Marvin Mills graduated from Cardozo Law in 2009 and is now an Associate at Weil, Gotshal, Manges in New York. He discusses his Cardozo experience and how the clinical connections he made gave him the courtroom experience he uses on the job.
Alissa Makower graduated from Cardozo in 1992.
Entertainment law and corporate law at Cardozo lead to her position at CBS as VP Senior Counsel.
January 23, 2013 - Cardozo’s Sixth Annual Alumni Association Dinner took place in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Tuesday, January 15. Over 500 alumni, board members, parents, students and friends jam-packed the ballroom to honor alumni of the year Jonathan S. Henes ’96 and Randi Weingarten ’83.
By awarding remarkable alumni while raising funds for Cardozo scholarships, the dinner is both a celebration of past achievement and a springboard for future accomplishments. Two scholarship winners kicked off the event, Jerry Goldfeder ’79, a graduate of Cardozo’s first class and now a successful election lawyer, and Jil Simon ’13, who said that coming to Cardozo after six years in the workplace was a scary career move, but one made easier by coming to it “debt free.”
Before introducing honorees Henes and Weingarten, Dean Matthew Diller acknowledged the recent death of former Cardozo dean and professor Frank Macchiarola, saying “Frank helped build the idea of community deeply into the DNA of Cardozo, that a law school can be rigorous and excellent, but at the same time have a warm, supportive community.” Henes began his speech by referencing “Dean Mack’s” profound influence on him, and said, “He taught us the importance of integrity, community, and standing up for what you believe in.” A partner at the 1,500-plus attorney firm of Kirkland & Ellis LLP in New York, Henes is one of the nation’s top restructuring lawyers who also takes his civic duties seriously. He is a board member of the Michael Lynch Memorial Foundation, which offers educational grants for children of firefighters and victims of 9/11 and other disasters. At Cardozo Henes adjuncts and is chairman of the advisory committee for the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Center on Corporate Governance.
From left, Jonathan S. Henes, Randi Weingarten, and Dean Matthew Diller
Randi Weingarten, whom Diller called, “a brilliant and tireless advocate for teachers,” is president of the American Federation of Teachers, a 1.5 million member national union. For two decades Weingarten has been an outspoken policy expert and labor lawyer, launching major efforts in educational reform and innovation. Prior to heading the AFT in 2010, Weingarten ran the United Federation of Teachers for 12 years. Like Henes, her involvement with Cardozo runs deep; she is a member of the Cardozo Public Service Advisory Council and has been a keynote speaker at the annual Public Service Law Advocacy Week (P*LAW), as well as at student orientation. She has also been an adjunct professor at the school.
“Gratitude” was the thread running through both Henes and Weingarten’s speeches. Henes, whom many would be surprised to learn spent months after college “lying on the couch and watching TV,” called Cardozo a “transformative experience,” and expressed his gratitude to his father (who turned off the TV and pushed him off the couch); Dean Mack; the professors who “pushed me and challenged me;” and his fellow students, one of whom became his wife and mother of their four children. “Pam taught me that there is a correlation between hard, focused work and success,” Henes said.
Randi Weingarten spoke in the context of recent events—the devastation wreaked by Superstorm Sandy and the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, both of which intimately affected her union members. “When you see what happened at Sandy Hook as I have now seen…You feel a sense of gratitude for that which we have and that which we are at Cardozo.”
After acknowledging her partner Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum and dear friends and mentors, Weingarten said she drew inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday coincided with the alumni dinner. “I always believed the arc of history, as Martin Luther King said, bends toward justice. Cardozo helped me believe in the art of the possible, not just in the rhetorical, but that we could use the law to make a difference in other people’s lives.”
As the speeches ended and alumni schmoozed with each other over dessert and coffee or headed out into the icy evening, one imagines they would heed Dean Diller’s exhortation: “You are our ambassadors and we need you to tell our stories out in the world…We need you to look out for our students and graduates.”
Bennie Starks with Cardozo Law alumni Lauren Kaeseberg who helped win his release. Photo: Ingrid Bonne
January 7, 2013 - Innocence Project client Bennie Starks walked out of a Lake County, Illinois, courthouse today a free man, ending a 25-year struggle to clear his name, including multiple rounds of DNA testing and three separate appeals. Newly elected State’s Attorney Mike Nerheim agreed to dismiss the remaining charges pending against Starks from a 1986 rape and battery. Though DNA testing from as early as 2000 excluded
Starks as the perpetrator, former Lake County prosecutors repeatedly refused to acknowledge the results, coming up with improbable theories to deny Starks’ innocence.
Starks’ exoneration comes one month after a court date last month was rescheduled due to a legal technicality. The Chicago Tribune reports:
The Innocence Project first agreed to represent Starks in 1996. Lauren Kaeseberg, a criminal defense attorney in the Chicago who worked on Starks’ case since she was a Cardozo law clinic student at the Innocence Project in 2004, joined Starks in court today.
Read the full Chicago Tribune article and watch a video of Starks immediately after the hearing.
Read the press release.
Read more about the case here and here.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Sara Eisenberg '05 (third from right) is working on San Francisco city attorney Dennis J. Herrera's (center) team of lawyers challenging California's ban on same sex marriage.
Ban on Gay Marriage Led Lawyers to Shift Role
By Adam Liptak
March 19, 2013 New York Times - SAN FRANCISCO — Nine years ago, city officials here sued to strike down a state ban on same-sex marriage. It was the first government challenge to such a law, and it set in motion a legal chain reaction that gave rise to a momentous Supreme Court case to be argued next Tuesday.
The move was also the beginning of a kind of civil disobedience movement by government officials. Around the nation, executive branch officials started to abandon their traditional role, which is to enforce the laws and defend them when they are challenged in court.
“We’re defense lawyers,” Dennis J. Herrera, the city attorney, said in his office in San Francisco’s palatial City Hall. “We defend laws that are on the books. And we got a lot of heat at the time for stepping out of that traditional defense role.”
In the years that followed, Mr. Herrera’s office — which now includes five former Supreme Court law clerks, more than some major law firms — has been involved in every phase of the legal war over same-sex marriage in California.
San Francisco’s strategy eventually spread to the State of California and the federal government. Instead of defending state and federal laws defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, President Obama and Gov. Jerry Brown of California urged courts to hold them unconstitutional.
That has complicated the Supreme Court’s job in challenges to Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriages, and to the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Because the plaintiffs and defendants in both cases agree that the laws under review are unconstitutional, there is a question about whether the justices have anything to decide. Indeed, when the justices in December agreed to hear the two same-sex marriage cases, they went out of their way to ask for briefs on whether the court has the power to decide them in light of the actions of government officials.
John C. Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and the chairman of the National Association for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage, said government officials in the two cases had demonstrated “a cavalier attitude toward their duties to enforce the law.” He was particularly critical of Mr. Herrera’s suit, which followed a brief period in 2004 during which Gavin Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco and now the state’s lieutenant governor, instructed city officials here to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. “It was exhibiting lawlessness,” Professor Eastman said.
Mr. Herrera said it was sometimes necessary for government lawyers to attack the laws they are charged with defending. “When a disfavored minority is being targeted,” he said, “it’s up to a public law office to stop it.”
San Francisco’s role in the Proposition 8 case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144, has been overshadowed by that of Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, the prominent lawyers who in 2009 filed the suit challenging the initiative. The city promptly intervened, and the two teams of lawyers worked closely together at the trial.
Mr. Olson, a former United States solicitor general who has argued some 60 cases in the Supreme Court, said the quality of the work from Mr. Herrera’s office was exceptional.
“Their briefs have been superb,” Mr. Olson said.
That is probably partly a testament to the credentials of the team Mr. Herrera assembled. Even in a difficult job market for lawyers, Supreme Court clerks command enormous payments for just joining private firms.
“Bonuses my year were $225,000,” recalled Christine Van Aken, who in 2004 and 2005 clerked for Justice David H. Souter. (Signing bonuses are now in the neighborhood of $280,000.)
Vince Chhabria, who clerked for Justice Stephen G. Breyer and joined the city attorney’s office after a stint at a firm, questioned Ms. Van Aken’s judgment. “I remember telling you,” he told her, “that you were insane to give up a quarter-million-dollar bonus.”
There are two other clerks from the chambers of the more liberal justices — Aileen McGrath worked for Justice Breyer, and Sara Eisenberg for Justice John Paul Stevens — along with one surprise.
Leila Mongan served as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, who is by some measures the most conservative justice on the current court. Ms. Mongan said she had joined the office because “it’s a place to do public law in an ambitious office that takes on important cases.”
Therese Stewart, Mr. Herrera’s chief deputy, said Ms. Mongan was an important sounding board. “She’s our outside perspective,” Ms. Stewart said.
Mr. Herrera said he was not surprised by the caliber of the talent he has been able to attract.
“Why do they go to law school in the first place?” he asked. “They want to be involved in cases of some moment.”
Besides, he added, they do not starve. “The top I can pay is about two hundred grand,” he said. That is comparable to the pay of junior associates at big law firms, although it comes without the signing bonus. The San Francisco lawyers have made distinctive contributions to the case. They were largely responsible for the argument that prevailed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit here, one that struck down Proposition 8 but stopped short of endorsing logic that would require same-sex marriage in all 50 states. (The ruling has been stayed while the Supreme Court considers the case.)
In its brief in the Supreme Court, the city repeated those arguments, telling the justices that some features of the state’s experience could allow for a ruling short of establishing a nationwide right.
Civil unions in California, as in seven other states, give same-sex couples all of the legal benefits and burdens of marriage while withholding only the name. California is, moreover, the only state to have withdrawn the right to marry after it had been established by its Supreme Court.
Those factors, the city’s brief says, could allow the United States Supreme Court to strike down the state’s ban. The brief also argued that the failure of California officials to appeal deprived the appeals court and the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over the case. The brief for the proponents of Proposition 8 said that they were entitled to represent the interests of the state and that the justices should not allow executive branch officials to veto the wishes of the electorate.
The brief filed by Mr. Olson and Mr. Boies is more ambitious than the city’s. It calls for the application of “heightened scrutiny,” requiring a showing that Proposition 8 is “substantially related to an important government objective.” Victory on that point could put all same-sex marriage bans at risk.
The brief makes a comparatively abbreviated argument about the proponents’ standing, another indication that Mr. Olson and Mr. Boies want to win big.
Ms. Stewart, one of the city’s lawyers, said the two briefs were complementary and that the two teams “could not be more supportive” of each other.
“Our view, perhaps because we are more cautious,” she said, “was to give the Ninth Circuit and the high court the whole panoply of options.”
By Tania Karas
May 3, 2013 New York Law Journal - William Ernest Kuenzel wore white to his wedding. That was the color of his prison-issued jumpsuit at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., where he has been on death row for almost 25 years.
Standing next to Kuenzel at his Feb. 22, 2008, marriage to Jane Campbell, a British social worker with whom he had been corresponding, was his best man, David Kochman, a New York attorney who has represented Kuenzel pro bono since 2003.
Kochman had to petition prison officials to allow the ceremony. And since Kuenzel's bride was not a U.S. citizen, Kochman had to convince immigration officials that she was marrying for love, not just to obtain a visa.
On the day of the wedding, prison guards sliced the cake into pieces to screen for contraband before it could be brought into the group visitation room.
In the decades since Kuenzel's 1988 conviction for murder, Alabama has changed its preferred method of execution from the electric chair to lethal injection. The state has executed 52 people in that time.
Meanwhile, Kuenzel has gone back to court time after time in a so-far unsuccessful campaign to prove his innocence. The state has been just as adamant in urging that he is guilty and should die.
Now, Kochman, a 33-year-old commercial litigation associate at Reed Smith, has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in what may be his best—and only—chance to hold off the execution of Kuenzel, a 51-year-old man with an eighth-grade education who Kochman says has become his close friend.
In January, Kochman, along with co-counsel Jeffrey Glen and Rene Hertzog of Anderson, Kill & Olick, filed a petition to make Kuenzel's case one of the fewer than 1 percent of applications for certiorari the high court accepts each year.
Their petition has the backing of former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, 93, who worked on an amicus brief in support of Kuenzel that was filed in March. (See sidebar.)
"I've read all of the records and I think that he's innocent," Morgenthau said in an interview. "Not only as a matter of law, but I think he's innocent as a matter of fact."
The state of Alabama filed its brief in opposition on April 24, and the Supreme Court could render a decision on granting cert as early as this month.
Kochman says he has been warned about the perils of getting too close to a client, especially one whose time may be running out.
"In that regard, I have failed miserably," he said. "I'm all in, and will be devastated if we lose."
The lawyer said he has been deeply impressed by his client's lack of anger and his attempts to build a new life from an 8-by-5-foot cell where he is alone 23 hours a day.
"When I was first getting started, I was really reluctant to get as involved as I am," Kochman said. "And, you know, he has some warts on him. But Bill is a selfless, amazing individual."
"If I could have anybody else on my case, anywhere, I would want David," Kuenzel said in an interview from Holman. "I know this is my last rodeo. I'm not even worried about me anymore. I want my freedom, I want to clear my name. But I'm more concerned about the people who've worked on it all these years than I am about myself, because David has done everything he can."
Three times, Kuenzel's lawyers have asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta for a new trial, where they hope to introduce new evidence and address constitutional violations in the original trial. Three times, they have been rebuffed, largely due to a procedural default that occurred in 1993 when a previous pro bono attorney filed a relief petition that turned out to be six months late.
Now only one narrow gateway remains to circumvent the default and avert what Kuenzel's lawyers are certain would be a miscarriage of justice: a legal principle called "actual innocence" as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court in Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S. 298 (1995).
"This appeal is our best and last shot to get Billy released," Kochman said.
Kuenzel has asked his attorney not to file useless motions that will prolong his life with no chance of getting him out of prison.
"He doesn't want to die, but he doesn't want to live any more on death row being innocent," Kochman said.
"I'm optimistic that we're going to win," Kuenzel explained. "And I do believe that if anybody can make it happen it's going to be David. I don't say, 'if we win'; I only say, 'when we win.''When we win, when I'm free, when this is all said and done.'"
Linda Jean Offord was a mother of three working the night shift at Joe Bob's Crystal Palace convenience store in Sylacauga, Ala., on Nov. 9, 1987, when she was shot and killed in a robbery attempt.
Kuenzel and his roommate Harvey Venn were charged with first-degree murder. Authorities said Kuenzel was the shooter.
Venn told authorities he was in the parking lot but never entered the store while Kuenzel was inside. Kuenzel claimed he had been asleep at his home 25 miles from the store when the crime occurred.
There was little physical evidence linking anyone to the crime, save for a pair of blood-spattered pants—Venn's—though he testified at trial the blood came from a squirrel. Prosecutors told jurors the blood was Offord's.
Twice, prosecutors offered Kuenzel, 25 at the time, eight to 10 years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea. He refused.
A jury found him guilty, and a judge sentenced him to death. Venn accepted the same deal, testified against Kuenzel at trial and was released in 1997.
Though Kuenzel at times has "had doubts" about not taking the plea deal, he said he doesn't regret it because "I could not bring the shame of being a convicted murderer on my family."
The deck was stacked against Kuenzel from the beginning, Kochman said. At the time of the 1988 trial, the fee for counsel representing indigent defendants in Alabama was capped at $1,000, even if the defense attorney spent hundreds of hours preparing for trials.
Kuenzel's court-appointed trial lawyer, William Willingham, spent fewer than 50 hours on witness interviews and discovery. Moreover, Kuenzel's appellate lawyers claimed the prosecution did not turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense.
Willingham admitted in a 2002 affidavit that he was ineffective. He was "lulled into complacency," he wrote, because he thought the state "had an extremely weak case against Mr. Kuenzel." The district attorney told Willingham he thought his own case was "problematic," he said.
Robert Rumsey, then district attorney of Talladega County, where the murder took place, was a skilled trial lawyer known for instilling fear in his opponents, according to Stephen Bright, president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based law office that represents prisoners facing the death penalty.
"He was this big, tall, great man who just dominated the courtroom," Bright said. "There were judges who were cowered by him. And when you take a skillful prosecutor against a very weak, unresourced defense lawyer, it was very unfair in terms of reaching justice."
With 193 prisoners on death row, Alabama has the fifth-largest death row in the nation and the highest capital conviction rate per capita, according to the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative. Rumsey sent a dozen people to death row, including Kuenzel, in his 20 years serving as district attorney from 1978 to 1998.
Kuenzel's first pro bono attorney, David "Duff" Dretzin, a New York labor and employment lawyer, took up the case in 1993. He'd been searching for meaningful public service work when he was referred to Kuenzel by Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and a clinical law professor at New York University. Despite never having worked on a capital case before, Dretzin would spend the next 13 years representing Kuenzel.
Weeks after he took over, Dretzin misinterpreted the filing deadline for a post-conviction proceeding. That mistake formed the basis for all future denials for post-conviction review by Alabama state and federal courts.
Kochman was hired as a summer associate in 2003 at Anderson Kill, where Dretzin, a solo practitioner, was renting the office next door to his. Eager to gain experience on a death penalty case, Kochman signed up to help. (Kochman moved to Reed Smith from Anderson Kill in 2008.)
Three years later, in June 2006, they had just filed their second appeal to the Eleventh Circuit when Dretzin, 77, died of injuries from a car accident. Kuenzel's case then fell to Kochman, who was only a second-year associate.
"I remember going outside onto my balcony, maybe a few days after I really started to think about this, and I just let it sink in, like, 'Wow, if this guy dies, it's going to be on my watch,'" Kochman said. "And this huge wave of nausea came over me. And I really questioned it for a minute, whether this is something I was willing to take on, whether I could handle it, and to this day I don't know that I can. But I know someone has to go out and do it."
In 2010, Talladega County prosecutors turned over records showing Venn and other eyewitnesses had initially given authorities starkly different accounts of the crime than they gave at trial. Neither the jurors nor Willingham knew their stories had changed. Jurors also did not hear that Venn possessed a .16-gauge shotgun, the same gauge as the murder weapon, which Dretzin uncovered years after the trial.
"I don't have any proof positive that Bill did not commit this murder," Kochman said. "What I do have is a mountain of evidence indicating that Harvey was involved, and that he was pressured to implicate someone other than himself so that he wouldn't get the death penalty, and that the police suggested his roommate, my client, as that possible person.
"What I see very obviously, what I know for a fact, is that he did not get a fair trial," Kochman added. "All Bill has asked for this entire time is one fair chance."
In January, Kochman met with Venn in an effort to find out what happened in the 2 1/2 days Venn was grilled by authorities. During that questioning, Venn changed his initial statement from one that did not implicate Kuenzel to one that did.
Venn, who is now married with children, refused to cooperate with Kochman. Accompanied by a lawyer, he insisted police told him he'd passed a lie detector test prior to the 1988 trial, though no record of it exists, Kochman said.
"Actual innocence" claims like Kuenzel's place an enormously heavy burden of proof on the petitioner, a burden Kochman argues has been made even harder by erroneous court decisions.
In Schlup, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote that defendants claiming actual innocence "must show it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found petitioner guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."
To do this, a petitioner must "support his allegations of constitutional error with new reliable evidence—whether it be exculpatory scientific evidence, trustworthy eyewitness accounts, or critical physical evidence—that was not presented at trial," the court held.
A three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit unanimously held in August that in Kuenzel's case "some reasonable jurors—weighing what was available at trial and what has since been presented—would have found Petitioner guilty."Kuenzel v. Commissioner, 690 F.3d 1311 (2012).
The state of Alabama, in its brief opposing Kuenzel's petition for cert, echoes that conclusion, saying Kuenzel has not shown that all reasonable jurors, even if they had been shown all the evidence that is available now, would have voted to acquit him.
In fact, the state argues, "a jury reconvened for a trial today could be even more convinced that he committed this murder."
To back up that assertion, it points to an attempt by Kuenzel's mother to suborn perjury years ago by paying his cellmate to confess to the crime. They also say Kuenzel bragged to coworkers about participating in Offord's murder and tried to destroy the shotgun shell used to kill her.
In the face of that evidence, "Kuenzel has not raised the sorts of doubts that give rise to relief under Schlup," Alabama argues.
Kochman calls Kuenzel's alleged admissions "hearsay." He does not deny that Kuenzel's mother tried to strike a deal with another prisoner, but says her conduct was understandable.
"Bottom line: it's not excusable," he said in an interview. "But it's not indicative of guilt. This is what happens when you have a desperate, innocent person who's just been sentenced to death. These unsophisticated, uneducated, yet caring individuals took indefensible actions because the criminal justice system failed them."
Kochman complains in his own petition that the courts that have ruled against Kuenzel have all wrongly applied a "presumption of guilt" to the question of whether his procedural default can be excused, effectively imposing a higher burden than the Supreme Court contemplated in Schlup.
Instead, he argues the courts considering Kuenzel's Schlup claims should have reviewed his case without any presumptions regarding guilt or innocence.
Under the actual innocence standard set by the Supreme Court, "My client is more innocent than Lloyd Schlup," Kochman said in an interview.
The Eleventh Circuit pointed to Footnote 42 of Schlup, which states: "Having been convicted by a jury of a capital offense, Schlup no longer has the benefit of the presumption of innocence. To the contrary, Schlup comes before the habeas court with a strong—and in the vast majority of the cases conclusive—presumption of guilt."
Kochman contends the presumption of guilt should be applied only where the defendant was convicted in a fair, error-free trial. But he says Kuenzel's trial was tainted both by ineffectiveness of counsel and prosecutorial misconduct.
Alabama counters that the adoption of a rule requiring a presumption of innocence "cannot be right… That rule would require the State, having satisfied its constitutional duty to prove the defendant's guilt at trial and to defend that verdict on direct review, to prove it again on habeas."
The Alabama Attorney General's Office declined to comment for this story.
In his day-to-day practice, Kochman represents companies in complex commercial cases in state and federal courts in New York and around the United States. He is also co-pro bono coordinator for the firm's New York office and was appointed to a three-year term on the Second Circuit's Pro Bono Appellate Counsel.
Kochman's interest in death penalty cases extends beyond Kuenzel's. Through his connections with the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Equal Justice Initiative, Reed Smith has taken on six additional Alabama death row clients.
"It makes you remember that the law is not just for large companies," Kochman said of his pro bono work. "It makes things real."
Both Kochman and Kuenzel believe in capital punishment as a theory, they say, because there are some crimes so egregious they should be punished by death— but execution should only come after the justice system fulfills its responsibility to ensure a man has received a fair trial.
Kochman has spent between 400 and 700 hours annually representing Kuenzel in the last decade in addition to his regular workload. Reed Smith and Anderson Kill have spent $10 million in attorney hours and expenses on the case.
If the Supreme Court declines to review Kuenzel's case, seeking clemency may be Kuenzel's last chance. And only one Alabama death row inmate has ever been granted clemency.
"I'm terrified that this is not going to get corrected," Kochman said. "It scares me to my core that the judicial system that I believe in could possibly sentence a man to his death without any review, simply based on a foot fault."
Kochman has traveled to Alabama two dozen times to consult with his client. They talk for 20 minutes on the phone each week, their conversations covering everything from legal strategy to family, politics and religion.
"I've developed a deep relationship with a 51-year-old man in Alabama on death row," Kochman said. "I consider him within my inner circle of friends. I'm his lawyer, first and foremost. But as part of representing Bill, I don't think I could do that to my fullest ability without forming a friendship with him."
Rarely do they discuss what might happen if Kuenzel loses his Supreme Court petition. Though Kuenzel has not asked his attorney to be present if he is put to death, Kochman said he "absolutely" plans to be there.
"We recognize the overwhelming odds," Kochman said. "We believe we have a strong case. So when you take all of that into consideration, at best, we have a 50-50 shot at getting him out. So why focus on the bad? We've made the decision to focus on the positive. We talk about 'When he gets out, when we're having dinner together at my house, or what will he do when he visits New Orleans, his favorite city in the world.' We focus on, 'what [job] will he do? Where will he live? Will he move to England with Jane?' That's what we speak about."
Kuenzel remains hopeful.
"I'm at peace in my fate," Kuenzel said, adding that if the Supreme Court does not take his case, "then it's time to start making preparations. I'm not scared of the actual dying part."
On one recent week, Kochman and Kuenzel spent most of their allotted phone time discussing arguments for the Supreme Court.
An automated voice interrupted to announce there was one minute left on the collect call.
"I love you. Thanks for doing this," Kuenzel said.
"Love you too, Bill," Kochman replied. "I'll talk to you soon."
@|Tania Karas can be contacted at tkaras@alm.com.
David Feuerstein is a partner in Herrick, Feinstein's 80-member litigation department, representing public and private companies in state and federal court and in arbitration and mediation.
He handles class action defense as well as employment, real estate and commercial litigation. His clients range from real estate developers, hedge funds, Fortune 500 companies and individuals in matters ranging from contract disputes to government investigations.
Over the past year, David has represented hedge funds related to their investments in structured financial products, such as PIPEs and RDOs, and he has successfully handled a complex real estate litigation after mediation failed.
David also has developed a specialty in business divorce, a practice area in which Herrick has been a pioneer. Over the past year, David has helped three technology sector companies navigate messy business divorce proceedings, dividing assets totaling more than $25 million.
David is spearheading Herrick's work with the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project's latest effort, the Partnership Project in Assisting Targets of Predatory Educational Institutes. This project addresses the growing legal need of low-income New Yorkers saddled with debts incurred from attending illegitimate trade schools that use students to exploit federal grant and loan programs.
He also works with Focus for a Future, a charitable organization that helps young people from underprivileged areas learn the importance of focusing on academics, athletics, interpersonal relationships and the importance of making positive choices in life.
David also has served as president of the Denis McInerney New York County Lawyers' Association American Inn of Court.
Herrick, Feinstien, 2005-present; Boies, Schiller & Flexner, 2001-2005; also is an adjunct professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
J.D., Cardozo Law, 2001; B.A. Yale College, 1995
"The best thing about being a lawyer is the opportunity to compete on a daily basis, to have your adversary come around to see your point of view."
David Kochman's practice at Reed Smith focuses on complex commercial litigation and appellate matters. His representations range from individually owned businesses to Fortune 50 corporations, spanning an array of industries including financial services, investment transactions and structured products, entertainment, digital media and e-commerce, retail, apparel, corporate trusts, real estate and restaurant.
Last year alone, argued over 15 substantive motions in trial courts around the country and prosecuted three appeals.
Since 2006, David has led the pro bono representation of an Alabama death row inmate in federal habeas proceedings before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. As counsel of record for the inmate, who has been on death row since 1988, David now has a certiorari petition before U.S. Supreme Court.
David also has led in the creation of a new program for Special Olympics athletes; co-founded the Hurricane Insurance Claim Help Library; served as attorney-coach for a local high school in the New York State Bar Association's mock trial tournament; and has successfully fought the removal of a Tibetan asylum applicant.
Reed Smith: 2008-present; Anderson Kill & Olick, 2004-2008
J.D., Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, 2004; B.A., Emory University, 2001
"Integrity is the first and foremost value. You should never, ever do anything to impugn your integrity."
Michelle Gonzalez, First Recipient of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic Community Fellowship, Joins leading LGBT advocacy organization Immigration Equality as Legal Fellow.
Press Release
June 12, 2013
The Immigration Justice Clinic at Cardozo School of Law and Immigration Equality and Pride Law Fund announced that recent Cardozo graduate Michelle Gonzalez is the winner of the first Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic Community Fellowship. Ms. Gonzalez will join Immigration Equality, the country’s premiere legal aid and advocacy organization working on behalf of LGBT immigrants and their families, for an 18 month fellowship.
Ms. Gonzalez, who graduated from Cardozo in May, will serve as a legal fellow at Immigration Equality, where her focus will be on representing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people held in immigration detention, beginning in August 2013. Ms. Gonzalez was a student in Cardozo’s Immigration Justice Clinic, where she successfully represented a transgender woman in deportation proceedings preventing her return to Mexico and the prospect of brutal persecution.
“We are thrilled to add Michelle to our legal team,” said Victoria Neilson, the organization’s legal director. “Every year Immigration Equality’s life-saving direct legal services numbers have increased. The greatest increase we have seen in direct representation cases is for detained clients, so adding a legal fellow to focus on direct representation detention work will greatly expand our capacity to help some of the most vulnerable members of the LGBT community. Michelle’s experience in the clinic with immigration issues, at Lambda Legal on LGBT issues, and interest in detention issues makes her a perfect fit for Immigration Equality.”
"I am excited to begin my legal career serving my community with Immigration Equality," said Ms. Gonzalez. "It is a natural fit following the experience I gained in Cardozo's clinics."
The Fellowship was funded by the generous support of The JPB Foundation.
The Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic has made national headlines for its advocacy work in immigration reform since it’s inception five years ago. The clinic responds to the vital need today for quality legal representation for indigent immigrants facing deportation, while also providing students with invaluable hands-on lawyering experience. Students in the clinic represent immigrants facing deportation before federal immigration authorities and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and represents immigrant community-based organizations on litigation and advocacy projects. www.cardozo@yu.edu
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Founded in 1994, Immigration Equality is the country’s premiere legal aid and advocacy organization fighting for equality under U.S. immigration law and working on behalf of LGBT immigrants and their families. The organization runs a pro bono asylum project to assist LGBT and HIV-positive asylum seekers to find free or low-cost legal representation and maintains a list of LGBT/HIV-friendly private immigration attorneys to provide legal representation for those seeking help. The organization also provides technical assistance to attorneys who are working on sexual orientation, transgender identity, or HIV status-based asylum applications, or other immigration applications where the client’s LGBT or HIV-positive identity is at issue in the case. www.immigrationequality.org
The Pride Law Fund promotes the legal rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, and people living with HIV and AIDS, by funding summer fellowships for law students and year-long fellowships for recent law school graduates working at nonprofit organizations on special projects, education and outreach and providing legal services. The 2010-2011 Tom Steel Fellowship is funded, in part, by generous donations from Fenwick & West LLP and Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom. www.pridelawfund.org
Avi Muchnick '04, founder and chief product officer of Aviary
Booting Up: New York's 2nd Tech Boom Reprograms the Legal Field
By Susan Karwoska for Cardozo Life
A stone’s throw from the Cardozo Law campus, in an area of New York City still known for its meatpacking plants, rail yards and other vestiges of the city’s industrial past, Google’s new east coast headquarters has brought a decidedly 21st-century presence to the neighborhood, from the free local wireless it provides to the of-the-minute design of its offices. Occupying a full city block, the massive building looks like nothing so much as a ship that’s just come in.
Google’s dramatic growth in the Big Apple in the last ten years has been a major driver of the city’s burgeoning tech industry. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is throwing considerable weight behind the effort to make sure this growth continues, offering up forward-looking initiatives to support and develop the city’s tech ecosystem.
Add to this a ready supply of venture capital as well as New York’s status as a world-class city, and it’s clear why New York has become fertile ground for a new generation of tech innovators. This tech renaissance promises to create new employment opportunities in every sector of the city’s economy, including the legal industry—good news in the field’s otherwise soft job market for those prepared to take advantage of it.
“This is an extraordinarily interesting time, full of ferment and opportunity,” says Cardozo professor Susan Crawford. “Because everything is so intangible in the digital world, its legal status really matters. Lawyers have a large role to play when you’re making arguments about intangible property or intangible relationships. It’s very difficult to point to a new piece of software and say ‘that’s mine,’ or ‘that’s his.’ Explaining what these intangibles are becomes the province of the lawyer, and lawyers are very good at telling stories.”
“The technology boom in New York City is going to be great for the legal industry here too,” says Avi Muchnick ’04, who has a leg in both the legal and tech worlds as a Cardozo graduate and the founder and chief product officer of Aviary, a successful New York-based photo-editing software startup. In 2007, when he was still at Cardozo, Muchnick used seed funding from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, to get Aviary off the ground. Six years later, Muchnick claims 50 million monthly users for his software and says that four billion photos have been edited using Aviary in a 12-month period.
“It’s clear—software is eating the world, and that means that there’s going to be a lot more intellectual property work out there to deal with this shift,” says Aaron Wright ’05, an associate in the content media and entertainment group at Jenner and Block and a former software developer who, like Muchnick, began a startup while still at Cardozo.
Wright was editor of the Cardozo Law Review when he and a few other Review staff members started a sports Web site that was later sold to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wales then hired Wright and his codevelopers to help build Wikia, a for-profit sister company to Wikipedia, which they saw grow from a small enterprise into what Wright says is now "one of the largest Web sites on the planet."
As much as he enjoyed his time in the tech world, Wright says, he wanted in on the legal side of the business. “I realized I wanted to go back to practicing law, so I thought about the future of the legal profession, and I looked around the city and realized that New York is going to be the hotbed for future tech startups. Everyone was talking about California, but I had a good feeling about what was happening here. There was a lot of energy, and I decided that I wanted to be a part of that.”
New York City is quickly developing into an epicenter of tech innovation with its own east coast slant, attracting local outposts of California tech giants like Google, Twitter, Facebook and eBay, and fostering homegrown startups like Foursquare, Buzzfeed, Gilt Groupe and Etsy. The New York startups often take the city’s traditional industries—such as fashion, finance, media, advertising and publishing—into the digital age. According to seedtable.com, in the last year alone, 127 startups were founded in the city—just a few shy of California’s total. “If the field continues to grow the way it’s been growing, that’s going to create a lot of legal work and a lot of opportunities for lawyers here,” says Cardozo Dean Matthew Diller. “We want to produce the New York lawyers who have the right mindset to do this work.”
Read the rest of "Booting Up" in the upcoming issue of Cardozo Life!
July 30, 2013 New York Times - An appeals court on Tuesday unanimously upheld a decision striking down New York City’s restrictions on the sale of large, sugary drinks, dealing a serious blow to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s hopes of reviving the rule before his term runs out.
The court, the First Department of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, concurred with a lower court’s ruling that the city’s Board of Health, appointed by the mayor, overstepped its bounds as a nonlegislative body by approving the rule. The justices also said that the various exceptions and carve-outs in the rule demonstrated that the board was concerned with matters beyond its core mission to improve public health.
“Such mechanism necessarily looks beyond health concerns, in that it manipulates choices to try to change consumer norms,” Justice Dianne T. Renwick wrote. The board, the decision stated, “violated the state principle of separation of powers.”
Seeking to reduce runaway obesity rates, the rule was announced by Mr. Bloomberg in May 2012 and approved by the health panel in September. The measure would have prohibited the sale of many sweetened drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces, but the appeals court wrote that the rule was laden with confusing loopholes and exemptions.
Only establishments that received inspection grades from the city’s health department, including movie theaters and stadium concession stands, would have been subject to the ban. Those with self-service drink fountains, like most fast-food restaurants, would be prohibited from stocking cups larger than 16 ounces. Meanwhile, vending machines and some newsstands would be exempt, along with convenience stores. The signature 64-ounce Big Gulp at 7-Eleven would escape the soda ban unscathed.
The rule also would not have affected fruit juices, dairy-based beverages like milkshakes and mixed coffee drinks, no-calorie diet sodas or alcoholic beverages.
Opposition to the limitations has been vocal, as city business owners and consumers deemed the rule and its loopholes unworkable and unenforceable. These concerns were voiced by Justice Milton A. Tingling of State Supreme Court in March, when he struck down the soda ban a day before it was scheduled to go into effect, calling the restrictions “arbitrary and capricious” and an overreach of the Board of Health’s power. Justice Tingling said the City Council would have to approve such a measure.
The argument against the ban has raised questions about the power held by the health panel, which has traditionally enjoyed a broad purview; the board has placed restrictions on lead paint and prohibited trans fats in food at city restaurants. The Bloomberg administration has argued that the city’s unchecked obesity epidemic should be similarly categorized as a broad and serious public health matter.
The ruling on Tuesday could mean the end of a signature effort of the Bloomberg administration and a centerpiece of the mayor’s third-term public health agenda, and leaves little time for the city to bring the plan back to life given Mr. Bloomberg’s waning time in office.
The city plans to appeal to the Court of Appeals, the highest appellate court in New York State. Officials in the city’s legal department could try to have the appeal argued — and, potentially, decided — before the end of the year, when Mr. Bloomberg’s term ends. But such an expedited appeal would be dependent on a number of procedural factors breaking in the city’s favor. Lawyers for the soda industry may also try to drag out any proceedings so the case would spill into the administration of a new mayor, and none of the current candidates for City Hall have expressed significant interest in continuing to fight for the restrictions.
In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Bloomberg called the ruling “a temporary setback” and referred to “the irreversible health impacts of obesity and Type 2 diabetes — both of which are disproportionately linked to sugary drink consumption.” He said his office would “continue the fight against the obesity epidemic” and appeal the case.
Critics of the ban, however, do not seem to think that such an appeal would stand a chance. “With this ruling behind us,” said Christopher Gindlesperger, a spokesman for the American Beverage Association, “we look forward to collaborating with city leaders on solutions that will have a meaningful and lasting impact on the people of New York City.”
Lynly S. Egyes ’09
Attorney, Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center
What do you do as an attorney at the Sex Workers Project?
I provide direct services to sex workers and victims of trafficking, and represent clients in a variety of visa applications and in immigration court proceedings. In addition, I provide regular “know your rights” training to the transgender immigrant community in Queens, and through this work and our connection with the LGBT community, we have established the first LGBT anti-trafficking program in the United States. Through our client-centered, non-judgmental approach, I often identify trafficking in situations that have been missed by other people.
How did the Immigration Justice Clinic prepare you for your current job?
We had a client who would be taken directly from jail to immigration detention. Peter Markowitz told me that I needed to get the immigration detainer lifted. I spent months contacting everyone I could think of for help, from law enforcement officials to attorneys to detention and removal officers, and I finally received a letter from our client saying that she would be released. I apply this attitude of doing everything I can, and then a little bit more, for my client every day in my job. I have been told by defense attorneys, judges and prosecutors that what I am asking for is not possible. But I think back to Peter telling me to keep going until the problem is fixed. And that is what I do.
Nyasa Hickey ’11
Attorney, Brooklyn Defender Services
What do you do at Brooklyn Defender Services?
I aid in the representation of non-citizen criminal defense clients, aiming to avoid or minimize the negative immigration consequences of arrest and potential conviction. I also help clients secure citizenship, green card status and other immigration benefits. Finally, I process applications for individuals seeking legal assistance for such benefits, and I supervise volunteer attorneys.
What did you achieve in the Immigration Justice Clinic?
I represented an individual who was taken advantage of by unscrupulous immigration attorneys, causing what should have been a simple adjustment application to remain an unresolved case for almost 20 years. By utilizing creative legal arguments and gathering affidavits from his family and community, I helped my client avoid deportation and obtain his green card in Immigration Court. I also engaged in large-scale advocacy focused on disentangling the immigration and criminal justice system by drafting legislation, crafting legal arguments and developing advocacy.
Clement Lee ’11
Detention Staff Attorney, Immigration Equality
What is most rewarding about your job?
Many detention facilities attempt to mitigate transgender detainees’ risk of victimization by placing them in solitary confinement. Transgender immigrants can be subject to torturous isolation, surveillance and humiliation for up to 23 hours a day. Many are tempted to “give up” and accept deportation to a country where they fear violence and persecution. I’m happy when Immigration Equality is able to secure their release from the nightmarish forms of solitary confinement.
How did the Immigration Justice Clinic prepare you for your current job?
The IJC was, hands-down, the most meaningful experience I had in law school. By exposing me to the complex interactions between criminal and immigration law, it played a tremendous role in preparing me for my current position. Professor Markowitz helped me to learn to navigate the complexities of "crimmigration" laws in a way that I still find useful every day. I still contact him for his feedback on cases that present particularly challenging issues.
Brooke Menschel ’11
Litigator, New York Civil Liberties Union
What is most rewarding about your job?
Over the past two years, I have had the chance to work with a diverse group of people on issues that not only affect their lives, but also present fascinating and complex legal issues. On a daily basis, I have the opportunity to work with NYC public school students who typically have never met a lawyer and who fear authority as a result of negative interactions in school and in their neighborhoods. Having the chance to advocate for these students and provide them with a voice to assert their constitutional rights has been incredibly rewarding.
What did you achieve in the Immigration Justice Clinic?
As a member of the clinic, I had the opportunity to work on three different, rewarding, and very challenging projects. Along with another student, I was able to use my newly developed legal skills to clear our client from deportation and secure his future in the United States, with his family in the only home he had ever known. Working with lawyers other public interest lawyers, I contributed to the drafting of a federal lawsuit that, years later, made headlines when the Judge supported the clinic’s position. Finally, as part of a year-long effort to reverse a decision made during the previous administration, I presented the effects of the policy to top-level DOJ and Administration officials
By Tania Karas
August 23, 2013 New York Law Journal - Responding to challenges for newly minted J.D.'s looking for work, Cardozo Law has announced a legal residency program that will allow recent graduates to work as full-time associates at small and mid-sized firms for one year after graduating while taking CLEs and training courses off-site at Cardozo.
The Resident Associate Mentor Program is modeled after medical residency programs where new physicians learn critical practical skills on the job.
"The established means of entering the profession are shifting," said dean Matthew Diller. "Bigger firms aren't hiring like they used to, which means smaller firms are a much more central part of the market. But they're reluctant to hire new graduates because of the higher cost of training them."
Under the program, 12 Cardozo Law graduates from the class of 2013 can apply to work for one of 11 law firms or corporate legal departments (one employer will hire two residents). The firms commit to employing graduates for one year at annual salaries between $38,000 and $43,000—similar to what they'd be making at a fellowship but less than the traditional market rate for associates.
Though the firms will make final hiring decisions, Cardozo's career services counselors will help match its graduates and participating firms based on the graduates' past experiences and interests. There is no guarantee that resident associates will be hired permanently.
Participating firms range in size from six to 24 lawyers and are spread throughout New York City, White Plains and Long Island. They cover practice areas including commercial litigation, personal injury, insurance defense, labor and employment, and trusts and estates.
Diller and Marcia Levy, associate dean of career services, have been working for the past year to recruit employers through the Cardozo Law alumni network.
"We sought out firms where it's practically unheard of for a new graduate to get a job right way, where usually, to get in they'd have to be hired laterally," Levy said. "But given the type of support we had to offer these small- to mid-sized firms, they were excited about this program."
Potential resident associates will interview throughout September and begin working Oct. 1.
@|Tania Karas can be contacted at tkaras@alm.com.
September 16, 2013 Diplomatic Courier - Is this “The Me, Me, Me Generation”? At the Diplomatic Courier, we hardly think so.
There are many more accurate labels that Millennials should aspire to. For example, the world has already seen the influence of the “Digital Natives” in creating new technologies and platforms, through which citizens from all over the world can communicate, protest, lobby, donate, and volunteer. From Haiti to Japan to Egypt, digital natives have reshaped society by bringing ideas to life with the touch of a button. In his latest book, analyst John Zogby characterizes the Millennial generation as “the First Globals”—the first generation to truly view themselves as part of a global citizenry above the old boundaries of traditional nationalism. For these “First Globals”, the world is their oyster, and a passport their ticket to success.
What, then, is in another label? With the “Top 99 under 33”, we saw an opportunity not to create just another label for an over-analyzed–and too often over-generalized–generation, but rather a community of some of the brightest and most innovative minds of the time, nominated and chosen by Millennials themselves. From poverty to summitry, defense to diplomacy, education to entrepreneurship, our third class of 99ers continues to prove to the world the power of breaking traditional models and thinking outside the box for new solutions to old problems. Bring a group of 99ers together in a room, and feel the world shift.
But we must not forget that behind each 99er is a cadre of Millennials, working together, reaching across borders, to create these new models and implement these new ideas. For our 2013 list, we received nearly 500 nominations, each and every one a gleaming ray of hope for greater peace, greater prosperity, and greater cooperation. The future is bright.
It is with many thanks to our partners since the inception of this list, the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, as well as our launch event sponsor, the Meridian International Center that we present to you the 2013 class of the Top 99 under 33 Foreign Policy.
Chrisella Sagers Herzog
Diplomatic Courier Managing Editor and
99 Under 33 Selection Committee Member
See the 2013 Top 99 Young Professionals in Foreign Policy here:
Ari Fridman is Counsel for Oversight and Investigations on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His portfolio includes the range of regional and functional areas within the Committee’s jurisdiction, such as oversight of foreign aid and embassy security. Ari has worked on multiple committee investigations, hearings, and legislation.
Previously, Ari was named a member of the Foreign Policy Initiative’s Future Leaders Program and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ National Security Fellows Program.
Ari graduated magna cum laude from Yeshiva University in 2006, and with a J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 2010.
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Describe the impact on foreign policy you have made in your current/past positions.
Implementing the agenda of two chairmen of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has had a tangible impact on and off Capitol Hill. Whether conducting highly visible investigations, such as the ongoing investigation into the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, or quietly probing foreign assistance packages to war theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Committee’s oversight work shapes the Obama Administration’s day-to-day execution of the nation’s foreign policy.
What personal contribution to foreign policy are you most proud of?
Working on the ongoing investigation into the September 11, 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya has been the most fascinating and complex assignment of my Congressional career. The investigation involves overlapping strands of policy and politics. Ultimately, we are trying to understand exactly what happened before, during, and after the attacks to improve security for our diplomats.
What is your vision of foreign policy in the 21st Century?
After wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America must reassess her strategic priorities abroad. In some respects, the Obama Administration’s pivot to Asia is recognition that global events are not limited to the Middle East. Yet our foreign policy establishment should consider deeper, more fundamental questions. Nation-building, in particular, should garner more skepticism from our policymakers. While isolationism is neither a moral or strategic option for the United States, a more modest approach to the world may be in order, particularly as we sort out profound fiscal challenges at home.
What challenges need to be overcome to create better foreign policy? What leadership traits are needed for this?
Our foreign policy establishment often operates by inertia. Republican and Democrat administrations alike prefer continuity of agendas to wholesale reexaminations of policy decisions in the first place. Admittedly, the latter is difficult work, yet the default mode of groupthink is no substitute for sound policymaking. Like most issues in Washington, foreign policy is driven to a significant degree by policy prescriptions made in the White House and implemented by the bureaucracies of the relevant agencies. Cabinet secretaries need to be empowered by the President to foster cultures of reflection within the Departments of State, Defense, and USAID. If not, the results are clear: good money is thrown after bad, well after the reality of a wasteful project in Afghanistan has run its course.
The Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal's volume 31 Editor-in-Chief, Sarah L. Farhadian, had her note cited in Callmann on Unfair Competition, Trademarks and Monopolies (4th Edition).
Sarah’s Note, Stealing Bacardi’s Thunder: Why the Patent and Trademark Office Should Stop Registering Stolen Trademarks Now, was published in Volume 30, Issue 3.
In Cardozo Law's "Law & Life" video series, alumni discuss their career, how they chose their field, and how they got to where they are. Jonathan Henes '96 is a restructuring attorney at Kirkland & Ellis.
November 6, 2013 Digital Journal - David Isaac, chief executive officer at The Garden City Group, Inc. (GCG), spoke at the Dean’s Speaker Series at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City on Oct. 16.
The Dean’s Speaker Series connects students with prominent alumni and friends of the law school, who share their experience and insights on building a career and pursuing goals.
Isaac, a Cardozo alumnus, gave an overview to students about pursuing career goals and the many legal career paths available, including legal administration services. In addition, Isaac talked about his leadership role at GCG and the matters that the firm assists with when handling a class action settlement, bankruptcy cases and other legal and regulatory matters.
“Cardozo provided me with an excellent foundation for my legal career. It was an honor and a rewarding experience to return to my alma mater and share my industry knowledge with the students studying at Cardozo,” said Isaac.
Isaac's distinguished career in the law has spanned more than 25 years. He has been one of GCG's senior executives since joining the firm in 1996 as its vice president, director of legal services, and has been instrumental in spearheading GCG’s growth. In 2000, he became president, and since that time, the company has grown from a 50-person firm to one that employs more than 1,000 people in 10 offices nationwide.
Isaac’s unparalleled experience has led GCG to its position as the premier provider of legal administration services. He is a graduate of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Yeshiva College.
“David is a great example for our students of innovative leadership and the impact that our alumni have on the world,” said Matthew Diller, dean of Cardozo Law School. “He was marvelous in giving a great overview of the work he and The Garden City Group, Inc. oversees, taught our students a lot about how class action litigation works in practice and the role of administration in the process, and was generously responsive and encouraging to our students.”
About The Garden City Group, Inc. (GCG)
GCG (http://www.gcginc.com) is the recognized leader in legal administration services for class action settlements and other claims administration, bankruptcy cases and legal noticing programs, with more than 1,000 employees in offices coast-to-coast. GCG has been named a Best Claims Administrator by the New York Law Journal for three years in a row. The firm has been engaged in many high-profile distribution matters, including the General Motors bankruptcy, the $20 billion Gulf Coast Claims Facility and the $7.8 billion Deepwater Horizon Economic Property Damages Settlement, the $6.15 billion WorldCom settlement, the $3.4 billion Native American Trust Settlement and the $3.05 billion VisaCheck/MasterMoney Antitrust settlement.
About Crawford
Based in Atlanta, Ga., Crawford & Company (http://www.crawfordandcompany.com) is the world's largest independent provider of claims management solutions to the risk management and insurance industry as well as self-insured entities, with an expansive global network serving clients in more than 70 countries. The Crawford System of Claims Solutions® offers comprehensive, integrated claims services, business process outsourcing and consulting services for major product lines including property and casualty claims management, workers compensation claims and medical management, and legal settlement administration. The Company’s shares are traded on the NYSE under the symbols CRDA and CRDB.
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