Erika Lim likes to say she moonlights as an attorney. She’s never had a paying client, but in 3½ years Erika has represented 45 clients pro bono. “Erika is undaunted,” says the King County Bar Association’s Merf Ehman. “She will work on any case for any client.”
Over the years, Erika has made a living in the public decision-making process — first as counsel to the state Senate, then as a policy advisor and legislative liaison for state agencies, and now with the City of Seattle. She savors the opportunities her pro bono work gives her to see the human side of policy issues she has worked on. She credits her lack of paying clients for her tolerance of the foibles of her pro bono clients.
Recently, she volunteered to take on a trial for a young, temporarily disabled single mother, who had received 12 eviction notices in a 12-month period. After Erika demonstrated that 11 of them were not based in fact, the trial court ruled in the tenant’s favor and awarded Erika attorney fees. She donated the fees to the King County Bar Foundation.
In another case, Erika represented a tenant against whom a landlord and property manager were obtaining baseless domestic violence protection orders in an effort to force the tenant to leave when they had no other grounds for eviction. Erika put a stop to that.
Last year, Erika accepted a case that had been turned down by many other lawyers. This was a case even experienced legal services attorneys shunned because of the challenges posed by the client. The client was a hoarder, who suffered from acute anxiety disorder. The landlord sought eviction because the tenant’s hoarding was creating a fire hazard. Even though the client deluged Erika with unsolicited information and filed her own motions, Erika never gave up on the client or the case. Eventually, she negotiated a settlement that saved her client from homelessness.
Erika was never deterred from going to court despite the fact that her last paid litigation experience was in 1991 as a Rule 9 prosecutorial intern. Fortunately, the Rules of Evidence hadn’t changed by the time she began taking pro bono cases in 2002. The KCBA’s training and mentorship programs are excellent, she says, and the bar identifies clients, sorts out issues and provides malpractice coverage.
In addition to her pro bono activities, Erika currently serves as president of the board of the Legal Foundation of Washington, which oversees the distribution of IOLTA funds to legal services providers. Previously, she chaired the board of the Pike Market Senior Center and Downtown Food Bank.
One of her many fans, John O’Brien of the Legal Action Center, praised Erika’s willingness to take on a case even though she might lose. “Erika is right there, ready to take a case without hesitation,” he says. “She understands that it’s not about her.”
Erika doesn’t allow herself to use the fact that she doesn’t practice law on a daily basis as an excuse to avoid what she believes is a moral imperative to use her license to practice law to help people who don’t carry the same union card. “If you have a license, whether you use it or not to make a living, you can do things that other people can’t,” she says. “The KCBA makes it easy. There’s nothing like having a client shake your hand and say ‘thank you.’ It makes all the effort worth it.”
But Erika’s service is about more than that, says O’Brien: The clients she serves “are people most of us would like to walk away from. Instead, she walks toward them.”
Susan Craighead is a commissioner with Division One of the Court of Appeals.
