From the President

First, I’d like to wish you a “Happy Administrative Professionals’ Day,” which you will be celebrating on the 21st of this month. We know how important your role is to your firm’s productivity and how you are counted on to make things run smoothly. And, for that, you are highly commended!

Our overall goal is to make your deposition planning stress free and as smooth as possible. We are here to act as a buffer for you and be your “one stop shopping” of deposition planning, so please don’t hesitate to contact us for any deposition need anywhere in the country.

As always, we welcome your suggestions and comments to The Reporter, and we encourage you to send in articles you have written or humorous tidbits for “The Lighter Side.”

Best regards,
Sheila Atkinson-Baker

A Lawyer Rejoins a Cause That First Gripped Her 70 Years Ago

By Susan Dominus
New York Times
Published: March 29, 2010

Ileta Green woke up Monday morning feeling anxious and dizzy, but when she arrived at the Supreme Court building in Brooklyn, she felt the pressure dissipate. There, waiting for her by the foreclosure settlement room on the third floor, was Shirley Adelson Siegel, a small 91-year-old woman in a silk scarf and a brown leather cap. “Hello, dear,” Ms. Siegel said, smiling at Ms. Green. “You’re looking well.”

Ms. Green smiled back at Ms. Siegel, the pro bono lawyer who is representing her as she fights for a modification of the mortgage on her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is in foreclosure. “When I told my sister my lawyer’s age, she said, ‘What?’ ” Ms. Green said. “But I told her, she’s really, really experienced.”

Ms. Siegel had never let on to her client just how experienced she actually is. The only woman in her class at Yale Law School, Ms. Siegel did years of committee work in public housing and civil rights before becoming, in 1959, the head of the civil rights bureau of the New York State Law Department (“Woman Lawyer Becomes First Head of New State Civil Rights Unit,” read the headline in The New York Times). Under Mayor John V. Lindsay, she was general counsel of the Housing and Development Administration, and in 1979, Attorney General Robert Abrams appointed her the state’s solicitor general.

For the past two decades, Ms. Siegel hadn’t practiced much law, focusing instead on teaching and traveling. She picked it up again in earnest in 2008, through a foreclosure project at the City Bar Justice Center. The news of so many losing their homes was pressing enough that Ms. Siegel found a compelling reason to return to the cause that first captured her intellect as an undergraduate at Barnard in the late 1930s. “My interest was always to work to help people get decent housing they could afford,” Ms. Siegel said. “That’s what inspired the New Deal programs for public housing. And I guess I never got over it, that’s all.”

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