QUES: Still untaken are several steps that required goodwill from local bar associations and others who had opposed the combination. "[I am] not a fan of Neal's," admitted John Peck, a former board member of the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program and a Pasadena Bar Association board member. Peck says bad feelings still linger among Ailies of the old program who feel left out. "They really screwed us. We had a good program," Peck said. An observer familiar with the reconfiguration debate who requested anonymity wondered why Dudovitz had not spent more time mending fences. "He ought to be bending over backwards for reconciliation, but if you want to do impact work and people in the San Gabriel Valley want direct services, you have to accommodate that or change your approach," the observer said. "Neal would never consider doing that." More than a year after he officially incorporated the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley, Dudovitz had not placed a local resident on the board of Neighborhood Legal Services or made the rounds of the private legal community to recruit the volunteer lawyers. "Our emphasis has been on having our potential clients know about us and deliver services to them," Dudovitz said. "We have done that spectacularly." He did not hire any of the old program's nine lawyers and has yet to permanently place any of his 18 new hires in the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley. The lack of a legal aid presence in Pomona prompted the bar association and court officials to start their own once-monthly family law clinic. After learning of the effort, Dudovitz sent personnel to staff the clinic for three hours per week and is helping to write a grant application to fund a self-help kiosk for Pomona patterned on the center he pioneered in Van Nuys. The help, although late, has earned Dudovitz some appreciation. "There has been a transition and [the clinic] has helped to fill some void," said Deni Butler, administrator for the Eastern District Superior Court. "But we are working together quite nicely contrary to what the other side issue is." Scott Wheeler, president of the Eastern Bar Association of Los Angeles and an ally of the old program, said he mobilized his 200 members to staff the clinic after watching the ranks of unserved poor grow over the past year.
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION: Who made the following remark?: "But we are working together quite nicely contrary to what the other side issue is."

QUES: Michigan will lose $2 million in federal funding and $600,000 in state funding to provide legal aid to the poor in 2003, according to Deierdre L. Weir, executive director of the Legal Aid and Defender Association, Inc., the state's largest provider of legal services to the poor. Current federal funds of nearly $10.7 million from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) will drop to $8.7 million for next year, according to Weir. She said that the reductions reflect a decline in the number of persons in the state who are living in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2000 census. LSC uses census data to determine funding across the nation, and according to the census, the state's poverty population fell from an estimated 1.2 million in 1990 to an estimated 968,000 in 2000. The state's legal aid agencies are also bracing for yet another cut in 2003 of some $600,000 of state funding. A portion of filing fees paid by litigants in the state's circuit courts, and a portion of interest on lawyers trust accounts (IOLTA) are earmarked for Michigan legal aid programs. These funds are expected to drop from currently $7.5 million in 2002 to $6.9 million when the Michigan State Bar Foundation makes distributions next year. Most of the decrease is attributed to the past year's low interest rates. "The irony of these funding cuts is that while there may be fewer poor people in Michigan today, the demand for service will not change because the poverty population remains so large and the legal aid funding so little that local providers will never able to serve all who need our service," said Weir. "It's as if the poor will be victimized twice-once for being poor and again as victims of these funding cuts." The U.S. Census Bureau, in spite of its best efforts, cannot locate every poor person living in a census tract, therefore the poor are also undercounted, added Weir. The brunt of these cuts will be felt most in Wayne County where according to the census some 333,000 poor people live, the largest concentration of poverty in the state. LAD will lose more than $870,000 for legal aid in Wayne County, nearly half of the state's total loss, said Weir. While difficult to measure, the loss of funds will mean that several thousand of Michigan's poor in need of legal service will not receive it, or they will receive significantly limited service. Cutbacks will include service in such civil legal matters as landlord-tenant, bankruptcy, consumer, child custody, predatory lending, mortgage foreclosure, utility shutoffs, social security, wills, and probate. "Local providers will have to work harder and smarter and use more technology instead of staff to provide as much service as we can with fewer dollars," said Weir. "We will be providing more selfhelp training to clients enabling them to navigate the legal system on their own in routine matters, more assistance on the telephone, and less direct representation by attorneys in specific, high impact matters. Currently, Michigan has 13 legal aid agencies covering the state's 83 counties.
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION: How is Legal Aid and Defender Association planning to cope with the funding drops?

QUES: 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.
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION:
What was the result of the merger?