The law firm of McLaughlin & Nardi, LLC, has been awarded the Equal Justice Medal by Legal Services of New Jersey for the Firm’s pro bono contributions to low income New Jersey residents.
While all of our attorneys do community service and pro bono legal services, Pauline Young by far does the most, and this award was mainly due to her. Pauline does a wide variety of pro bono work, but concentrates on providing services which help remove barriers to employment for prisoners reentering society after their terms of incarceration have ended, most often through engagement of their criminal records.
Pauline generally does her pro bono work through Legal Services of Legal Services of New Jersey and Volunteer Lawyers for Justice’s Reentry Legal Services program.
Legal Services of New Jersey is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization which provides civil legal representation and advice for low income residents throughout the state of New Jersey. It does so utilizing its talented staff of in-house lawyers. However, providing legal services to the poor is a chronically underfunded area, and so it also relies on a pool of dedicated attorneys in private practice, like Pauline.
Volunteer Lawyers for Justice is a private program created by the Legal Services Foundation of the Essex County Bar Association. It was founded in 2001 and initially led by a core group of 30 volu
nteers and a full time executive director, Karen Sacks. In 15 years under Karen, the program grew into a cutting edge program with 1500 volunteer attorneys providing pro bono civil legal services to low income and under-served residents of Essex County and Newark, New Jersey.
Reentry Legal Services (ReLeSe) is a program run by Volunteer Lawyers for Justice. It is dedicated to serving persons returning to society after imprisonment by helping to remove impediments to their reentry and reintegration as contributing members of society.
If you are a lawyer, you should consider volunteering for these organizations. And whether you are a lawyer or not, they perform valuable work vital to our country’s core constitutional value of equal justice before the law, so please donate to them if you can.
Pauline Young joined McLaughlin & Nardi as a law clerk while she attended New York Law School. Despite the fact that we thought she believed we were axe murderers, Pauline thankfully stayed with us as an associate, and last year she joined Frank Nardi and Maurice McLaughlin as a member of the firm. Pauline has become invaluable to us, trying cases and arbitrations, settling complex disputes, negotiating complex transactions, and navigating regulatory thickets.
Congratulations on a job well done, Pauline! Hopefully your example will inspire others to service.
McLaughlin is a full service civil law firm serving the state of New Jersey, principally in the northern part of the state. You can contact us at (973) 890-0004, or by filling out the contact form on this page.