Richard "Kirt" West became the new LSC Inspector General on September 1, 2004. Although West spent the last twenty years at three other Inspector General offices, working most recently as the Executive Director of the Inspector General Management Institute at the United States Postal Office, as a young man he worked to help low-income people, sometimes in collaboration with legal aid programs. After graduating from Lawrence University with a B.A. in 1969, West worked as a case worker at the Cook County Department of Public Aid in Chicago. In that role, he worked with what is now known as the LSC-funded Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago (LAF) by referring clients and by providing LAF with information on issues involving the administration of the public assistance program, sometimes via an affidavit. While attending Northwestern University Law School, from which he graduated in 1984, West worked on Social Security disability and welfare policy cases at the school's legal clinic. During the second summer of law school, West worked at the Mandel Legal Clinic at the University of Chicago on litigation under the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. West says he knew that for children with disabilities, obtaining an appropriate education is "very different from just sitting in a corner," so he helped to make sure that children with severe disabilities could enroll in residential schools. West says that when he began law school he had intended to become a legal aid attorney, but that with two children in grade school and a massive debt upon graduation, it was not economically feasible. Now that he has become LSC's Inspector General, West says that he is "coming full circle and sort of returning to where I started my career."

LSC, Press Release: LSC Announces Appointment of Inspector General (Aug. 17, 2004) (on file with the Brennan Center); also based on original reporting by Brennan Center staff.