Few Lawyers Can Afford to Specialize in AIDS Cases

Although AIDS has touched every area of law, few lawyers can afford to specialize in AIDS cases. Only a handful, like Luis Maura and New York City’s Mark Senak of the Gay Men’s Health Center, and Los Angeles Deputy City Atty. David Schulman devote full time to the task.

Those most involved in AIDS law include:

- Government lawyers and civil rights groups such as the ACLU who concentrate on discrimination cases with wide impact.

In California, Los Angeles-based Gloria Barrios of the Fair Employment and Housing Department is at the forefront of protecting AIDS victims from discrimination, primarily in the workplace.

“We offer free service and people can get things done speedily here (about 2 1/2 years as opposed to five in court) and they do get their day in court,” she said.

Five cities in the country--Los Angeles, San Francisco, West Hollywood, Hayward and, most recently, New York City--now have ordinances banning discrimination against AIDS victims.

Los Angeles last December funded a full-time deputy city attorney, Schulman, and two support staff members to work with Deputy City Atty. Mary House on enforcing the law. So far they have fielded 40 inquiries--mostly on job or housing discrimination and refusal of dental treatment--and resolved them all without going to court.

At the ACLU, Susan McGrievy has spent 80% of her time on AIDS cases in the last couple of years, assisted by two law students, and hopes to produce a manual for lawyers on AIDS legal principles. She handles primarily “impact cases,” which affect general civil rights, for example filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the Phipps school case.

- Gay rights or AIDS groups who handle individual legal problems of AIDS victims.

In Los Angeles, Maura is a full-time lawyer working with AIDS victims but does not practice law. Cognizant that attorneys are donating their expensive time, he screens clients and separates legal questions from other problems, then refers clients to a panel of 36 lawyers organized by Susan Sholley at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center.

Sholley, who spends most of her workday at the center, makes an occasional call or writes a letter, but generally refers each month’s 35 to 45 AIDS inquiries about wills or landlord disputes to the panel of volunteers.

Gary Wood in San Francisco has built the nation’s largest panel of attorneys handling AIDS cases--75--and works nearly full time coordinating the effort.

Handling about 1,300 cases a year (1,200 of them wills or instructions to medical personnel about whether to prolong life), the lawyers can recover fees in Social Security and certain other cases and must donate 25% of that to the panel. Wood said $250 was collected last year.

- Private attorneys working pro bono, or without pay, like those on Sholley’s panel. Roger Kohn, who hasn’t personally handled any AIDS cases, has turned his information service for the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. into an almost full-time job. Last December, he organized one of the first seminars for lawyers and doctors about legal aspects of AIDS, charging $5 for printed material, in comparison to several hundred dollars charged by some current organizers.

“A lot of us are doing it not for venal concerns,” said Kohn, “but out of concern not only for the victims but for the good of society, to protect civil rights.”

- Private attorneys working on contingency or (rarely) for retainers. Thomas Girardi is handling the Kushnick and Burg cases on contingency as he would any other negligence case, recovering a portion of any verdict he wins but nothing if he loses. Even well-to-do families of AIDS victims would have trouble paying attorney fees any other way, he said.

Dealing with AIDS victims creates problems for the legal providers. Despite their confidence in the enlightenment of California citizens, lawyers say they still feel stigmatized occasionally.

“You go to a cocktail party and people say what do you do in the city attorney’s office,” said House, “and I say I handle . . . AIDS cases, and they step back three feet.”

A bigger problem is emotional burnout for the volunteers. The work takes such a toll that Wood in San Francisco and Sholley in Los Angeles offer their volunteers several months off to, in Sholley’s words, “preserve the resources.”

Richard Berger, 54, who asked for a year off after 14 months of writing wills for dying young men, said: “When you are dealing with such a catastrophic type of situation, you find you are suffering a lot. I got terribly depressed about it. Everybody I talked to was going to be dead very soon. I just couldn’t carry the burden for everybody.”

One of the problems in litigating AIDS cases--and one reason AIDS litigation has not burgeoned--lawyers say, is the patients’ inability to outlive a five-year civil suit.

“The AIDS people are so sick they are not going into court because there is little you can do for them,” said the ACLU’s McGrievy.

“We know we have to streamline everything,” summarized Wood of San Francisco, “because often this guy is going to be dead tomorrow.”