as an attorney with the WMLS, used different words to say essentially the same thing.

“I want to help the underdog,” she said, using that term to describe not only current clients, but also herself and other family members when she was growing up. “Often, we’re the last line of defense for these people, and I like being part of it.”

This defense comes across a number of service areas, including housing (which comprises nearly a third of the case load), elder law, benefits, health, family law and domestic violence, employment, immigration and naturalization, consumer cases, and others. The agency, created in 1972, handled 4,066 cases between July 1, 2006 and June 30, 2007 for residents in Hampden, Hampshire, and Berkshire counties.

The full scope of the work handled by WMLS can be appreciated, or at least better understood, by scanning the names of the projects it is involved with, and thus a seemingly endless list of acronyms, the sum of which would make most heads swim.

There’s the Battered Women Legal Assistance (BWLAP), Family Law Advocacy, and Basic Family Law Services (BFLS) projects, which provide legal representation, assistance, and education for victims of domestic violence and their children, and family law services for low-income families. There’s also the Housing Court Intervention Projects (HCIP), through which WMLS collaborates with area housing courts, Western New England College law student interns, and service providers to assist people with housing and tenancy issues; and the Disability Benefits Project (DBP), which assists people with obtaining and retaining SSI benefits and to utilize work incentives to secure and maintain employment.

But there’s more — such as the Medicare Advocacy Project (MAP), which, as the name implies, helps people obtain and retain Medicare benefits; and the North End Outreach Project (NEOP), a collaboration with the North End Outreach Network (NEON) to provide on-site legal aid, training, and education within neighborhoods in that challenged section of Springfield.

Dealing with this alphabet soup of law is a dedicated group comprised of 20 staff attorneys, six paralegals, four managing attorneys, four senior management people, three AmeriCorps Paralegals, five law student interns, and nine secretaries and administrative assistants.

Dieringer spoke for all those individuals when she said, “it’s great working with people who are like-minded; we support each other, because this work can be very stressful.”

Elaborating, she said that lawyers working within WMLS faced what she called a “different kind of stress” and not necessarily more stress than others in the legal profession. While some lawyers struggle to meet quotas (or expectations) for billable hours and revenues, and many in private practice wage the battle of the bottom line, she explained, WMLS lawyers face stress that comes from that ‘impact work’ they do.

“Burnout can be a big factor here,” she explained. “It can wear on you, I think, to work exclusively with low-income people and see the same kinds of really hard issues present themselves every day.

“And while we’re always helping people,” she continued, “there are some situations where we just can’t help, and if you’re not able to help, the outcome is that someone is homeless, or someone loses custody of their children, or a woman is beaten or killed by her abuser. That kind of weight on your head to fix those kinds of situations can be a lot.”

Stress can come in other ways, said Elzeneiny, noting that WMLS, like other agencies of this ilk, must continually fight for funding. Some years are leaner than others, she continued, but resources never match actual need. In fact, she estimates that maybe 60% of the cases that come the agency’s way can be taken.

This leads to what she called “triage,” a term borrowed from the medical community to describe the process of prioritizing cases in ways that will make the best use of the agency’s limited time and resources.

“And triage is one of the most stressful things we have to do,” she explained. “Those are very hard decisions that we have to make.”

Case in Point

At the forefront of all this are lawyers who made a conscious decision to seek out this kind of work, although sometimes, they admit, it actually finds them.

Bers told BusinessWest that, contrary to popular opinion, jobs like those in WMLS are in many ways harder to get that those with large or small law firms. First, there are not many of them, she explained, and, again, counter to widely-held perception, many people want them.

“I saw a lot of my fellow law school graduates go on autopilot and get jobs with big-city firms paying $100,000 to start,” she said. “With public-interest work, you usually have to forge your own path — they don’t come to the law schools to recruit you like the big firms do, because they can’t.”

As an undergrad, Bers said she worked in a program to help homeless individuals, and knew that she wanted to do something that involved social justice. She was eventually convinced that law school was a good place to start. During her first summer in law school she worked for the Mass. Law Reform Institute in Boston, a legal services backup center that does a lot of work for the state.

“I loved it, and realized that this is what I what I wanted to do when I grew up,” she said, adding that the following summer, she was an intern at Greater Boston Legal Services, an agency similar to but much larger than WMLS. There, she gained an appreciation for the day-to-day regimen of legal-services attorneys through work in the benefits unit, and confirmation that this was what she wanted to do.

She applied for and won a two-year fellowship from Equal Justice America to join the staff at WMLS when there were no vacancies, and filled an opening that came about as that stint was ending.

Bers takes part in several initiatives, including MAP, one of those aforementioned acronyms, and is the only MAP advocate in Western Mass. Since 2006, she has helped individuals navigate through the myriad private prescription-drug programs now in effect — a daunting task to be sure.

“It’s been very confusing — there have been a lot of administrative errors and mistakes that I’ve helped people resolve,” she said, adding that she also deals with individual plan formularies and those aforementioned appeals for coverage of a particular drug. The paperwork-intensive work provides a mix of the rewards and frustration that are part and parcel to public interest work.

“We’re helping people with issues that are very high-stakes for them,” she said, “and being able to help then with such matters is very satisfying. But it’s also frustrating because we’re dealing with laws that make things difficult for our clients.

“And seeing the poverty that so many people have to live with is hard,” she continued. “I feel lucky that I don’t have to worry about billable hours, but there is a toll that this kind of work takes on you.”

Amatul-Wadud knows all about the poverty line. She lived at or near it as part of a family of 10 children, and said those experiences help shaped her path to WMLS, which was a rather unusual one.

Her early career ambition was to be a journalist — “I wanted to tell people stories and get paid for it,” she joked — and did some writing for the Republican before segueing into a stint as a paralegal, first at MassMutual and then ISO New England, before eventually attending law school.

“I didn’t know at that time that I wanted to go into public interest work,” she said, “but I guess, all along, my fate was destined. As a paralegal student, I took an internship at the Mass. Commission Against Discrimination; as I saw complaints come in, I decided that I wanted to help the underdog.”

Upon passing the Bar exam in 2006, she saw an ad for a position at WMLS, “and I decided I couldn’t not take it.”

Today, she handles a wide array of family law matters, from divorce to custody issues to domestic violence, and like others we spoke with, she said the work is rewarding yet taxing, primarily because of that mix of legal and social issues that come forth every day.

Like Bers, she used the term “high stakes” to describe what’s on the line for her clients, and, using divorce as an example, she said this doesn’t mean what it does when big houses, large bank accounts, and vacation properties are the matters at hand.

“These are a different kind of high stakes,” she said, noting that there are often issues of domestic abuse and custody with her divorce cases, and issues, from clothing to transportation, that result from the abject poverty impacting most clients.

“Like when a woman’s cell phone is disconnected and it’s her only form of communication,” she said. “You either have to convince the husband, who’s not represented by an attorney, to turn the phone back on, or I have to go before a judge — and somehow give it credibility, that I’m here over a cell phone — and get a ruling in her favor.”

The Bottom Line

Summing up work for WMLS, Dieringer said there is definitely that “different kind of stress” she described that sometimes keeps her up at night. But there are also the rewards.

“Even on my worst day, I leave here feeling that I’ve helped at least one person who wouldn’t have received help otherwise,” she said, “and that’s really important … that’s what keeps me going.”

Others we spoke with used very similar words and phrases when talking about their efforts on behalf of clients. They come naturally at WMLS, where the mission is clear and simple: to handle ‘impact work.’

George O’Brien can be reached at obrien@businesswest.com