New York State Pro Bono Opportunities Guide
Lawyers in Love
New York Lawyer
January 5, 2007
By Thomas Adcock
New York Law Journal
As proof of his promise - "Love blooms through pro bono work" - Jeffrey S. Trachtman offers the example of two lawyers whose journey to marriage began not long ago as idealistic young associates at Kramer, Levin & Naftalis.
The bride and bridegroom - Alison Louise Sclater, 34, and Jonathan Wells Dixon, 35 - were wed last month in Ms. Sclater's hometown of Seattle in a civil ceremony officiated by Terrence A. Carroll, retired judge of the Washington Superior Court.
"We attract a lot of young lawyers eager to do good in the world," said Mr. Trachtman, a Kramer Levin partner and chairman of the firm's pro bono committee.
Again, Mr. Trachtman points to Ms. Sclater and Mr. Dixon: She is director of pro bono services at the New York Legal Assistance Group since July; he is a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights since July of last year, assigned to the organization's Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative.
"These two have gone off to do [pro bono] full time; others stay and fold their pro bono work into a commercial career," said Mr. Trachtman. "We wish them both well."
Likewise, the newlyweds hold fond regard for Kramer Levin, where their former colleagues are now close friends and where they first met in November 2004 - upon Ms. Sclater's first day on a new job.
Among Kramer Levin associates, said Ms. Sclater, "there's a tradition where you're taken to lunch on your first day, so a mutual friend at the firm invited us."
"I almost declined, I had so much work," said Mr. Dixon. "Thankfully, I didn't."
"I remember seeing him walk down the hall," said Ms. Sclater. "He had this air about him. He was comfortable with himself, and confident, but not in an egotistical way."
She added, "Then we sat down to lunch. There was an immediate draw. He had a wonderful sense of humor. I knew immediately he'd be an important person in my life."
They discovered common ground, first through their mutually catholic taste in music. They each had careers previous to the law - he as a banker in his home state of Connecticut, after which he enrolled in the University of Colorado School of Law in Boulder, she as a staffer at the National Women's Law Center in Washington, D.C., which inspired her to earn a J.D. at New York University School of Law. Both clerked for federal judges. Both were drawn to Kramer Levin in large measure due to the firm's pro bono offerings.
Prior to his proffer of life partnership, Mr. Dixon decided that getting permanence off on the right foot would best be expressed in asking Ms. Sclater's parents for their daughter's hand in marriage.
Said he, "We both come from traditional families."
Said she, "He's a little more traditional than I am."
The more loquacious Ms. Sclater, who was provided an oral brief of her beau's determined formality, explained, "I told Wells that it was absolutely unnecessary to do what he did. But I knew my parents would really love it. I knew they'd be honored. Not that they would have been offended otherwise."
Not that bride and bridegroom are always quite so punctilious. After all, there was a dicey detour in their romantic marathon - the grim business of representing seven Uighurs detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The plight of the Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Muslims from the Xinjiang province of western China, was brought to the attention of Mr. Trachtman and his committee at Kramer Levin by the Center for Constitutional Rights - Mr. Dixon's employer-to-be. Mr. Dixon and his bride-to-be were consequently assigned to represent the Uighurs, who were captured by the United States in Afghanistan when they wound up in a cross-border combat zone as they fled persecution in China, whose government had branded them terrorists.
The lawyer/lovers saw to it that their pro bono clients were cleared on suspicion of terrorism, at least by U.S. lights. They could not be returned to China, however, and instead live today in Albania.
In the course of legal resolution, Ms. Sclater and Mr. Dixon twice made the difficult trek to Guantánamo.
Travel preparations involved bureaucratic intrusions that Mr. Dixon likened to something more exhausting than a mortgage application.
Then came the flights from the U.S. mainland, each taken during a sweltering time of the year aboard an officially chartered, rickety, 16-passenger commercial craft with no air conditioning, no cabin air pressure and no lavatories. The 90-mile passage between Florida and Cuba requires a full day of travel, due to circuitous air lane requirements and a passel of landing barricades.
But the ordeal cemented a relationship already tested by the tricky business of falling in love on the job with - as in the case of Ms. Sclater and Mr. Dixon - the object of one's desire in the office just down the hall.
"It's a professional workplace," said Ms. Sclater. "So we weren't open about it."
Mr. Dixon quickly added, "But there was no deception, and we didn't violate any firm policy."
And what is their policy on offspring?
"No comment," said the more circumspect Mr. Dixon.
"Yes," said Ms. Sclater.
Law.com
Home
Advertisement:
