Paragraph: (Society_Law_and_Justice/oanc-Law_Schools-1.txt)
Sent 1: Life for the partners of Cates, Katalinic & Lund holds little of the glamour one might expect from a career in law.
Sent 2: Instead of lunches at Lut��ce, they caucus at the Palace Diner in Queens.
Sent 3: Wooing clients means passing out fliers on street corners, not securing box seats at Madison Square Garden.
Sent 4: To make ends meet, one partner stacks pipe and cleans the yard at a plumbing warehouse.
Sent 5: Another handles urine samples in a hospital lab.
Sent 6: A sign of failure, of a feeble economy, perhaps?
Sent 7: Hardly.
Sent 8: They are heeding the call of a growing pool of law schools, which are for the first time pointing graduates in a new direction and teaching them how to get there.
Sent 9: Forget the lure of large firms, the security of a government post.
Sent 10: Here is how to grapple "in the service of justice," as many of the schools put it, instead.
Sent 11: Convinced that corporate largess and government programs barely dent the nation's legal needs, the law schools are urging graduates to buck tradition, pass up big salaries and ignore mushrooming student debt to join tiny neighborhood practices or simply start their own, all with an eye toward charging no more than their clients can afford.
Sent 12: This is not pro bono legal work; it is "low bono," a term the schools coined to define the atypical kind of law career they are training students for.
Sent 13: While its practitioners do charge for their services, they are also dead set on turning no one away - or at least as few as possible.
Sent 14: "When you go into this kind of social justice law, it's really brutal and you're almost guaranteed to struggle for a couple of years before there's a light at the end of the tunnel," said Fred Rooney, director of the Community Legal Resource Network at City University of New York School of Law, from which the lawyers of the newly formed Cates, Katalinic & Lund graduated last May.
Sent 15: "But if our graduates don't do it, the millions of people who cannot access justice in this country will continue to soar."
Sent 16: The movement, primly called the consortium, started four years ago by CUNY, Northeastern University, the University of Maryland and St. Mary's Law School in Texas.
Sent 17: (St. Mary's later dropped out.) Since then, it has drawn seven additional law schools to its ranks: the University of Michigan, Rutgers and Syracuse Law Schools, New York Law School, University of New Mexico School of Law, Thomas M. Cooley Law School and Touro Law School.
Sent 18: It has elicited at least initial interest from 19 more.