By: Jeremy Kazzaz, Summer Associate, Mountain View
As a 1L I competed in the school-wide and regional client counseling competition. At the competition student-actors play the part of first time clients walking into your law firm and our task as competitors was to build a relationship with the client, listen to his or her story, and pick out the relevant facts to be able to advise them accordingly. The client counseling competition was one of my favorite extracurricular activities as a student, so imagine my delight in finding out that our pro bono service day with Fenwick would be a real, live version of the client counseling competition.
The first Justice Bus trip of the summer that Fenwick associates volunteered for was focused on a substantive area of law working with parents to craft or dispute educational plans for their children with special needs. For this trip, legal aid nonprofit OneJustice prepared us volunteers to hear about any civil legal issue that the scheduled and walk-in clients are facing in a general clinic format.
Eight Fenwick summer associates, two Fenwick associates, three Google legal interns, and five LinkedIn attorneys and legal interns took a day away from the corporate world to give back to our Northern California community, expecting the unexpected.
With coffee and bagels in hand (necessary pro bono tools), we boarded the Justice Bus on Friday, July 25 to cruise up to rural Marin County. We staffed a walk-in clinic with Legal Aid of Marin, an organization that provides access to the civil justice system to low-income, vulnerable and otherwise underserved residents of Marin County.
We were thrilled to have the opportunity to provide a wide range of legal services to those in need. The service day also gave us the opportunity to tackle problems that we wouldn’t encounter as corporate associates. Highlights included helping a local resident with a consumer protection and elder abuse issue, aiding a family with landlord disputes, and a longtime social worker with employment disputes.
All in all, we were able to help 13 Point Reyes Station locals. The moment that left the biggest impact on me came toward the end the day. Once I had fully advised a client on the substantive housing law issues she faces, seasoned Fenwick Associate Robin Reasoner joined me in laying out basic negotiation strategies and tactics to empower the client to negotiate a favorable new lease agreement for the home the client’s family has resided in for nearly a decade. We crafted a game plan that I have no doubt she will implement in the coming weeks in negotiations with her landlord.
Community service has always played a big part in my life from building roofs with the National Park Service in middle school, organizing social activities for the elderly in an assisted living home in high school, and as of late, teaching legal research and writing basics to inmates serving long sentences in Michigan’s only women’s prison. I am proud to be at a firm that is as committed to pro bono work as I am.
Fenwick's team of volunteers included Summer Associates Amanda Baratz, Jessica Benzler, Ari Haber, Jeremy Kazzaz, Zach Lerner, Liwen Mah, Robin Reasoner, Travis Robertson, Victoria Wong, and Michael Xu, Associates Liwen Mah and Robin Reasoner, and Pro Bono Coordinator Bonnie Lau.
Jeremy Kazzaz, a rising 3L at the University of Michigan Law School, was a summer associate in the Corporate practice group at Fenwick & West LLP. He has volunteered with low-income applicants to Michigan’s unemployment insurance, taught legal research and writing to inmates at Michigan’s only women’s prison, and spent his 1L summer working with student startup companies at Michigan’s Entrepreneurship Clinic. Before law school, Jeremy briefly lived in Israel on a kibbutz, or communal farm, and served as a paratrooper for the Israeli Defense Forces. As an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, he was an active member of U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill’s successful campaign, and later took a semester off to work for her on Capitol Hill. In his free time, Jeremy enjoys listening to podcasts on double speed, visiting microbreweries, and biking.
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great photos and nice information.
Posted by: maryjane | 05/17/2017 at 10:21 PM
informative.
Posted by: maryjane | 06/05/2017 at 02:25 AM