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Jessica Bednarz has spent much of her career representing people, researching access-to-justice issues and using that knowledge to try to find better ways to deliver legal services. That includes using what’s known as “design thinking” for developing client service programs.
In the 35 years that Jayne Conroy has been a lawyer, she’s spent the entire time in private practice doing civil litigation and has tried more than 70 cases. She also worked her way through law school as a paralegal, which she says enhanced her education experience and taught her the best ways to know a case file backward and forward, as well as how things should be organized.
Attorneys often expect incarcerated clients to lie and vice versa, says Derrick Hamilton, who served more than 20 years of a second-degree murder sentence. Those outlooks don’t help build good attorney-client relationships, according to Hamilton, who now works with students at the Yeshiva University Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law’s Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice.
While 2022 was a phenomenal year for attorneys and “anyone with a pulse” and a law license could find work, 2023 might “go back to normal,” says Valerie A. Fontaine, a founding director of the legal search company SeltzerFontaine.
As we head into the holiday season, consider what you want your celebrations to look like, rather than meeting everyone else’s expectations, says Laurie Besden, a lawyer who has been sober for almost two decades.