Rarely has the public-interest law firm taken on so many cases with such direct public-policy impact as in the past 18 months, under the leadership of its new chairman and vice chairman, Bob Proctor and Matt Glavin. Glavin, the first executive director of Southeastern without a law degree, is credited both with energizing the group's fund-raising efforts and turning its bend from the ideological to the pragmatic.

Lawsuits, or the threat of lawsuits, from Southeastern lawyers are credited with reducing Georgia's unemployment tax, repealing the state's intangibles tax on securities and scuttling a one-time tax on Olympic housing rentals. 'We vigorously defend the free-enterprise system, the principle on which our society was founded,' Glavin said. 'When government oversteps its bounds, we are there.'

Staffed with just three attorneys, Southeastern has built a network of 125 volunteer lawyers across its nine-state region. Glavin plans to open a Columbia, S.C., satellite office this year, with a Tallahassee, Fla., office to come in 1997. The privately funded foundation acts as a legal-aid society for cases that prove a conservative point. Sometimes that means representing a plaintiff in a suit, other times weighing in as a 'friend of the court.' Southeastern lawyers are assisting in the case of two Stephens County schoolgirls taken to a clinic for birth control by school personnel without their parents' permission.

And the foundation has fought race-based preferences in municipal contracting and hiring from Jacksonville to Richmond, Va., winning precedents that Glavin credits with setting up last month's Texas ruling against affirmative action in college admissions. A Maine transplant known for managing Republican campaigns, Glavin promotes the not-for-profit firm with almost the same ferocity that he promotes himself. And considering that Glavin pictures himself as Georgia's next lieutenant governor, that's saying something.

A new meaning for 'midnight madness?' Occasional night-time sessions of the General Assembly are among the options being discussed by members of a study committee on legislative reform. 'We could have 'people's night' at the Capitol,' suggests Rep. Mike Polak, D-Atlanta, a study commission member who came up with the idea. Besides making the session more accessible to spectators, the move might allow people with daytime, salaried jobs to run for office. That would include people like Polak, a Southern Bell employee, who uses all his vacation, sick leave and unpaid leave to attend the three-month, daytime session.

Republicans are fuming that perennial candidate John Frank Collins, whose name sounds just similar enough to former Gov. Joe Frank Harris' to fool some voters, is back on the ballot again. The 70-something motel owner from DeKalb County has waged six losing races for the Public Service Commission, most recently as a Democrat. But after switching from Democrat to GOP to Democrat, he's back in the Republican column for a 1996 PSC race and threatening to knock off the party's carefully recruited candidate, state Rep. Bill Hembree of Douglasville.

It's time government offices were safe from the scourge of solitaire. So says Mitch Skandalakis, chairman of the Fulton County commission, who wants video games banned from county employees' computer terminals, including his own. 'The simple fact is that there are employees who spend much more than a few minutes a day playing these games,' said Skandalakis, who is contemplating a run for statewide office in 1998.