Plenty of lawyers talk about leaving a big, comfortable job to defend the weak and powerless. Tom Myers walks the walk. As general counsel to the Los Angeles–based AIDS Healthcare Foundation—the country’s largest grassroots provider of HIV- and AIDS-related health services—Myers fights to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS and to protect the rights of the sick and dying.
One day Myers might be keeping demonstrators at the mayor’s house out of jail. Another he’s negotiating down a vendor fee by more than $100,000—money that then goes straight to patient care. The next day he’s helping to set up and find counsel for a new health-care center in Durban, South Africa, where President Thabo Mbeki is questioning whether AIDS—a national epidemic—is even solely caused by a virus.
The 36-year-old Myers started down the public interest path in 1989 as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1994, Myers signed on with McKenna & Cuneo in Los Angeles to practice labor and employment law. He still cared about public interest work, but like a lot of law students, he decided to get some big-firm experience first.
As a newly minted associate, Myers worked the standard 10 to 12 hours a day, doing a fair amount of litigation and a lot of discovery. He liked the work, but he couldn’t stomach the business end: “Trying to reduce my life to six-minute blocks killed me,” he says. In 1997, Myers went with his department when it broke off from McKenna to become Curiale, Dellaverson, Hirschfeld, Kelly & Kraemer. About a year and a half later, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a Curiale client, decided to hire its own counsel. Myers, who’d since moved on to Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, went for the job and got it.
The $54 million, 400-plus-employee nonprofit AIDS Healthcare Foundation is dedicated to providing medical and other services regardless of a client’s ability to pay (funding comes mainly from government sources). The foundation operates 12 health-care centers throughout the United States as well as an AIDS hospice, a managed-care program, and 16 thrift shops in Los Angeles County.
As a department of one, Myers handles the gamut of legal issues, from helping to set up clinics to dealing with employment issues to wrangling with government agencies over funding. When a legal curveball comes at him, he has to figure it out for himself. “I like to take things from start to finish on my own,” he says.
Working for a nonprofit may mean forgoing the beach house in Malibu or weekly dinners at Dan Tana’s. “But you have to decide how much is enough,” says Myers. “I make six figures. I ought to be able to do what I want to on $100K a year.”
What makes the job worthwhile, though, is making a difference. Take the Durban clinic. “If we’re successful in Durban, we’ll show other developing countries that they, too, can do this,” says Myers. “Efforts like that combat the disease. It’s hard to think of work that’s more important.”
Resumé
- General Counsel, AIDS Healthcare Foundation
Los Angeles, 1998—present - Associate, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp
Los Angeles, 1998 - Associate, Curiale, Dellaverson, Hirschfeld, Kelly & Kraemer
Los Angeles, 1997–’98 - Associate, McKenna & Cuneo
Los Angeles, 1994–’97 - Harvard Law School 1994
- Paralegal, Legal Aid Society of New York 1989
