In June 1975 about 300 key stakeholders from throughout Canada and North America gathered in Victoria, British Columbia, for a national conference on Canadian legal aid. The conference covered three days and treated a raft of topics, but among four major addresses to the conference were remarks by Morgan Ellsworth, then president of the National Clients Council in the United States.

The National Clients Council was part of a 1970s-era drive to make federally-funded legal aid programs responsive—and even partly governed by—the clients those programs served. The Council was funded originally by the Office of Economic Opportunity and then by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), but was killed in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration. It had regional offices and trained legal aid clients to work for social change in their own communities and to get involved as client representatives on the boards of their local legal aid organization. Still today, the LSC’s eleven-member board of directors is required to include at least one eligible client; but the client-governance idea is otherwise largely dead.

As for Morgan Ellsworth, the National Clients Council president who spoke at the 1975 Canadian legal aid national conference, I can find record of him absolutely nowhere other than in these thirty-year-old conference proceedings, all typewritten and tape-bound in an olive drab cover. What’s here, though, makes it a shame that I can’t find more. But what’s here is in any case worth reprinting. Here’s just a taste:

How can folks even debate the question of whether clients should be involved, whether poor folks should be involved? I’ve never seen a teachers’ organization run by doctors. I’ve never seen a doctors’ organization run by carpenters. I’ve never seen a lawyers’ organization run by cab drivers. And folks always think that poor folks shouldn’t run a poor folks program. Somehow, that doesn’t make sense to me, but they tell me I might be “culturally deprived.”

It’s true that poor folks need legal services. They also need money, better housing, better clothes and lots of other things. But, at this stage in history in Canada and in the States, all over the country wherever poor folks are, poor folks need leaders; poor folks need organizers. They need other things, but, if they had good leaders and organizers, they could go about the business of changing some of the problems that they’re struggling with every day.

And I think that lawyers have a role in this. All kinds of folks have a role, in fact, if they are interested in change taking place in the poverty community.

A lot of folks don’t believe that. It sounds good, it’s a job, it’s something to do and it kind of takes care of your conscience and you’d rather be doing something meaningful and relevant and all the rest of it, but when you get down to the “nitty gritty,” you don’t mean to change things the way they need to be changed.

Poor folks understand that and poor folks need the changes. Because, you see, if somebody was to sneak up behind me right now and knock me down on this ground, (and where I come from, they do a lot of that), and if they had their foot on my throat, choking me, and I was trying to get up, I would not call for a lawyer; I would not sign a petition; I would not wait till the next election; I would do everything I could to get them up off of me. When you’re being strangled, or think you’re being strangled, you may choose some methods that are different.

. . . .

If you saw the picture The Godfather, you’ve seen that scene where the Mafia was trying to decide how to do something, and the lawyer was there. So, the Mafia said: “This is what we want to do.” Then they turned to the lawyer and said: “Can we do it legal?” If the lawyer says no, then Marlon Brrando says: “Call up somebody from Chicago and we’ll do it illegal.” But, the lawyer doesn’t tell Marlon Brando or the Mafia what to do; the lawyer is there to give the technical assistance.

Well, that’s the same thing you’ve got to do in the legal aid movement. If the client wants to do something that you think you wouldn’t do, then you go on vacation that day.

. . . .

As for clients on legal aid boards, I’d be careful about these boards; you don’t want to get fooled. You see, they get some poor folks and they sit them in on the boards and they say: “See, we’ve got client involvement.” But, poor folks get wiped out when they sit in there with about nine or ten professionals. So, just having clients on boards is not enough. You’ve got to have clients involved in the day to day action that’s taking place. And, the universities have a responsibility too, because some of those clients have to get some of those degrees. Some of them are pretty good now, but folks don’t recognize them because they don’t have that piece of paper. It can’t always be the other folks who are the lawyers.