Access to Justice Fellows Program Enters Eighth Year

Members of the Massachusetts nonprofit and legal communities gathered at the John Adams Courthouse on October 22 to join Lawyers Clearinghouse and the Massachusetts Access to Justice Commission in kicking off the eighth year of the Clearinghouse’s Access to Justice Fellows Program.

Over 130 senior attorneys and retired judges have signed up to volunteer with the program since its inception in 2012, providing thousands of hours of pro bono service to over 75 different partner organizations. This year’s class of 24 Fellows—the largest class to date—is engaged in a wide range of projects, using their decades of legal expertise to assist with matters related to immigration, veterans issues, employment law, environmental conservation, nonprofit governance, the mentoring of recent law school graduates, and more.

Following opening remarks from Fellows Program Director Susan Gedrick, attendees heard from Rosalyn Garbose Nasdor, Director and Pro Bono Counsel at Ropes & Gray and a member of the Clearinghouse Board.

Roz welcomed the newest class of Fellows on behalf of the Clearinghouse. She remarked that Fellows have contributed nearly 100,000 pro bono hours over the past 8 years, with 80% of Fellows from previous classes choosing to continue their work after their Fellowship year is over.

A senior partner from Ropes & Gray has participated in the Fellows Program every year since the program’s inception. Roz explained how much this means for these attorneys, who are able to focus on such meaningful pursuits, and for the firm’s younger associates, who gain hands-on experience and mentorship by assisting them.

Roz then introduced the evening’s Fellow speaker, Paula Finley Mangum. A solo family law practitioner, Paula spent her 2018-2019 Fellowship year volunteering as a mentor with the Women’s Bar Foundation’s (WBF) Family Law Project, a program that recruits and trains attorneys to take pro bono cases to assist low income survivors of domestic violence.

As a Fellow, Paula assisted attorneys with client intake, accompanied them to court, and created training sessions on special topics, all with the goal of helping volunteers become comfortable and confident taking on such sensitive client-facing work going forward. Though her formal Fellowship year has ended, Paula will continue to work with the WBF for another year.

Over the course of a year she called “motivational and inspiring,” Paula says she also found value in the connections and the collaborations made possible through the Fellows Program, especially through the program’s monthly lunch meetings.

“It was amazing to hear every month powerful, moving stories about the work everyone was doing. Sometimes, often, it was heartbreaking. It became clear to me that access to justice was also about opposing injustice,” she said.

Paula closed her remarks with lyrics from her favorite musician, Bruce Springsteen: “Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse/Means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

It was a fitting introduction to the final speaker of the evening, Hon. Ralph D. Gants, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court and Co-chair of the Massachusetts Access to Justice Commission. Justice Gants has long supported access to justice initiatives in Massachusetts and helped champion the Fellows Program when it was first conceived by co-founders Susan Finegan and Martha Koster, both attorneys at Mintz.

Justice Gants spoke about how the program was created to meet the pressing need for additional legal services in a state, and country, where many individuals do not have equal access to legal representation. At the time of the program’s founding, there was a largely-untapped demographic of senior attorneys who were winding down and ending their practices, but who still had so much experience and wisdom to offer.

Today, the Fellows Program model has been replicated by a number of other states, and there is growing recognition of the value of engaging retired and senior professionals in volunteer programs.

Justice Gants commended Fellows past and present for their collective efforts over the past eight years, before reiterating Paula’s message about the significance of the program.

“One of the great blessings of the Fellows Program is that not only does it yield an enormous amount of work and enormous amount of help to so many organizations and so many people,” he said. “But it also provides such a welcoming and enlightening community for people to get together to share what they do, and begin to recognize just how much they have to offer and just how much there is to do.”