There are the phone calls, even the ringers seeming to shriek when the callers are upset. Other callers are thoughtful, like the middle-aged man with a soft Southern drawl who wonders aloud if he should get a divorce since his wife refuses to go to marriage counseling. The women who call up about male apartment managers or bosses who are sexually harassing them are despondent and ashamed rather than angry, their voices barely audible, reduced to a whisper as their throats tighten with tears.

Clinic coordinator Jim Reilley (left) and assistant, Alan Bridges, handle expungent and driver's licence reinstatement cases.

There are the visits, like those from the elderly, disheveled man who stops in occasionally at our office to inquire after his favorite pro bono attorney, wanting to speak to him about friends he's worried about. On one occasion he fears a longtime friend is being mistreated in a nursing home; on another that an elderly friend is being robbed blind by relatives. The old gentleman lingers in the VLSP office, talks of the days when, at 13, he drove a team of horses in the Oklahoma oil fields. He's 89, homeless, sometimes staying with friends. He tells us about the time, asleep in a homeless camp along the river, when Sacramento policeman "Bronco Billy" whacked him awake with his nightstick during a raid.

Law student Heather McLaughlin (left) and staff attorney Alysa Meyer discuss a debt collection case.

There are the clinics, too, emergency rooms full of the furious, distraught, or depressed, like the quiet, middle-aged woman who sat down recently with an intern at the guardianship clinic. As the intern scanned the woman's paperwork, she discovered that the woman was seeking guardianship of her two grandchildren because her daughter had died the week before.

This is the Voluntary Legal Services Program at 20, brainchild of local attorneys Tom Eres and Jim--now Judge--Mize. What is VLSP? The simple answer is that it's the pro bono arm of the Sacramento County Bar Association, providing free civil legal services to the indigent of Sacramento and surrounding counties. In 2000, VLSP closed some 4,500 cases, representing over $2 million in legal services donated by its members, who include attorneys, paralegals, law students, legal secretaries, interpreters, and others. The Voluntary Legal Services Program now runs nine advice clinics at its main office and other sites and also refers more time-consuming cases to attorneys in the private bar for direct representation.

Interns Oneia Hawkins (left), Myrene Abot (center), consult with staff attorney Gloria Zarco.

But this definition conveys neither the sights nor the sounds of the front line. It doesn't really speak of the desperation clients feel because of their legal problems nor of the passion of attorneys who do the unglamorous, routine work that is often the most singularly important in each client's life -- that because of an attorney's efforts, a client is able to keep her home from being foreclosed on, receive guardianship of a child, fight back against a wolfish boss, get divorced from an abusive spouse.

That the poor have their most fundamental legal needs met was the point of establishing VLSP, Eres said. "As legal aid became more institutionalized, that left a gap. We wanted to create a situation that would be win-win: provide legal training for lawyers and also supplement the poor's access to justice," he said.

In 1981, when VLSP was founded, Eres was the president of the Sacramento County Bar Association. "It wasn't until Tom Eres became president that we had a sympathetic person in power in the Bar Association," Mize said. "I was on the bottom of the bar association heap pushing this proposal upwards. The proposal did not go anywhere until Tom started pulling from the top."

As Mize describes it, at that time the custom in legal aid in Sacramento was for volunteer attorneys to spend a shift at the Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) office helping clients in person or over the phone. However, what didn't get resolved during the volunteers' shifts would wind up on the staff attorneys' plates. To fix this, LSNC wanted to eliminate shift work in favor of direct representation, ensuring that volunteers would see cases all the way through. Also at this time, several of those on the committee overseeing the Sacramento County Bar Association's Attorney Referral Service, including Mize, believed that lawyers should give back to the community in some way in exchange for receiving referrals. The solution these committee members hit on was to require that attorneys who wanted referrals would also have to take legal aid cases. Eventually, LSNC and the Attorney Referral Service formed a joint committee called the Voluntary Legal Services Committee.

"I don't think we left a stone unturned in the legal community," Eres remarked of that time when he and Mize "tilled the soil" for this new pro bono program. "Our paths crossed at exactly the right time. Jim was really the spark plug. He was Joe Montana; all I did was body blocks downfield," Eres said.

From a dream sketched out on scratch paper, VLSP has evolved into a 1000-member volunteer organization. Ellen Juarez, the program manager since 1987, remembers when VLSP had only 50 volunteer advocates, their names and case assignments kept in a single binder, all the notes handwritten. When she came on board as the program manager, she joined June Black, the program coordinator, as the only VLSP staff. At that time, VLSP was housed in two offices in the LSNC building, next door to VLSP's current location. Juarez and Black would call clients, interview them, and then leaf through the binder to find attorneys to take the cases, mostly family law and landlord/tenant referrals from LSNC.

Interns Justin Fok and Myrene Abot refer cases to volunteer attorneys.

After recruiting student interns to help with client intake, Juarez and Black implemented legal panels-groups of attorneys that provided direct representation for specific kinds of cases. Two clinics spun off as a result, and Juarez and Black realized that the clinic format was a much more efficient way of helping clients. Currently, VLSP holds clinics on family law, guardianship, conservatorship, small estate advice, simple wills, employment law, debt collection defense, driver's license reinstatement, and misdemeanor expungement. The clinic format has succeeded so well that today "60 percent of VLSP clients are served by the family law and probate clinics," Juarez said.

Juarez, who has stepped down as VLSP's director, works part-time now to show new managing attorney Vicki Jacobs the ropes. Juarez anticipates that she will be leaving VLSP sometime later this year to pursue other professional goals. Reminiscing about the early days at VLSP, Juarez reflected, "I didn't really have a lot of goals in the beginning. We had just suffered a huge cut in IOLTA funding, from $86,000 to $16,000 in one year. I didn't think of expanding. As a matter of fact, the managing attorney at that time had to resign-there wasn't enough to pay her."

An increase in IOLTA funding and several new grants have allowed VLSP to expand recently and quickly, adding both more clinics and more part-time staff attorneys and work-study students. That VLSP serves ten times the clients it did in its early days - that it is still helping the poor at all - is due largely to Juarez's determination. For example, when the IOLTA funding was cut and the managing attorney resigned, Juarez ran VLSP by herself for a year.

Whatever hardships imposed on her-she was also a single parent - Juarez prefers to talk up the volunteers whose enthusiasm spawned the panels and the first clinics. "We used to work until 9:00 every night-there was a meeting of one of the panels, or a clinic, or a training," Juarez said. Pausing, she added, "Of course, we were younger then," she says, her sigh ending in a chuckle. What has given Juarez the most satisfaction over the years is that the large numbers of people who respond to requests for volunteers and the amount of time they wind up putting in.

Before Governor Gray Davis appointed him to a judgeship last year, Mize was one of those volunteers. As a family law specialist in private practice, he handled family law cases for VLSP, donating hundreds of hours. Describing himself as "a product of the 1960s," Mize also holds an M.S.W. from the University of California, Berkeley and helps run a soup kitchen called Sharing God's Bounty that he founded with two other St. Philomene parishioners. "I was raised to believe that an individual could make a difference and those of us who were fortunate enough to have some degree of resources had an obligation to give back to the community," he said.

Jacobs, now VLSP's managing attorney, also answered the call for volunteers. She joined VLSP's advisory committee in 1990 after moving from the Bay Area and got busy and stayed busy on fund raising and administrative projects. Jacobs, who has worked for law firms and for herself, was hired as VLSP's new boss in March, a job she wanted because, as she put it, helping the poor "hav[e] their say in court isn't a bad way to spend one's legal career." And while VLSP is well-regarded in the state, held up as a model among pro bono organizations, it is a nonprofit just the same, subject to the usual obstacles to the goal of serving as many people as possible as well as possible for as little as possible.

Impossible? Jacobs has a strategy. "I want to diversify our funding sources so that we can weather any economic and political changes," she explained. Drumming up money requires that VLSP does a better job of "informing the local bench, bar, and the community at large about the work that we do," she said. As most attorneys who donate their services through VLSP are solo practitioners, Jacobs would also like to beef up the number of attorneys from other sectors who volunteer. "That's a huge job," she admitted. It would entail more law firms letting attorneys use billable hours for pro bono, for instance, and the state allowing public attorneys to use informal time off for this purpose.

Every degree of success VLSP achieves in the years ahead in funding and recruiting is important to the unrepresented poor, who need a number to call, a clinic to attend or a door to walk through that will lead them to hope.