NYC Bar Association: We Are Still Here to Help

Editor’s note: The head of the New York City Bar Association wrote this piece in response to an editorial in The American Lawyer on the law firm’s role in the time of crisis.

As The American Lawyer editor-in-chief Gina Passarella recently wrote, clients will turn to their law firms in a time of crisis. We might add that, in a time of crisis, law firms, attorneys and the legal profession as a whole also have a place to turn: bar associations.

While the New York City Bar Association’s building is closed during the coronavirus pandemic, much of our staff and our volunteer members have been as active as ever to ensure the effective operation of the courts and the justice system. Through the work of several of our committees, the City Bar recently made recommendations to New York’s Unified Court System and to the federal district courts in the New York City metropolitan area and to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on operating during this public health crisis. The City Bar Justice Center and a number of law firms are joining with the Lawyers for Good Government Foundation to launch a pro bono project to help small businesses access the federal government’s COVID-19 stimulus package. And the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice will be working with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison’s Coronavirus Resource Center to provide pro bono relief internationally.

We are moving more of our CLE programs online and offering many of them free to members, and offering our on-demand programs free to students at most of the area’s law schools. Our Lawyer Assistance Program is more important than ever for those in the legal community suffering from mental health or substance use issues. Our Small Law Firm Center is advising the practitioners who are facing a unique and demanding set of challenges.

Our Legal Referral Service is fully operational remotely, as is the City Bar Justice Center’s Legal Hotline for low-income New Yorkers. The Justice Center is offering free, remote legal assistance to New York City front-line health care workers in preparing simple life-planning documents, and is working with law firms to provide pro bono legal services to small businesses during the crisis. Our Office for Diversity & Inclusion continues to support those who are underrepresented in the legal profession through its webinars.

Through our digital outreach, we are reaching our 24,000 members with the latest updates on the operations of the courts and resources available, and our colleagues at other bar associations, including the New York State Bar Association, the New York County Lawyers Association, the Muslim Bar Association of New York, the Hispanic National Bar Association and the Metropolitan Black Bar Association are doing the same. Among other activities, the Asian American Bar Association of New York is tackling the issue of anti-Asian rhetoric and bias incidents in connection with the labeling of the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.”

While we await the opportunity to reopen our building to the hundreds of lawyers and members of the public who pass through its doors every day, we will continue to provide a sense of community and a host of resources in this time of isolation and distancing, as so many of our sister and brother bar associations are doing. Our associations are a place for members to engage, learn and collaborate at a time when all three are all the more important and all the more difficult. In whatever city you live, we urge you to support and take advantage of your state, local or affinity bar association.

Bret Parker Executive Director, New York City Bar Association