Heroes of the Profession

W. Terence Walsh

Terry Walsh, recipient of the 2007 John Minor Wisdom Award, has spent much of his over thirty-five year legal career advancing the cause of child welfare by attacking school failure in Atlanta and other jurisdictions both within and outside the State of Georgia and promoting access to justice for poor people. He has practiced as a business litigator at Alston & Bird his entire career, voted one of Georgia's “Super Lawyers” by his peers. He chairs the State Bar Committee on Children and the Courts, is the Past Board Chair of Kids in Need of Dreams, and serves as a Director of Family Connection Partnership and Georgia Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. Walsh has authored numerous articles including “Pro Bono 2000: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and “A Safety Net for Dropouts.”

What originally drew you to pro bono work?

I was in school in the ’60s and we had a social revolution going on. The one constant in the midst of all that turmoil was the court system. To be a good and effective lawyer you have to have—and I know this sounds trite, but—a passion for justice. And boy, if there was ever a time when whatever incipient feelings you had along those lines got motivated and animated, that was the time.

So, how did you find your place in this kind of work?

The first job interview I went on as I was finishing up [school] and trying to get to the next step was to the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. And contrary to what some of my partners may tell you, I did in fact get a job offer there.

But I am not a patient person, and I decided that I probably would not last very long handling case after case after case of the same sort of problem—that probably what I might do best was to get in a position where I could effect some sort of systemic change. So I looked towards large firms that had a very active social conscience.

You’re the chair as well as one of the founders of the Truancy Intervention Project. How did you first come up with the idea for it, and how did you get the program up and running?

In 1991, I was the incoming president of Atlanta bar, so I had a forum where I could try to attract volunteers, and I had always enjoyed working with children, and had spent some time working with troubled kids. So I went to the chief judge of the largest juvenile court in the Southeast, who was then Judge Glenda Hatchett. She essentially said we could turn her courtroom into a laboratory. We identified as the population we wanted to try to help the kids who were first-time offenders and only in trouble because they had run afoul of the compulsory education statute.

Most of the kids that we worked with weren’t merely truant, they were truant about three times over, and so there was no way to avoid an adjudication of truancy. The key was to come up with a game plan as [to] the disposition of the case that would address whatever it was the impending school failure was symptomatic of.

Are there any examples that stand out?

I’m working with a five-year old right now. His family was about to be put out on the street and his going to school was not at the top of his single parent’s priority list. We got into the picture and let the landlord know that he was not going to put them out on the street, that they were going to get some time and they were going to move gracefully.

We were able to come up with a brand new Section 8 housing unit for which his mother qualified, and so he and his four siblings and mother moved to the new housing, which happened to be right around the corner from the school. So our little client and his older siblings could walk to school; transportation wasn’t an issue anymore. He ended up on the principal’s list and now he’s got a shot at a happy and productive life, and that’s what that program is all about.

We just closed books on the last school year and we’re within shouting range of 4,000 kids represented, and over 80 percent of those have gone back to school and succeeded. We’re not saving the world here, but we’re helping kids one at a time.

I understand you and some other attorneys in your firm are currently representing four Guantanamo detainees. Have you all come under fire for taking on this representation, or have people been mostly supportive?

In a large partnership, we don’t agree on anything. So on something as controversial as this we weren’t likely to find unanimity, and we didn’t. But we had some people who felt very strongly that that’s where we needed to be, and once [Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Charles] Stimson made his comments about how our clients should choose between law firms that represent terrorists and law firms that didn’t…we heard from maybe ten clients, two or three of which are in the Fortune 100 list, and they were uniformly supportive.

A strong case could be made that it’s one of the most important constitutional issues since the civil rights days. The notion of scrapping habeas corpus and detaining or imprisoning people—U.S. citizens and non-citizens from all over the world—indefinitely is so foreign to the most basic concepts of our legal system. That system, when it’s allowed to work right, is the envy of the legal world. I think the administration’s legal position on Guantanamo is unraveling a little bit every day.

Do you have any advice for lawyers, especially starting lawyers, in the private sector who want to get involved in pro bono work but might not really know where to start?

Private practice and public service are not at all mutually exclusive. You do [pro bono work] because of a compelling community need, you do it because it’s the ethically responsible thing to do. It also gives you training you might otherwise not have, and client contact and things like that that in the large firm life are lacking in certain practice areas.

But the bottom line is you do it for yourself, you do it because it makes you feel good about who you are and about having a chance to help. In the case of my five-year old client, it wasn’t the largest case I’m going to handle this year, but it was certainly the largest case in that little guy’s life, and we gave our young client a chance to succeed.