Washington Lawyer - November/December 2024 - 15

FEATURE
Talk about your journey to this new position.
I've had a rather nontraditional path. When I moved to D.C. in 2002, I had
been working as an attorney up in New England. I was a prosecutor in
Massachusetts. I also worked at a big firm doing mass tort product liability
litigation for plaintiffs. That was still a focus on sort of helping the little
guy against the big guy.
Then, I came down [to D.C.] and found out that there were some women
who were organizing this new project called the DC Volunteer Lawyers
Project. That was in 2008. So, I said, " Hey, I would love to help out. " I ended
up being the organization's first executive director.
[DCVLP] helps people in family law cases who do not have a lawyer, and
it recruits, supervises, and mentors pro bono attorneys. The idea for that
organization was to address some of the problems that we had seen as
practitioners doing pro bono work, where [there was a] fear of going to
court if that was not your area of expertise, [in] cases that are so critical to
that individual. We set up the project as something that mirrors a law
school legal clinic. I was doing that from 2008 to 2014. I also managed
their domestic violence project.
After that, I went into policy work and was a policy attorney at the
DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence for two years. That [was] where
I learned about systems change, working on that kind of thing, collaborating
with many different stakeholders and trying to accomplish change
or advocate for funding for domestic violence services in the District.
[Then] I went over to Ayuda, which serves low-income immigrants, and
I was the associate director for their domestic violence and family law
program. While I was there, we expanded
the program from D.C. into
Maryland. I did that for four years, and
then I came to the D.C. Courts [in 2021],
managing the Family Court Self-Help
Center.
Afterward I worked in the Clerk of the
Court's office doing operations management.
That gave me a good view of
how [Superior] Court works and all the
divisions, which I think is critical to this
position, since part of the goal is to
break down barriers and silos within
the court. And then in June, I became
the first director of the Access to Justice
Unit.
What is the function of the new
Access to Justice Unit?
[It] is really a signal of the courts' commitment
to expanding access to justice
... The unit is more of an administrative
function, where we are coordinating
different initiatives at the court. It's
those specific initiatives that are going
to interface one-on-one with a pro se
litigant. For example, if someone has a
family case - custody, divorce, child
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024 * WASHINGTON LAWYER 15
support - they can go to the Family Court Self-Help Center. They can
meet with someone called a facilitator, who is a trained paralegal under
the supervision of an attorney. That person can explain the law, the
court's procedures, and help them fill out the court forms. They can also
do that in probate cases, and that is another area where we have a high
rate of unrepresented litigants. [For those individuals], we have the Probate
Self-Help Center.
If [the pro se litigant] is in our Landlord & Tenant Branch, Small Claims
Court, or Probate [Division], we have the court navigators. Those are
trained court staff who will greet people when they come in, ask them
why they are there, and then direct them to the correct office. They will
answer questions about [having] all the right forms. " How do I go into
the courtroom? How do I let the judge know I am here? " It's the procedural
and physical navigation stuff.
For pro se litigants, and even for attorneys, how will all these
services come together to make justice more accessible?
Our court navigators, our pro bono manager, and our ADA coordinator
are all within the unit. The pro bono coordinator does not really provide
direct services to individuals because you can imagine that would be
tens of thousands of people who could reach out to her. But she is trying
to increase the number of pro bono attorneys and [volunteer] opportunities
here at the court. She does things like give courthouse tours to law
firm attorneys to encourage them to volunteer their time, to show them
that it is not really that scary and that there are resources here to help
them.
continued on page 20
Washington Lawyer - November/December 2024

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