A government-sponsored coup last year made Bruce Iwasaki and Neal Dudovitz the kings of Los Angeles County's federally funded legal aid community. The two men emerged atop a changed landscape that resulted from a decade of begging for a share of shrinking public dollars doled out by an unsympathetic GOP-controlled Congress. That era was capped in 1998, when the Legal Services Corp. forced 275 legal aid providers nationwide to combine into 179. To comply with the orders from their main funding source, a new species of poverty lawyer emerged - a tech-savvy and button-down breed who swapped neighborhood walkin offices for toll-free phone lines, self-help kiosks and Internet access to legal advice. While some organizations made the dramatic change look effortless, for others, it did not come easy. And few programs provide more dramatic illustrations of the promise and pitfalls of government-funded legal services than Los Angeles County's two largest providers of federally funded services - Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and Pacoima-based Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County. From his offices in Koreatown, Iwasaki, a soft-spoken former O'Melveny & Myers attorney, quietly engineered a merger between a much smaller Legal Aid Society of Long Beach and his program, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. The merger was completed peacefully within a year of the federal order. Today, the programs operate seamlessly, offering new innovations - including toll-free multilingual phone advisers, expanded hours for domestic-violence clinics, and renewed immigration and consumer aid - built on the foundations of the old program. The organization is Los Angeles' largest government-funded group, with a budget of $11 million leveraged into $40 million in legal services to the poor.

Question: "What was the result of the change in funding?"

OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

Answer: "Legal Warfare"

Response: no

Former Long Beach Executive Director Toby Rothschild, now a policy wonk in Iwasaki's outfit, agreed. "To some extent, I did look at it and say, 'We are the littlest kid on the block, and we don't want to get beat up so we need a bigger protector,'" Rothschild said. "Once we got past that, it became a real positive for the Long Beach program and Long Beach clients." But to the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley legal aid program, the positives of merging with Dudovitz's program, San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services, were never obvious. A meeting in late 1999 between Dudovitz and the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program's board showed how little the two programs had in common and how difficult bridging the gap between their ideologies would be, Dudovitz recalled. Although no merger plans were discussed, board members at the smaller program knew of Dudovitz's preference for impact litigation over direct services. "We had a discussion about what our separate views were," Dudovitz said. "The message we got was that they wanted their program to stay as it was." Lauralea Saddick, former executive director of the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program, said her board simply did not share Dudovitz's desire to spend money influencing social policy and participating in high-profile litigation over poverty-related issues. "Our board's philosophy was that the money given by the federal government was to help people with basic everyday needs," Saddick said. "It might take a little bit of humility to take those kinds of cases. Impact work is very important ... but what was the good of getting the law changed if no one is there to help the individual?" Before the San Gabriel program was subsumed by Dudovitz's group, it offered to merge with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County. The boards of both organizations eschewed impact litigation in favor of the 1960s model of providing direct client services. Supported by resolutions from the Pasadena, San Gabriel, Eastern and Foothill bar associations, the two programs drew up plans to merge and submitted them to the Legal Services Corp. Dudovitz won Iwasaki's backing to oppose the deal, and Legal Services Corp., the national funding source, overruled the proposed San Gabriel-Pomona Valley/Orange County merger. On Jan. 27, 2001, the federal agency awarded the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley service area to Dudovitz under the umbrella of an expanded San Fernando program, citing the location of both programs in Los Angeles, which would allow "better coordinated and more effective advocacy on county government policies." The San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program sued Legal Services Corp. to stop the takeover, claiming the federal program based the decision on favoritism for the politically active Dudovitz and the politically powerful Iwasaki. Though the federal suit accomplished little, it effectively suspended the end of the old program and the start of the new one for nearly a year.

Question: "It was thought that it would be difficult to bridge the gap between the ideologies of which two organizations?"

OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

Answer: "San Gabriel-Ponoma Valley program and Legal Aid Society of Orange County"

Response: no

Imagine you are standing in a farm field in central Illinois. The land is so flat you can see for miles and miles. On a clear day, you might see a grain silo 20 miles away. You might think to yourself, it sure is flat around here. If you drive one hundred miles to the south, the landscape changes. In southern Illinois, there are rolling hills. Why do you think this is? What could have caused these features? There are no big rivers that may have eroded and deposited this material. The ground is capable of supporting grass and trees, so wind erosion would not explain it. To answer the question, you need to go back 12,000 years. Around 12,000 years ago, a giant ice sheet covered much of the Midwest United States. Springfield, Illinois, was covered by over a mile of ice. Its hard to imagine a mile thick sheet of ice. The massive ice sheet, called a glacier, caused the features on the land you see today. Where did glaciers go? Where can you see them today? Glaciers are masses of flowing ice.

Question: "Why does Springfield have its features?"

OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

Answer: "A long time ago, it was covered by a mile thick sheet of ice"

Response:
yes