Ten years of gender justice

For the last 30 years, Her Justice has been one of the leading organizations working at the intersection of the court system and women living in poverty, providing legal services in the areas of immigration, child support, divorce and intimate partner violence. Using a “pro bono first” model – which matches volunteer attorneys with women in need of legal services – Her Justice has been able to serve 45,000 women and children to date. Amy Barasch has been the executive director of Her Justice for the last ten years, leading the expansion of Her Justice’s policy initiatives. Under her leadership, Her Justice has moved beyond just providing legal services to work closely with elected officials, advocating for policy and legislative change.

New York Nonprofit Media spoke with Barasch, the outgoing executive director of Her Justice, about the organization’s mission, the “pro bono first” model, what she’ll miss about Her Justice and what’s next for her.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What ignited your passion for this work?

I am a lawyer, and I went to law school late, and I say that because for many attorneys, they will say they were born knowing they wanted to do (law). I took seven years between college and law school and was a journalist and lived in Paris, but I always really knew I wanted to work on women's rights issues. Ultimately, I went to law school, and while I was in law school, the Violence Against Women Act passed in 1994. I really thought of myself as wanting to use the law to help women and particularly women living in poverty. There was a lot of excitement and change around the issue of intimate partner violence, because for the first time, we had a federal law addressing that issue.

I did join a law firm right after law school, like many other people, to get good training and to help pay off my loan. But then from there, I jumped pretty quickly into the intimate partner violence space. It always came from a desire to address women living in poverty, and the partner violence conversation was really active and exciting at that time. So that's how I kind of focused my work in that area. 

For me, Her Justice was a nice way to recognize that while partner violence is where I have a lot of experience and expertise, that's one of the unfortunately many challenges that women in poverty face. So if you're going to work with this population, it's important to have that expertise, but it's just one of the entry points into addressing the various systemic challenges that women face in our systems.

Tell me about Her Justice and its model. 

Her Justice was founded a little over 30 years ago by someone named Cathy Douglass who was working in a law firm, went to family court and saw how few women had legal representation in family court, yet the majority of petitioners in family court – the people coming to ask for some kind of remedy or help from the court – are women. Because she worked in a law firm, she thought there must be a way to bridge this gap. There are a lot of lawyers who would love to help, and there are all these people who need lawyers. 

It's important to remember that, back in the day, when we were founded, there wasn't a lot of pro bono work that actually helped individual people. Pro bono at the time was more about doing appeals, where you'd get an exciting headline, or representing artists who had a need but couldn't afford counsel, but the firms were taking on pro bono in a very targeted way and not dealing with individual poor people quite as much. So Cathy really had this vision that that was something that could be done if we trained the lawyers properly. 

Fast forward 30-plus years, we now are one of the biggest providers of pro bono services to individual people living in poverty in New York City. What that means is that we have attorneys who are really experts in the subject matters in which we work – and that's family law, divorce law and immigration law – and we work with volunteer lawyers from the city's firms. What our lawyers and our staff spend the most time on is identifying folks who need help and who would benefit from the kind of services we offer, getting their materials together and preparing them to work with an attorney. Then, on the other side, training and preparing the volunteer lawyers for being able to work with our clients and understanding the subject matter area. And then really supporting (and) mentoring the lawyers to help (for) the duration of the case. 

The real magic of the model is that it means we can reach so many more people than we would (otherwise) be able to. Last year, we served 4,131 women and children with our model. We would never be able to reach that many women if our attorneys just did direct service.

How does Her Justice ensure quality representation by a volunteer attorney who may be strapped for time?

One of the things we're very, very dedicated to is to being client-focused. We start with what the client needs, and then we figure out how the attorney can find the time or the expertise to actually be able to meet our clients’ needs. We want to make sure that our clients are getting the best quality representation. We train the attorneys, we're reviewing all the papers, we're supporting them in the representation. Because we are experts in pro bono, we really make sure that we have a model that's agile and flexible, because we want to be driven by the needs of the clients. One thing we do is, we always make sure that at least two attorneys are assigned to all of our clients’ cases, so that clients are not losing consistency – for example, if one of their lawyers moves to another firm. We always make sure that there's someone at the firm who's supervising the case, often a partner there, to ensure that sustained representation happens throughout the course of the case, which may take a couple of years.

I’d love to hear more of Her Justice’s other areas of expertise. 

We do divorces and immigration. Divorce is really important to mention because in New York, people who are getting divorced often, especially lower income folks, often go between family court and the divorce court. A lot of people don't recognize that in New York, divorces actually happen in Supreme Court. They don't happen in family court. In New York, you have a right to a lawyer for most cases in family court, like custody and orders of protection, but in divorce, there isn't a right to a lawyer for the financial part – for example, allocating debts and assets. People are often kind of shuffling between the two court systems. Our lawyers are all deeply experienced lawyers in the family and matrimonial court, so they bring that expertise with them when they're mentoring and supporting the volunteer lawyers. 

Sometimes, there can be a lot of debt in a marriage, especially if there has been partner violence and if there has been financial abuse. We see divorce as a social justice issue along with the other matters that we handle. On the immigration front, we focus explicitly on immigration remedies that are available for victims of partner violence. That's the one area of our practice where all of our clients have experienced partner violence. For those cases, you absolutely need an attorney. The filings are really complex. They, unfortunately, last for years. 

One of our huge policy pillars is to try to get work authorization for immigrants as quickly as possible, because we know that people are in this country and they need to work and they need to support their families, and the federal government can sometimes take years before they decide whether or not they're going to give status to this individual. Without legal work authorization, they're really stuck between a rock and a hard place. 

And Her Justice also does policy and advocacy work?

Yeah, so we do a whole menu of things. We officially launched a policy department within the organization, and that's where we can match the lived experience of our clients with the policy knowledge that our team has and come out with recommendations about policy change that addresses the systemic issues that we see coming up again and again for our thousands of clients. We don't just make recommendations. We also advocate. We've been involved in proposing legislation. We work very actively with some of our elected officials to recommend what legislation might solve the problem.

Another piece is that we actually create data where there is no data through our original policy research reports. We believe in making policy recommendations that are feasible and that address the problem we’ve identified. That means we’re often looking for data from the court system to really understand what’s going on there. But the courts do not share an enormous amount of data. We believe in making policy recommendations that are feasible and that actually address the problem identified because we work in the court system. The courts do not share an enormous amount of data. Our first original policy report was based on findings from a child support court-watching initiative we created. Eighty-nine trained volunteers observed 797 child support case appearances in New York Family Courts. What’s really important about that is any data that didn't exist before, it makes the recommendations more credible because we've done our own research, and that policy report then was available for us to use when we talk to elected officials and to the court system. And through all of that work, we've ultimately come up with some proposed legislation that hasn't passed yet, but it's moving relatively quickly.

So Her Justice is essentially practicing law in different areas of expertise and then taking the lived experiences of their clients, creating policy recommendations, trying to influence legislation and also collecting data – that's a lot!

The pro bono model, in a way, makes this more feasible for us. We do see thousands and thousands of clients, but the direct representation is being handled by the volunteer lawyers, and that gives us a little bit more bandwidth to pull back and look for those systemic trends. It's been really exciting to build out the policy team. That was when I was hired. It was one of the things that the board wanted to see happen. So I'm really proud that that's taken place, and it's exciting to see that our team is getting recognized for the expertise that they have and starting to really be seen as a thought leader in this space.

What’s something you’re going to miss working at Her Justice?

I'm going to miss the people. I'm so incredibly proud of our team and the fact that they're so dedicated to their work. Just recognizing that we've all gone through COVID together, which obviously lands heavily on people like our clients – folks living in poverty trying to raise kids – but it also lands so heavily on staff of organizations like Her Justice and all the other social services and legal services organizations, because when our clients are struggling and when we can't help them as much as we want to, it's really painful, and the family court really wobbled significantly during COVID. They were basically not open for certain kinds of cases for almost a year and a half, and our team pushed through that, and we've come out stronger on the other side, and the organization is really strong in terms of staffing and finances. I'm always just really inspired by the dedication of the team and the creative strategies that they come up with by doing their work.

What’s something you’re really proud of having done at Her Justice?

I'm really proud of the policy work. I've been in government in the past, and so I've done policy before professionally, but it's really powerful when the policy comes out of the direct service, because you're being honest to the needs of the client. It's very easy when you're in government – as someone who's been there – it's very easy to get distance from the folks you're actually trying to help if you haven't been in the work for a while. It's hard to change your mindset from direct service to policy, but I'm really proud that it’s grown so quickly and so strongly and that this is really seen as a thought partner to electeds and other policymakers.

What’s next for you? What are you looking forward to?

I’m looking forward to taking a breath. Those of us who become executive directors are very honored and privileged to lead these great organizations, but it's also a lot. It's kind of all-consuming, and I’m excited to see where the team goes under their new leadership. I don't have a specific job. I felt like 10 years was a solid tenure for a not-for-profit, and I felt like I had one more professional chapter in me. My real passion has always been gender justice and civil law and how we can use the civil legal system to address those issues. 

What I'm really hoping to do is focus on divorce reform. Divorce is an under-recognized social justice issue. We have felt that marriage is the bedrock of society, and we need it to have a good community. But I feel really strongly that what families look like today is very different from what families (looked) like when our rules and policies were drafted, and we need to rethink what that looks like. And in combination with that, we have to rethink what divorce looks like, because a lot of the harms of divorce that we talk about are actually harms created by the system that we invented. We need to reinvent that system. I do see that as a gender justice issue and an economic justice issue for women like our clients. 

I will say that since our founding, representation and divorce has been the number one help that clients of ours have asked for. That was true when we were founded, and that's true today. That's an area to address. I don't know how yet, but that's the area that, of the many soap boxes I have, that's the one I'd like to stand on going forward.