Pandemic Pivot

COVID-19 HAS TESTED ALL CORNERS OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION.

In their own words, Chicago-Kent alumni share how the pandemic has challenged them and how they have responded for the betterment of their clients and their communities.

AROUND THAT PERIOD in late March [2020], there was just a lot of uncertainty. Rentervention saw a huge uptick in the period between the end of March and end of April. We saw about a 500 percent increase in people coming [to the website], just hungry for information. It still didn’t translate into a whole lot of people talking to attorneys, because that’s one of the things that Rentervention is designed to help address. Rentervention has the chatbot side of things and can help answer some of those questions and have the information on point to be able to help people through. Staff attorneys still provide assistance to people with a virtual clinic component.

“What we saw over the next couple of months after that was the numbers still were increasing. But then there’s one moratorium and there’s an extension of the moratorium, and then there are different projects and courts that are effectively on hold to a large degree. The usership on Rentervention has started to come down a little bit. I think that’s just a byproduct of how things are working, where it just seems like nothing was getting done and people may not feel they’re really at the risk of eviction proper. They aren’t really hungry for that information anymore because they don’t feel like there’s something coming right around the corner. And I think people are getting the wrong impression. We [Rentervention and Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing] don’t want to meet you in the emergency room. We want to meet you well ahead of that if it’s ever going to happen and to not turn the emergency room into a probability, but more of a possibility.

“I used to represent small mom-and-pop-style landlords across Chicago. And, for a lot of them, if they weren’t getting rent, and without diving deeper into their books, there are aspects of their life that would suffer. They might have a

Conor Malloy ’12 Project Director for Rentervention

Conor Malloy ’12 is the project director for Rentervention, which offers Chicago tenants online information and an interactive chatbot to help tenants independently navigate common housing issues and seek help from a pro bono attorney, if necessary. Rentervention is housed within the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing and is a joint project of the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois and other advocates.

note on the property. If you’re not paying the note on it, now everybody’s in trouble. This whole economy in and of itself needs a cash injection. There have been some housing programs, but we haven’t seen a whole lot about how effective they are because it’s all so fresh and seems to be an uncoordinated patchwork. It’s hard to advise people. The fact that we can no longer reliably consult with clients about what something might look like prospectively, it really does a lot to frustrate everybody involved.

“Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing just started a new program called the Eviction Prevention Project. They doubled our attorney staff, and through a grant from the City of Chicago we will be able to help with a lot of things like lockouts and eviction notices and really try to move people upstream to avoid court and provide other means of assistance.

“There has been pivoting with courts being effectively closed in a couple of ways. It’s still open where you can do Zoom court, but there are no final orders and evictions right now. It seems like the virtual clinic was matched for something like this pandemic. It’s great to have something in place where you could continue to help people outside of the normal processes of saying to a client, ‘Alright, you're invited for intake, come on down to the office.’ That client might have to take three buses to get here and drag all the documents with them instead of a tenant just snapping a picture of their five-day notice with their phone and texting it over to you and dealing with it that way. It’s just how you conducted business every day. In so many segments of society, we hear about this longing for returning to normal. But I hope that as we come out of this going forward, we can keep continuing to provide these types of assistance and virtual assistance in finding people where they're at.” —As told to Jamie Loo

THE POLICY SOLUTIONS and research that are tied to how people exit poverty really ground us in what we are championing at any given time. And so, before the pandemic, we were just chugging along on reforms that we were looking to achieve in economic, health, and criminal justice policy.

“We were working with our coalitions and partners to move initiatives forward, drafting and filing new legislation, and understanding where the support was in the political window for achieving those reforms. And then COVID hit, and nobody wanted to talk about any of the things we were talking about. But they did—all of a sudden—need bold solutions to stem the crisis and mitigate millions of more people either getting sick or falling into poverty. And we were very much ready. We just kind of shifted and pulled out research and other ideas that the team had shopped around in prior years. And we were able to basically draw from all of that experience to repackage solutions to meet the moment.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, we would go to sleep one night and wake up the next day, and suddenly, for example, the Medicaid churn rate was fixed; Governor [J. B.] Pritzker’s office just decided we’re not going to kick people off of Medicaid and have them reapply every year because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. That was something we’ve literally been trying to fix for years. The speed at which people were jumping on board with being ready and able to put solutions in place was pretty crazy, like finding housing or offering hotels for people experiencing homelessness or putting an eviction moratorium in place. We were really, at the beginning of March and April and even the beginning of May, drinking from a fire hose of requests and jumping on opportunities to insert our ideas and shape the response to help the most vulnerable people, especially low-income

Rachel O’Konis Ruttenberg ’11 Director of Policy for Heartland Alliance

In September 2019 Rachel O’Konis Ruttenberg ’11 began her position as the director of policy for Heartland Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization composed of five entities that work to serve those who are homeless, living in poverty, or seeking safety by providing a comprehensive array of services in the areas of health, housing, jobs, and justice. Seven months later COVID-19 hit, and while Ruttenberg has continued to advocate for the same people and solutions that Heartland has always served, her job took on new meaning in the midst of a pandemic.

communities of color who were being hit the hardest by the pandemic and economic crises.

“I will say that, as the months have gone on, some government bodies have acted more swiftly and more progressively, and some have not. Congress has completely fallen behind, especially in getting people the economic help they need. Our city and state have stepped up as much as they could, in many ways. In the early days there were assumptions that federal funding would come through in order to be able to implement many of the solutions we knew were necessary to mitigate the crisis and make sure things did not get so much worse. In fact, the Illinois legislature passed its budget this year totally based on that assumption.

“We need state and city aid to ensure we can continue all of the social services people rely on, and we need to be getting cash to people so that they can keep their housing and have access to health care. We need to start looking toward recovery. Once it’s safe, how can we get people back to work so they can be spending money in our local economy? How can we invest in subsidized employment and transitional jobs strategies for people hardest hit by the pandemic and the economic crisis? How can we expand health care in a way that will serve us better during the next public health crisis? At this point, all eyes are pointed to the federal government because there’s no money or political will to do any of those things. Things have sort of ground to a halt. It’s looking pretty bleak in this moment, and I don’t see a lot happening until we have a change in leadership.” —As told to Andrew Wyder

THE VERY FIRST clients that called us were clients in the event space, for example, wedding planners. They knew this was going to hit really hard for a long time, and they were wondering what they could do about their contracts. Another type of client is business owners who are trying to get out of their leases. For some businesses, it’s impossible to make those rent payments, and so I’ve had more calls about trying to get out of leases than I ever have before in my career.

“Also, in that two-week to one-month period, I had the hardest conversations about employment issues of my career. Clients were having to lay off staff or at least wanting to think through the options, and this was before the Paycheck Protection Program. They’re crying, and this is really hard for me, too, because I’m a business owner. I’m taking a financial hit in March, and I had four attorneys and an assistant at the time. The responsibility that business owners feel for their employees is heavy. They know their families, their kids, their employees’ kids’ names. They know that this job is what is keeping that household afloat. And there’s a relationship built over time, and loyalty. We ended up having to let a couple of attorneys go, which was really sad. The hard decisions that had to be made were very emotionally draining. But it’s also nice to be able to be there. It’s rewarding to be able to help clients through that.

“Since we are on this mission to make legal services accessible to small businesses, my team felt we have the

Michelle Green ’11 G&G Law, LLC

Michelle Green ’11 is the founder and owner of G&G Law, LLC, which serves small business clients and startups with transactional legal services. Green launched her firm right out of law school and during a recession, and as a business owner herself, has felt the pain many of her clients are experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

legal knowledge to help people deal with this while these business owners don’t have any money to pay for lawyers. I’m really proud of what our team produced. We produced a coronavirus resource page on gglawoffices.com that has tons of articles and videos. And then when the PPP information started coming out, we put out tons of information and videos about that. It keeps changing, and we're still trying to put up updates.

“We did have clients that broke through that first PPP funding round. I was going through the application process myself, so I knew firsthand how stressful it was. Small business owners are awesome. I can’t think of anybody who hasn’t reopened or pivoted and found another way to provide services or products.

“I have started to see more people making this switch or the big leap into starting a new business. I knew that was coming. I started my business in the middle of a recession. At that time, I talked to a lot of business owners who had left previous jobs or were laid off because of the recession, so that's an opportunity to start a new business. Businesses that can be successful during this time are the ones coming to us for services now. It’s stressful, though, because it’s really hard for small businesses in general—like it is for everybody— to project what’s going to happen in the future. There’s just no way to look at the revenues and the numbers from last quarter and then try to predict what’s going to happen next quarter. It’s just a lot of unknowns.” —As told to Jamie Loo

Beyond the headlines and union picket lines, and company spokespersons and union leaders in Chicago, an unsung group of people help hammer out contracts behind the scenes.

Martin H. Malin, director of the Institute for Law and the Workplace (ILW) at Chicago-Kent College of Law, is often one of them. Malin has been called upon to arbitrate or mediate some of the largest labor and employment negotiations in the city for the past 40 years, including the 2015 and 2016 Chicago Board of Education and Chicago Teachers Union contract negotiations, for which one of Malin’s former students was the fact-finder. He was asked to be a fact-finder for the 2019 negotiations, which included contracts for Chicago Public Schools employees.

“It was really cool because the mediator for both sets of negotiations for the CTU and with SEIU [Service Employees International Union] was another one of my former students, Emil Totonchi, who is a mediator with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service,” he says. “During the mediation stage of the fact-finding, Emil was actually co-mediating with me. That was so much fun to be tag-teaming with my former student in this mediation.”

Malin is always delighted to come across former students in his practice. It happens frequently in Chicago, where for the past 24 years the labor and employment law program he built has graduated hundreds of lawyers. ILW has also brought thousands of public- and private-sector labor and employment lawyers and professionals through the doors for conferences at Chicago-Kent.

“We bring the practicing professional and academic communities together; we bring the student community together with the practicing professional community; and of course, we bring the labor, the management, and the employee-advocate communities together,” Malin says. “I like to think of our program as a bridge across different worlds that brings everyone together for everyone’s benefit.”

An Intellectual Home for Labor and Employment Law

In the 1970s the late Lawrence F. Doppelt founded and directed Chicago-Kent’s labor and employment law LL.M. program. His death in 1979 left the program without a leader. Malin, a junior faculty member at The Ohio State University business school, came to Chicago-Kent as a visiting professor for a one-year appointment in fall 1980. Afterward, Chicago-Kent offered him a full-time position to teach labor and employment law.

Malin’s original mission was to slowly wind down the LL.M. program, but the law school continued to receive inquiries. Chicago-Kent kept the labor and employment law courses and expanded them for juris doctor students. A new labor lecture, the Kenneth M. Piper Memorial Lecture in Labor Law, became an endowed lecture series with its own advisory board.

Around this time, one of Malin’s students, Frank Fucile ’83, who was an inspector for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and president of the local American Federation of Government Employees, approached him with an idea. Fucile said that although Chicago is a federal government hub, there were no regional professional-development opportunities for federal-sector labor law professionals. Malin and Fucile worked together to launch the first Federal Sector Labor Relations and Labor Law Conference in 1982.

“It was a rousing success. With Frank’s contacts we put together a program advisory board with basically every major constituent of that conference having a representative on it and with the regional directors of the relevant federal agencies on it,” he says. “It just exceeded our wildest expectations.”

Today the conference remains the largest annual conference on federal sector and postal labor relations and labor law held outside of Washington, D.C. A virtual edition of the conference in 2020 attracted more than 450 attendees from 38 different states.

In 1984 the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act and Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act went into effect, establishing a statewide framework for collective bargaining. It led to the creation of the Illinois Public Sector Labor Law Conference, which has become the state’s largest conference on public sector labor law, drawing upwards of 600 lawyers and labor relations professionals to the law school each year.

The conferences brought together members of the labor and management community in a neutral, academic space to learn and discuss workplace issues. Malin says ILW started hearing stories about grievances and unfair labor practice charges being settled at the conferences.

By the early 1990s Chicago-Kent had developed a strong reputation for labor and employment law, and former law school dean Richard A. Matasar suggested the creation of a certificate program. Malin says the law school needed another labor and employment professor to help with this, so Rafael Gely, a lawyer and labor economist, was hired. Malin, Gely, and Matasar consulted with leaders in law firms, companies, and unions to find out what skills they were looking for in new labor and employment lawyers. Along with the certificate program, the law school also wanted to see if there was support for creating a larger institute. Every dollar from members of the institute, Malin says, would go to scholarships for the next generation of labor and employment lawyers.

In 1996 ILW was officially established. The Piper and Distinguished Labor Leader lectures and ILW conferences have brought national leaders in labor and employment to Chicago-Kent. These include AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, Sara E. Rix of the AARP Public Policy Institute, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Commissioner Victoria Lipnic, to name a few.

ILW publishes the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, the only faculty-edited, peer-reviewed employment law journal in the country focused on legal issues related to the workplace. It also publishes the Illinois Public Employee Relations Report. Under Malin’s leadership, ILW has established four endowments and several student scholarships. In 2019 preLaw Magazine ranked ILW the #1 employment law program in the country.

“The Institute for Law and the Workplace’s programs provide an invaluable forum to discuss today’s most important labor and employment issues through an academic and pragmatic lens,” says Jorge Ramirez ’97, managing director of labor and government strategies for GCM Grosvenor and former president of the Chicago Federation of Labor. “The opportunity to connect with others outside of an adversarial setting has had a positive impact on building collegiality among our regional workplace law community. We are fortunate to have a place like ILW here in Chicago.”

The Bridge Builder

Collective bargaining is in Malin’s roots. Born and raised in the New York City borough of the Bronx, he still remembers “the euphoria in our household when my father landed a job with the New York City Sanitation Department as a mechanic’s helper.” As a member of Local 32BJ SEIU, Malin’s father had access to good wages, health insurance, and a pension plan. It enabled the family to have a good life, and for Malin and his sister to be the first generation in their family to graduate from college.

As a student at Michigan State University, Malin worked a minimum wage job in the kitchen at the university’s conference center, the Kellogg Center. During his sophomore year, Malin discovered that management wasn’t honoring raises set by the student employment office. He and a fellow student worker filed a complaint and won. Afterward, they proposed establishing a grievance committee for student workers, which management declined.

“We said, ‘The regular employees have their grievance committee,’” Malin says. “And local management said, ‘Yeah, because they have a union.’ And so the light bulb went off for both of us. We need a union!”

Malin says they had no idea what they were doing. Over the course of the next year, he and his co-workers, a ragtag group of undergraduate dishwashers from the Kellogg Center and a non-lawyer Michigan State labor relations professor, fought for a union all the way up to the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. In 1973 MERC ruled in their favor. It was an amazing victory, Malin says, because up until that point “the National Labor Relations Board, with respect to private universities, had held that students employed by the universities were not employees under the National Labor Relations Act.” Although the efforts at unionization at Michigan State later failed, the experience was the spark that led Malin to specialize in labor and employment law.

Malin has been active with several state and national organizations throughout his career, including serving as the chair of the Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law of the Association of American Law Schools, secretary of the American Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Law Section, and member of the board of governors and vice president of the National Academy of Arbitrators. He has published more than 80 articles and seven books, including Public Sector Employment: Cases and Materials and Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace. In 2016 the ABA honored Malin with the Arvid Anderson Public Sector Labor and Employment Attorney of the Year Award for lifetime contributions to public sector labor law.

One his career highlights was his appointment by former President Barack Obama to the Federal Service Impasses Panel in 2009. Malin was reappointed in 2014 and served until 2017. The panel’s seven members resolve impasses in collective bargaining between federal agencies and unions that represent the agencies’ employees. Malin handled a wide range of cases, including a worldwide U.S.

The EEOC partnered with the Institute for Law and the Workplace for an event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, which included a panel discussion with two flight attendants who were among the first women to use Title VII and the Equal Pay Act of 1963 in the courts to fight workplace sex discrimination. Pictured here are [left to right] Mary Celeste Lansdale Brodigan, plaintiff in Lansdale v. United Air Lines, Inc.; Chicago-Kent Professor Mary Rose Strubbe, former ILW assistant director; and Mary Pat Laffey, plaintiff in Laffey v. Northwest Airlines, Inc. During her time in privacte practice, Strubbe handled one of the early sex discrimination cases in the airline industry.

Customs and Borders Protection agents’ contract and a work shift dispute between the U.S. Army and civilian security guards tasked with watching over a former chemical weapons stockpile in Utah.

Malin says his proudest achievement from ILW is the “small army of graduates who have gone out and done amazing things in the field.” ILW alumni include equity partners at big law firms, union lawyers, management firm lawyers, and top labor counsel for corporations across various industries. They can also be found in government positions, including state labor relations boards and the EEOC.

Although he is retiring from ILW in 2021, Malin plans to stay active in the workplace law community and to continue to mediate and arbitrate. He will undoubtedly run into more of his former students. Chicago-Kent Assistant Professor Emily Aleisa, who is an ILW alum and who will become assistant director in fall 2021, says Malin cares deeply about his students. He has always modeled a sense of community and inclusion, she says, facilitating thoughtful discussion and meaningful connection on potentially divisive topics.

“As a result of Malin’s influence in the classroom and beyond, the Chicago workplace law community definitely is more collegial than competitive,” she says. “He not only inspired generations of practitioners to continue shaping this crucial legal landscape, he also made them feel up to the task.”— Jamie

Loo