From the Editor

By Martin Lasden
     
      When Gina Lobaco, the author of this month's cover story, first got involved in public-interest law as a young political activist, the legal-services lawyers she met often seemed more idealistic than practical. "The stereotype was long hair, sandals, and jeans," she recalls, "and in fact that's what many of them looked like. They wanted to make the world a better place, and they saw the law as an instrument of change. But they weren't managers, and they certainly weren't interested in the boring details of running an office."
      Now, more than three decades later, Lobaco assures us that idealism is still very much alive within the legal-services community. But the federal government doesn't provide the kind of support it used to, thanks to the congressional cutbacks of the mid-'90s. So organizations that provide legal aid to poor people have survived, and sometimes thrived, by turning to the private sector for help?in the form of both money and pro bono representation. Nowhere is this phenomenon more striking than in Los Angeles, where legal-services providers regularly raise large sums of cash by throwing big, glitzy fund-raising parties.
      Lobaco is extremely well placed to write about all this. She produced the city's first Justice Ball for Bet Tzedek in 1997, and every succeeding Justice Ball up until 2005. She has also organized Bet Tzedek's annual fund-raising dinners, which these days raise more than $2 million a year. And she has done fund-raising for the ACLU as well.
      "It's ironic," Lobaco says, "that because of the battles they've had to fight, legal-services providers in L.A. have become better managers and at the same time better equipped to represent their clients."
      So, were those congressional budget-cutters right, after all? Not exactly, Lobaco answers. What works in L.A., she points out, doesn't necessarily work in Fresno or Redding, where there remains a crying need for legal aid but far fewer well-heeled benefactors to invite to a ball. "Fund-raising," she says, "is never a panacea. It's an adaptive strategy."
      Also in this issue, Susan E. Davis profiles six of California's most high-powered trial lawyers?idealists in their own way who happened to be involved in some of the past year's highest-profile cases. And Senior Editor Thomas Brom writes about the copyright wars raging within the world of fashion design?a world where idealism is perhaps in shorter supply.
     

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