There and Back Again with Tom Albin

Most attorneys get a degree or two on the way to law school. Tom Albin took it a bit further—and longer—than that.

“I had delayed my entry into the legal field—I was doing six degrees including a Ph.D., and that took a lot of time,” Albin says. “I was older than a lot of the other new attorneys because I’d spent 14 years in college and graduate school.”

Albin, whose Ph.D. is in Romance linguistics, originally planned to practice international law, which felt like a natural fit for someone with his knack for language. (He’s fluent in French and Italian and “comfortably conversant” in Spanish, he says.) He lived and studied in France and Italy, and it was following two years of college in France that he decided international law might be for him. Later, between 2L and his final semester, Albin had a clerkship with a Flemish law firm in Brussels that he loved. But there was one major caveat.

“I didn’t like the practice,” he says. “I was assigned to an international taxation matter, and it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to represent individuals, not nameless, large corporations.”

It’s some of society’s more vulnerable people whom we’re typically representing, and I enjoy that.

Representing individuals is exactly the type of work he’s been able to do at Connecticut Legal Services, a private nonprofit he first joined in 1984 that represents low-income persons seeking help in the areas of housing, family and domestic violence, health law, public benefits and more. The organization’s stated emphasis, Albin says, is providing help related to basic human needs.

“It’s not about making money,” Albin says. “It’s about human interest, it’s about helping people, and that’s why it’s nonprofit here and for-profit there. The mentalities are totally different.”

Of course, meaningful work isn’t always lucrative. “A lot of new attorneys who are dedicated to the theory of helping people leave within their first two years because they’re wooed away by private practice, where they’re called upon to do different things than they would here but at a much higher pay scale,” he says.

Albin is speaking from experience. He was wooed away himself. After four years at CLS back in the 1980s, he left for Embry and Neusner, where for 33 years he specialized in workers’ compensation and Social Security disability. Today, though, Albin is back as a full-time housing attorney at CLS, representing individuals in landlord-tenant matters including evictions, code enforcement, Section 8 entitlement, lockouts and relocation benefits.

“I’m making less than I would at a comparable private practice firm, but no private firm does landlord-tenant defense,” Albin says. “There are landlord firms that do nothing but evictions, but at CLS I do mostly eviction defense cases. It’s an area that I’ve come to love passionately since I started doing it in the ’80s and I was thrilled to come back to it.”

And he’s paying it forward with summer associates like Emma Diamanti, a 3L at UConn who he thinks is in the perfect position to start her career at CLS. “My view is, I’m single, I live with my parents, I have the years to spare to donate my time for less pay to the people who need it,” Diamanti says. “I’m assuming that I’ll grow to love it and then the salary will be able to support me. I would rather spend my life helping people than have a bunch saved up when I die.”

Albin adds, “We’re trying to get people housed, fed, protected from abuse, trying to straighten out their immigration status and deal with issues that are related to the elderly. It’s some of society’s more vulnerable people whom we’re typically representing, and I enjoy that.”

Albin’s empathy grew even more after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago, then had a successful course of treatment. “It changed my perspective,” he says. “I just feel like we’re not guaranteed anything. You could lose a basic human need at any time, and that’s just heart-wrenching.”

That said, Albin says it’s important not to get too attached. “I’m not helping anybody if I’m going to go home and cry about their situation,” Albin says. “I try to be as professional as I can, but I have a great deal of sympathy towards the people who are in these situations.”