I knew when I started this job that there would very likely be some clients we simply couldn't help. We're a small office, three attorneys and two paralegals (plus two interns for the summer), and even if every single person who came to us had an absolute open-and-shut case, we couldn't possibly take them all. This organization serves nine counties, and we already have more work than we can handle. I knew all that.

What I also knew, but didn't viscerally understand until today, was that there would be some clients we couldn't help because the law isn't designed to help them.

When someone comes in who has clearly been treated unfairly, but not for a provable discriminatory reason - fired after almost twenty years with the company for taking a vacation she was told she could take - we can't do anything because it's legal in New York to fire anyone at any time as long as it's not because of their race/sex/age/national origin/etc. When someone comes in to complain of being sexually harassed by her boss, but her company has only three employees, we can't do anything because the federal antidiscrimination statutes don't cover companies with less than 15 employees.

We can't do anything but say "It's horribly unfair, but it's not against the law. We're so sorry." And that's not enough.