The Legal Intelligencer
Gina Passarella
June 28, 2011

While their company works to make sure clients’ cars run smoothly, the attorneys in Pep Boys’ legal department are trying to smooth the way for the area’s homeless to transition into self-sufficiency.

In April 2009, Pep Boys General Counsel Brian Zuckerman attended a pro bono birth certificate clinic organized by Philadelphia-based Homeless Advocacy Project (HAP). Zuckerman was so intrigued by HAP’s mission that he asked the public interest firm to present an overview of its organization to his legal department.

The four-lawyer legal department was too small to adopt a legal clinic of its own for HAP, but was nevertheless undeterred in its goal to help the homeless who reside in area shelters. So Zuckerman reached out to the local office of DLA Piper and, more specifically, his friend, partner Joseph Kernen, a HAP board member.

Shortly thereafter, the law firm and legal department teamed up to “adopt” the Stenton Family Manor Shelter in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. The shelter is dedicated to helping homeless families in transition.

For the past two years, attorneys from Pep Boys and DLA Piper have gotten together every other month to staff a legal clinic at the shelter. The volunteers meet individually with shelter residents to give them legal advice, prepare their intake paperwork and assume representation of the clients.

“Though relatively small in number, the entire staff of the in-house Pep Boys legal department, under the leadership of Vice President and General Counsel Brian Zuckerman, has been extremely generous in their contribution of time and legal expertise to the many HAP clients they have assisted over the past several years,” HAP Executive Director Marsha I. Cohen said in a letter detailing Pep Boys’ pro bono service.

As of early May 2011, Pep Boys’ attorneys and legal assistants have provided shelter residents legal help in more than 70 matters, ranging from credit and debt resolution, Social Security insurance and Social Security disability insurance, veterans compensation, family law, assistance in obtaining birth certificates and other general legal advice. In 2010, Pep Boys attorneys opened 25 new cases for which the department’s attorneys provided representation.

“On a constant basis, the Pep Boys legal volunteers dedicate a great deal of their time towards communicating with and counseling clients, advocating on their behalf and providing expert and professional representation to a community which otherwise would not have access to free legal services,” Cohen said. “Residents at Stenton are greatly assisted by the volunteer efforts and legal expertise provided by Pep Boys’ volunteers and as a result, many previously homeless families and individuals have succeeded in transitioning to self sufficiency and independence.”

One of the key drivers of Pep Boys’ pro bono initiative for HPA is Janice Levin, the company’s senior counsel of employment and litigation. Cohen called her “one of HAP’s most essential pro bono partners.”

Levin sits on HAP’s board of directors and serves as the “adopt coordinator” for Pep Boys on the project. She organizes the company’s pro bono volunteers who attend each of the Stenton clinics and coordinates the representation of their HAP clients.

HAP’s Adopt-a-Shelter project began in 1995, and there are currently 19 shelters being serviced by local law firms, law schools and law departments. Aside from Pep Boys, the only other in-house law departments to work on this program are Merck and PECO, which have teamed up with Reed Smith and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, respectively.

Pep Boys’ work for HAP is proof that doing good deeds is infectious. Cohen quickly realized Levin was passionate about these issues and found her a place on HAP’s board. From there, Levin’s work has expanded beyond the bimonthly meetings to include broader homeless advocacy issues across the city. She recently worked on advocacy related to a proposed city ordinance amendment regarding how the homeless are treated by police.

Much of the work she does for the individual residents, however, is often more simplistic legally but crucial to their eventual transitions.

“Honestly, a lot of what we do is very simple, very basic,” Levin said. “People are living at Stenton and so their primary goal is to find housing … [but] a lot of their basic paperwork they don’t have.”

One thing HAP clients often need are their birth certificates for themselves and their children. That is the “basic bread-and-butter work” Levin and her colleagues handle at these clinics, she said.

The work can become more complex, and Levin just recently triumphed in a case involving a single, homeless man who was being “hounded” by creditors for a few thousand dollars in student loans he owed. He wasn’t a Stenton resident, but rather someone Cohen had asked her board members if they could help out and Levin volunteered.

“It turned out to be a much more involved process than I thought it was going to be,” Levin said. The man had no assets. Levin said that by applying for forgiveness and writing letters and talking to different people, the creditors eventually held the loan in abeyance and “finally, just very recently, discharged him from any obligation on the loan.”

While Levin leads the Pep Boys team on the “adopt-a-shelter” project, she isn’t alone. All four of the department’s lawyers, including Zuckerman, attend the clinics when they can. So too do a handful of DLA Piper lawyers, including Kernen. The clinics typically run about an hour and a half and there is some work for the attorneys to take back to the office with them, too.

As far as Levin knows, this is the first type of broad-based pro bono project Pep Boys’ legal department has ever taken on. Kernen, who counts Pep Boys among his clients, said his firm has teamed up with other clients on pro bono projects, but said those clients all have much larger law departments that can more easily handle the workload.

“It is tough for even a firm to do all by itself,” he said.

Cohen said she has never seen another company with so few attorneys have a commitment as deep as Pep Boys’ has been. She said the company’s lawyers have never missed a clinic.

Kernen said teaming up with Pep Boys has been a great way to spend more time with a client, train the firm’s associates and just generally do something positive for the city.