Coming out of law school, Thanh Ngo could have gone to a plush law firm. Instead, he decided to work for those who most needed him-the largely low-income immigrant clients served by the Asian Law Caucus.

When he accepted the Echo and Green Fellowship that funded his work there, his peers and parents reacted—not with praise, but with derision.

“My parents said: ‘The pay is so low; no one wanted it. That’s probably why you got it,’ instead of seeing it as a national competition and an honor,” remembers Ngo, the first Vietnamese American to work for the district attorney in San Francisco.

“In law school, everything is geared toward going to a law firm,” he said. “It’s a lot easier; you almost have to justify yourself going to something otherwise.”

Such pressure, along with daunting school-loan debts and relatively low-key recruitment by the nonprofit sector, are among the reasons that public interest jobs (including government positions) attract a smaller percentage of Asian Americans than any other racial group. Even though Asian American representation among law school students has nearly tripled in the past decade, public interest attracts only 15 percent of APA law graduates, as opposed to 24 percent of Latinos and 27.7 percent of African Americans. Of white graduates, 15.2 percent choose nonprofit jobs.

Where do the other Asian Americans go? About 17 percent become counsels for companies or industries, but more than half—56 percent—of both APA and white graduates gravitate to law firms, which may pay them three times or more what they might make working for an advocacy group or for the government. The others clerk for judges, go into academia or leave the profession.

Brian Matsui, a third year law student at Stanford University, said of the 15 Asian Americans in his graduating class, 10 plan to join a firm, three are now clerking and the rest are yet undecided. None have definite plans to work in public interest.

THE PROBLEM IS MONEY...
Lisa Lindelef, assistant director of public interest programs at Stanford Law School, said starting salaries for lawyers in the nonprofit sector range from $19,000 to $50,000 a year. Meanwhile, first year associates at large San Francisco law firms may start at $85,000 or more.

Even for those graduates not already intent on the associate-to-partner track, the firms’ pitch—the all-expenses paid trip to interview, the wining and dining, the prospect of salaries just below the six-figure mark—can be compelling. Observed Matsui: “Many law students are uncertain of what they want to do post-graduation, and so it is easy to follow the ‘natural course’ into a firm.”

But when asked why so few graduates choose the nonprofit track, Lindelef said, “The most frequent reason is debt”—a burden that can top $100,000, with $10,000 due each year. Indeed, Fordham University Law graduate Howard Wu cited “crushing loans” as a big reason he chose to work for Baker & McKenzie rather than explore public-interest options.

Ngo admits he can’t blame those who choose the corporate track. “It is unrealistic to expect a graduate with $100,000 in debt to work for $25,000,” he said. “There needs to be an environment where this type of work is valued.”
To that end, a few law schools try to give graduates who enter public-interest fields a break. Harvard, for example, will help public interest lawyers making $29,000 or less meet their monthly loan payments. But even those who can take advantage of such programs can find salaries that don’t often top $40,000 hard to live on. “My year at UCLA, they started a program that helped public interest students, but I still went into debt,” Ngo said. “Credit cards are useful things.”

...AND PRESTIGE
Those who choose public interest law often suffer not only a blow to their checkbooks but also to their esteem, given the sector’s image problem with law students and school administrators—let alone friends and family.

Despite Harvard’s loan-forgiveness plan, “there is very little support for public interest work from the school, and very few of my classmates are in public interest work,” said David Chiu, a staff attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights in San Francisco. S.F. prosecutor Andrew Vu, too, said most of his classmates at the Santa Clara University School of Law aspired to a big law firm. “If you did public interest, they suspected that you had bad grades, or you didn’t get hired by a firm.”

Families can be even less supportive. While more Asian American parents have grown to embrace law along with medicine and engineering as good potential careers for their children, many expect them to be high-paid lawyers in prestigious firms.

“My parents definitely wanted me to take a high-paying corporate job to cash out on my law-school education,” said Chiu, 29. And even though they have become more accepting of his choice, he admits, “they wouldn’t mind if I jumped ship and got a real paying job.”

Vu, who works in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, says his relatives still don’t get it. “My family still apologizes to their friends and say to them, ‘Oh, Andrew is only going to do this for a few years. Then he’ll put out his own shingle.”

Ngo speculates that family members, particularly immigrants, might see working for the public interest as a luxury. “I don’t blame them, especially immigrant and refugee communities. A lot of people still have a refugee mentality, are still in survival mode.” Added Ngo: “They ask, ‘How can you take care of yourself, your parents, your family, if you worry about the welfare of other people?’ ”

Another factor at play, Ngo said, is the tendency among people to distance themselves from those who may look like them, but whom they see as less socially acceptable. “For instance, in Vietnamese communities, a lot of people who immigrated earlier have become successful in Silicon Valley. They don’t want to think about the poor new immigrants; they don’t want to talk about the problems.”

THE MARKET IS TIGHT ...
Still, competition is high for nonprofit jobs. While a large New York law firm might hire as many as 100 fresh graduates, a typical legal aid office might have three openings a year.

“Jobs with public interest organizations ... are hard to get,” said Stanford law student Donna Shibata, who figures she’ll work for a firm but may explore the public sector further in her career. “There aren’t a lot of openings.” Shibata has found that most organizations want attorneys with some experience, given that many have little time to train new hires. She has looked into the San Francisco Federal Public Defender’s Office, but it usually takes on those who have a couple of years at a law firm or a clerkship under their belts.

“Some of my mentors have highly recommended working in a firm for a few years to get the training and credentials,” Shibata said. Referring to the arduous tasks frequently assigned young associates, she said, “They have found that they are asked to co-counsel cases because of their experience in drafting briefs.”

And while firms dangle permanent job offers up to a year before a student graduates, many public advocacy groups have no regular recruiting schedule and find their prospects on a word-of-mouth, ad-hoc basis. Such jobs “are difficult to find ... and working during a summer for a public interest organization does not guarantee permanent employment at that organization following graduation,” said Stanford law student Matsui. “At a firm, summer associates get offers for permanent employment.”

But those who have forged careers in the public sector agree that opportunities exist for those who are determined. “If you want a public interest job and you do clinical interest jobs that makes you get contacts, you will get the jobs,” said Chiu, who worked as a Democratic counsel to the Senate Constitution Subcommittee before coming to San Francisco. “I did a gazillion internships, and I think there are a ton of possibilities in the public interest world.”

He added, “Without more Asians in public interest, we won’t see ... Asian Americans in the leadership roles that we need to advance the causes.”

Said Ngo: “If you want to do it, you can find it.”

BUT REWARDS CAN BE GREAT
The keen competition for jobs isn’t only because relatively few are out there, but also because they provide rewards that money cannot buy, say public interest attorneys. As Vu puts it, “I wanted to be on the side of truth and justice ... be on the good guys’ side.”

“It’s indescribably satisfying to see your hard work produce real improvements in the quality of life for people who desperately need help,” said ACLU lawyer Dan Tokaji.

Chiu observed, “The fact that it’s more difficult to get a public interest job suggests that those jobs are much more in demand. You are not in a cog in a machine that needs 50 associates a year. Each of these public interest jobs are one-of-a-kind positions that are unique in what you can do.”

But some corporate attorneys say their jobs are far from boring or stifling.

“One of the reasons I particularly like what I do is that I’m a patent attorney,” said Ben Wang, an associate at Townsend and Townsend in San Francisco. “I deal with the scientific aspects and then I’m also a lawyer trying to change their scientific inventions into legal protectable properties.”

After earning a master’s in molecular biology from Harvard University, Wang went to Georgetown Law School with an eye toward a career that combined law and science. He finds his job both interesting and important, he said.

“I have bigger clients—for example, universities who are interested in protecting their intellectual property, because they can sell patent rights to a corporation who is interested in developing the product, from which they use money to support academic research. So it is important that I do a good job for them,” said Wang, who represents UC Berkeley, Stanford and UCSF, among other institutions. “I have a lot of smaller clients whose survival is based upon their strength of their patent portfolio, and so it’s critical that we do a good job so that they can survive.”

But public interest attorneys say there is a growing need for more Asian Americans in their corner, given that only 1.4 percent of lawyers and judges overall are Asian American.

“Asian Americans must assume a more active role in the fight for civil rights ... If we fail to speak up for ourselves, then we allow others to speak for us to our lasting disadvantage,” said Tokaji, now representing the UC Santa Barbara student newspaper in its suit against the UC Board of Regents, which it says held secret meetings to drum up support to end affirmative action. In the wake of the board’s 1995 ban on racial preferences and that of Prop. 209, Asian American enrollments increased to over 40 percent of UC Berkeley’s incoming class—but the 1996 initiative hurt other Asian Americans, notably minority businesspeople.

The paucity of Asian Americans in the public sector also means that there are few examples for others to follow. Said Vu, who is Vietnamese American: “There aren’t enough people like me. ... Especially in government where we proclaim to represent the people, we should at least look like California.”

A member of the Asian Bar Association’s Civil Rights Committee, Chiu is helping to set up a mentoring program between law students and public interest attorneys. “Asian law students should not hesitate to contact Asian public interest lawyers they have heard of,” he said. “We’re happy to assist.”

Said Tokaji: “It’s true that litigation can’t solve every human problem. But lawyers do have the power to help people in need, and it remains extraordinarily gratifying to go into work every day and fight for them.”