A Fire In Her

Utah attorney Lauren Scholnick has never liked bullies.

As a fifth grader in suburban Chicago, Scholnick was fed up with the popular kids’ monopoly on a premium lunchroom table. Years before she would work as a labor union lobbyist, the young Scholnick organized her classmates into an alliance and persuaded them to arrive to the lunchroom before the popular kids. By occupying that most sought-after table, Scholnick and her allies ultimately brought an end to the lunchroom hierarchy.

“I think everyone had those same mean girls, or whatever, that could have ruled their lives, and I just was not gonna allow that to happen to myself or anybody who I cared about,” she says. “Maybe I was born this way—with that fire in my belly to be the voice of people who don’t have a voice or can’t figure out how to use their voice.”

Those instincts have guided the labor and employment attorney’s professional life. She regularly completes more than 100 hours of pro bono work per year; in 2004, she received the Pro Bono Service of the Year award from the Utah State Bar.

At the firm she founded nearly 25 years ago, Scholnick Thorne Holland, pro bono work is a priority—in fact, Scholnick met many of the people who came to work at the firm through law clinics.

Since the late ‘90s, she has served as a supervising attorney for the Street Law clinic, run by the S.J. Quinney College of Law’s Pro Bono Initiative at the University of Utah. Each month, she helps law students give civil legal advice to community members. Some of her pro bono cases come from people she meets at the clinic.

The clinic provides advocacy services for people who have little or no experience interacting with the legal system, Scholnick says. Helping someone negotiate a payment plan for their medical bills, for example, means the person has avoided damage to their credit score and is no longer receiving harassing phone calls, Scholnick says. Among other things, the clinic also commonly handles housing issues, helping tenants understand their rights and negotiate with landlords to stop eviction proceedings.

“Problems that people have been having for a really long time we can solve almost immediately once we talk law to the other side,” she says. Debt collection letters are a common example. “The only way you can break through that logjam and actually negotiate something with a lawyer is if it’s another lawyer who is on the line trying to reach the debt collection attorney.”

Equally important, Scholnick adds, is the value the clinic has for law students.

“To do pro bono work for someone, you can get to a positive outcome pretty quickly, and that’s satisfying,” she says. It shows law students that “they can use even the small amount of training that they’ve had so far to really impact somebody else’s life.”

After graduating from the University of Illinois College of Law in 1995, Scholnick, an avid skier, applied only to judicial clerkships that would take her to ski country. This brought her to Salt Lake City and what she calls “the paradise that is Utah.”

Following a stint on Jim Bradley’s 1996 gubernatorial campaign, Scholnick’s post-clerkship career began at Utah Legal Services. While there, she started the “and Justice for all” campaign, an effort to raise money from lawyers and law firms to fund three of the biggest civil legal services providers in Utah: the Disability Law Center, the Legal Aid Society of Salt Lake and Utah Legal Services. Schnolnick continues to help raise money for the campaign, among other work with Utah Legal Services, and formerly sat on the organization’s board.

Before becoming a lawyer, Scholnick had worked in Illinois as legislative director and organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Once in Utah, she realized the kinds of legislative changes she’d helped make in worker-friendly Illinois would be much more difficult in her new state. Still, she donates her time each legislative session lobbying the Utah Legislature on important civil rights issues—mainly workers’ rights issues, including protecting collective bargaining rights.

Work affects every aspect of someone’s life, Scholnick says: their self-worth, their ability to raise a family, their chance to live healthily and access medical care.

“Employers that take away that opportunity from people either illegally or unfairly, it just undermines people’s value as individuals and undermines their ability to support their families,” she says. “I think all of that contributes to why I feel so strongly that everyone should have representation and be able to work.”