AVLF Welcomes Jeff Nix as Newest Board Member

Jeff Nix, one of the newest members of the AVLF Board of Directors, is partner at Troutman Sanders LLP. For the past twenty-five years, he has focused his practice entirely upon construction law representing stakeholders involved in every facet of the construction industry. Prior to attending law school at Boston University, he worked as construction engineer. This background allows him to offer a fresh, unique and pragmatic approach to helping clients solve problems ranging from negotiating simple agreements to resolving large complex multiparty disputes.

Jeff is an ardent supporter of the firm’s pro bono initiatives. He started the firm’s Wills Project, which provides wills and other estate documents for individuals battling cancer, service members and their spouses (including members of the military, police, fire, and EMTs), and elderly and low-income Atlantans. He also routinely represents tenants through AVLF’s Eviction Defense Program. Jeff has been recognized for his outstanding pro bono service by both the State Bar of Georgia as recipient of the H. Sol Clark Award and by the Atlanta Bar Association as recipient of their Service Award. An alumnus of the 2003 Class of Leadership Atlanta, Jeff has also assisted in the building of more than 50 Habitat for Humanity homes over the last 30 years.

The New Faces at AVLF

The New Faces at AVLF

Carey Kersten

Carey Kersten is AVLF's new Development Director. A native of South Texas, Carey has lived in Atlanta for nearly five years and was most recently a part of the technical proposal writing team at AirWatch. Prior to that, Carey worked at Sutherland in the client and professional development department.

Carey holds Bachelor's and Master's of Arts degrees in English and Technical Communications from Texas State University, and she has over ten years of business development and marketing experience. She has run eight marathons (but keeps promising to quit) and loves to read and travel.

 

Cole Thaler 

Cole Thaler joins AVLF as our Director of Housing and Consumer Programs. Previously, he worked as a supervising staff attorney with Georgia Legal Services Program, where he represented low-income rural Georgians in cases including unemployment benefit appeals, protective orders, eviction defense, and food stamp appeals. In 2011, he won an injunction in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia requiring a public housing authority to lower the rent it was charging his disabled client.  

 

From 2005 through 2009, Cole worked for Lambda Legal, a national legal organization that works on behalf of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, and those with HIV. As Lambda Legal's transgender rights attorney, Cole litigated a number of federal court cases around the country that advanced the rights of transgender people, including prisoners and youth.  In 2009, he received a Stonewall Bar Association award recognizing Outstanding Service to the Stonewall Community.

 

Cole co-authored "Serving All Communities: Providing Respectful and Competent Services to Low-Income LGBT Clients," published in the January-February 2014 issue of Clearinghouse Review:  Journal of Poverty Law and Policy. He was the lead author of "A Seat at the Table: Justice for SNAP Recipients Accused of Fraud in Georgia," published in Clearinghouse Review's September-October 2012 issue.

Cole received his bachelor's degree magna cum laude from Williams College and his J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law.  

AVLF Announces Michael Lucas as New Deputy Director

AVLF is proud to announce that Michael Lucas has become the new Deputy Director of the Foundation.

Michael Lucas, AVLF Deputy Director

Michael has worked with AVLF for four years, and two years ago became the Director of Housing and Consumer Programs. In that span, Michael has done especially remarkable work with AVLF’s signature program, the Saturday Lawyer Program: under Michael’s cogent and enthusiastic direction, the Saturday Lawyer Program is the strongest it has ever been in the 40 plus years of its operation. In 2013 alone, more than 250 volunteer lawyers counseled more than 350 clients on a Saturday morning on housing, wage claim and debt defense matters and dispensed more than $250,000 of free legal services to low-income members of our community on Saturday alone – saying nothing of the significantly greater amount of work done on the cases after Saturday when those attorneys accepted cases. 

Michael started the AVLF Dollars for Judgments Program by encouraging the State Bar Creditor’s Rights Committee to join AVLF in an effort to collect judgments secured by or on behalf of AVLF clients; he was also instrumental in the founding of the new LICAP (Low Income Consumer Advocacy Program) Program that will send experienced practitioners into Bankruptcy Court in adversary proceedings on behalf of AVLF clients who are judgment creditors. Michael also directs the AVLF/Atlanta Bar Association Estate Planning & Probate Section Probate Information Center, and related AVLF substantive pro bono programs.

Moreover, Michael is a delightful person with whom to work, has a wicked sense of humor and is widely well respected in the Atlanta legal community. With his energetic and passionate approach to every interaction (sustained, somehow, through the sleep-deprivation period brought on by the birth of his and wife Lauren’s two daughters, Maya and Zoe), Michael continues to present the very best of the Foundation, and as a Staff we look forward to Michael’s leadership. Our congratulations to our wonderful colleague and new Deputy Director, Michael Lucas!

Shedding my Blinders: How Guard ad Litem Work Opened My Eyes

By: Dara Paulsen, ESQ.  

Although the 'best interests of the child' is always at the forefront of our domestic laws, I never truly considered how working directly with children in family law can influence my own practice, expectations, and preconceptions until I began taking volunteer Guardian ad Litem cases with AVLF. As a practicing family law attorney, I have the opportunity to work with clients with children in divorce and adoption cases. But as a GAL, I work with the child during the entire case, and the blinders really come off. Acting as the "eyes and ears" of the Court, you really get to know the child and have the opportunity to play detective-investigating the child's wants, needs, and interests (which are far from the same thing). This isn't my first rodeo working cases with children. Many moons ago, before law school, I worked in Brockton, Massachusetts, as an Education Advocate (EA) attempting to obtain often expensive services for special needs children from public schools which didn't want to cough up the dough. But GAL cases are a whole different experience. Which brings me to the first thing I learned...

1) Parties’ credibility can be questionable. Including kids. Who hasn’t had an adult client who portrayed the facts in their most, ahem, favorable light? While working with kids as an EA, when I questioned children, I never had a reason to doubt them. It was simple—either they received their speech therapy that day or they didn’t. I was essentially an education cheerleader who sang the praises of my clients’ children. However, I realized through one particular GAL case, the answers I now seek are more complicated. Further, the ways children choose to interact with you are more complex. A pre-teen client appeared perfect on the outside—church-goer who received good grades and was a model for the other children in her home. However, as my investigation proceeded, and I met with teachers, and with the child herself I learned that my pre-teen client would frequently lie and was in desperate need of counseling. She would lie about anything and everything. At home she was the perfect angel: her Father oblivious to the bullying, stealing, and consistent lies at school. However, during my initial interview with the pre-teen, I had no idea. I began to that understand when you are examining a child’s credibility, discretion and judgment become a trickier business. I’ve never been in a position that demanded my examination of a child’s credibility far beyond the usual ‘coaching’ parents perform in custody cases. It threw me for a loop and challenged my expectations of the work itself. Which brings me to the second thing I learned…

2) Playing Detective is fun. At the end of your GAL investigation, you humbly submit your written Recommendation to the Judge, which explains your reasoning behind your custody recommendation. The Judge then gets to do whatever she wants with that information and make her final decision. While collecting this information, you get to evaluate all the facts you discovered while playing detective during your investigation and make a specific recommendation based on those facts. You get to do the digging yourself which is normally reserved for hiring out a specialist, like a forensic accountant in a divorce case. For the first time in my practice, I feel like I have a real impact on a child’s life based on my investigating and decision-making alone. And that is a pretty powerful and liberating, but weighty, charge. By doing your best to be straightforward, impartial, and transparent about your investigation and conclusions, you really better enable the Judge to make her best informed decision. To quote Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.



To conclude, I practice family law and have learned a multitude of new things about myself and my own practice of law through the challenges of Guardian ad Litem work. I can’t imagine how exhilarating it could be coming from a different line of practice, like estate planning or criminal law. You just may come out realizing that you, too, have the opportunity to take your practice blinders off.

We've launched our new website!

By: Martin Ellin, Executive Director, AVLF

The Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation is proud to launch our new web site- http://www.avlf.org/! We hope that our site will allow you to easily become familiar with the Foundation’s many pro bono programs, with the extraordinary AVLF Staff members who direct those programs, with the opportunities that are available for volunteer lawyers to become involved in meaningful pro bono legal work, and more. We want our site to be of real value to everyone that visits.

This enhanced web site is but one part of the social action adventure upon which we have embarked. We hope that you will see our Facebook Cause page, and that you will ‘friend” or at least “like” us so that AVLF’s posts will show up on your newsfeed. We will be adding video to this site, and invite you now to follow us on Twitter, as well as this Blogspot page. Our new “Marty’s Blog” page will post entries from the breadth of the AVLF Staff- we hope you read us regularly.

In the near future, we will add a contributor page to our website which lists all of our current grantors, a page that archives and makes available our previous newsletter issues, a community resource page for clients and the general public and a resource page for victims of DV. Finally, to assist our many generous financial donors, our site will be contoured to reveal monthly and planned giving options and a very special link so that Winetasting 2010 donors will be able to pay for sponsorship and tickets to our November 4th party with the click of a button.

Why add these features, and why now? The first answer is so that I may earn my children’s respect: I am tired of them leaning on me to honor a promise I made some time ago to go beyond personal visits (which all the AVLF Staff will continue to make), hand written letters (which I still intend to write frequently) and phone calls from a land line as a means of keeping in touch with the people the Foundation serves. But even more importantly, so that we may interact with our clients, public interest partners, volunteer attorneys, Court personnel and friends more quickly and more fully, and because the demand for our service is dramatic and increases so quickly that finding avenues to reach out, and to hear back, could not wait.

The Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation receives close to 30,000 telephone calls and 5,000 visits to its website each year. We give advice and direction to thousands, and are able to arrange for as many as 4,000-5,000 low-income citizens of Atlanta to receive the direct assistance of an attorney or paralegal to whom they otherwise could not have had access. We coordinate the provision of that free legal service through private attorneys who need the Foundation’s help to learn of volunteer opportunities, and the Staff’s assistance to supervise them as they offer a variety of legal support. We support each of the Courts of Fulton County- our volunteer programs work with the Superior, State, magistrate, Probate and Juvenile Courts of the County- and increasingly partner with those courts as they serve to promote access to justice for the unrepresented.

There are few places in our community that we and our volunteer attorneys do not touch. And now, our ability to touch those places electronically gives us a greater reach than ever before. Join us as we do everything that we can- with your help- to promote equal access to justice for the poor, the marginalized and the voiceless of our community. Enjoy!