Staff moves at The Door and the New York Community Trust result in promotions. Kaavya Viswanathan moved up from pro bono managing attorney to director of legal services at The Door after Eve Stotland became the program officer for education and human justice grantmaking at the Trust. That position opened after Shawn Morehead became the vice president for grants, replacing the retired Patricia Jenny, according to a spokeswoman.

https://www.wnyc.org/story/two-ny-lawyers-describe-chaos-reuniting-migrant-children-parents/

WNYC News

Two NY Lawyers Describe Chaos of Reuniting Migrant Children With Parents

Attorneys Kaavya Viswanathan and Eve Stotland at The Door represent a few children sent to NYC after being separated from their parents at the US border.

Attorneys Kaavya Viswanathan and Eve Stotland at The Door represent a few children sent to NYC after being separated from their parents at the US border.

( Beth Fertig / WNYC News )

Jul 26, 2018

Today is the deadline for the federal government to reunite more than 2,500 migrant children who were separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border. Hundreds were sent to foster care agencies in New York, and they're now being represented for free by various attorneys lawyers. WNYC's Beth Fertig spoke to two lawyers at The Door, a social service agency for kids. In this interview, Eve Stotland and Kaavya Viswanathan explained how several of their young clients are still very much in limbo just hours before the reunification deadline.

Kee

Ain’t that the plagiarist?

Mar 18, 2019, 7:16 PM

https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2018/08/20/volunteer-lawyers-hold-cle-to-help-lawyers-represent-kids-in-immigration-proceedings/

Volunteer Lawyers hold CLE to help lawyers represent kids in immigration proceedings

August 20, 2018 By Rob Abruzzese, Legal Editor Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Kaavya Viswanathan, pro bono managing attorney at The Door's Legal Services Center, with Sarah Burrows, pro bono manager at the Brooklyn Bar Association Volunteer Lawyers Project. Eagle photo by Rob Abruzzese

Kaavya Viswanathan, pro bono managing attorney at The Door's Legal Services Center, with Sarah Burrows, pro bono manager at the Brooklyn Bar Association Volunteer Lawyers Project. Eagle photo by Rob Abruzzese

The Brooklyn Bar Association Volunteer Lawyers Project (VLP) hosted a continuing legal education (CLE) seminar with an attorney from the Door’s Legal Services Center at Abrams Fensterman in Downtown Brooklyn on Wednesday in order to prepare lawyers to represent children in immigration proceedings.

The immigration training seminar is not something the VLP normally handles, but they often will invite attorneys from outside organizations to conduct CLEs on topics it thinks may interest its members.

“We are a nonprofit in Brooklyn that works with low-income residents in a number of different civil, legal practice areas including bankruptcy, family law, foreclosure and elder law,” said Sarah Burrows, pro bono manager at VLP. “We also partner with other organizations throughout the city to offer our volunteers opportunities outside of the scope of what we normally do.

“Attorneys who are interested in taking on a case through The Door, they are looking for volunteer attorneys to work with children throughout their case, and also opportunities and a need for volunteers to work with children just in family court.”

Attorney Kaavya Viswanathan, who has presented CLEs in conjunction with the VLP in the past, represented The Door and broke down everything that the nonprofit covers. The Door serves approximately 10,000 young people every year and the Legal Services Center helps nearly 1,200 kids annually.

“Our mission is to provide holistic services for young people ages 12-24,” Viswanathan said. “We really try to be a one-stop shop for everything a young person may need in their lives. The legal need is just one part.

“We have a health center on site, we have counseling services, we have career and education services,” Viswanathan continued. “They can come in and get a meal. The idea is that we serve the whole person and we acknowledge that even if your legal case is going well you still need support in other parts of your life.”

Viswanathan pointed out that there is no right to counsel in immigration proceedings even when it comes to children and said that there are real concerns for their rights to due process as a result. Children without representation are five times more likely to be deported, according to The Door.

DAILY TOP BROOKLYN NEWS

News for those who live, work and play in Brooklyn and beyond

“There really are stories and instances where a case worker has carried a two- or three-year-old into immigration court, who either doesn’t speak or doesn’t speak English,” she said. “So, there are a lot of concerns about due process when children are involved in immigration court proceedings and it’s one of the reasons why getting pro bono counsel in these cases is so critical. If a child doesn’t speak English, it is impossible for them to defend themselves.”

The training covered common forms of legal relief available to children, such as the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and asylum. Viswanathan explained how to pursue relief before state family court, immigration court and also during the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Attorneys who attended Wednesday’s CLE and agreed to take on a case pro bono received two free credits. Visit BrooklynVLP.org for more information on this or future pro bono and CLE opportunities through the Volunteer Lawyers Project.

SHARE ARTICLE:

Leave a Comment

Related Articles

The Volunteer Lawyers Project will host a CLE that encourages attorneys to take on child immigration cases pro bono. Pictured are Sarah Burrows, pro bono manager at VLP; and Kaavya Viswanathan, who will present the program later this month. Eagle file photo by Rob Abruzzese

Volunteer Lawyers Project trying to help kids in immigration proceedings

August 20 | By Rob Abruzzese, Legal Editor

Brooklyn Today

August 7, 2019 | Rain, 75° F

Daily Top Brooklyn News

Brooklyn Boro

View More

New York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3828910&forum_id=2#38652938)

i see their shirts sometime around the city

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3828910&forum_id=2#38652943)

If you missed any of the CLE pro bono programs/trainings below, they are recorded and posted on our learning portal, Kramer Levin University, under Kramer Levin Courses/Pro Bono. Please contact Tatiana Cios if you need assistance viewing them and obtaining CLE credit.

Updates in the Law on Representing Children in Immigration Proceedings (Kaavya Viswanathan, The Door)

https://www.kramerlevin.com/images/content/5/0/v2/50898/8929-Newsletter-Pro-Bono-Spring-2019-Web-v7.pdf

Last week, our former colleague Kaavya Viswanathan (left) and Rachel Davidson from The Door - A Center of Alternatives' Legal Services Center visited our New York City office for a pro bono CLE discussion on recent shifts in immigration law and policy that particularly affect children and adolescents.

The attorneys discussed the family separation crisis (and its continuing effects), new proposed regulations concerning child detention, and the status of various federal lawsuits challenging recent government policies.

https://www.facebook.com/KramerLevinNaftalisFrankelLlp/photos/a.422261454559546/2017436085042067/?type=3

At #JIJ19 we toasted to Eve Stotland for 11 yrs of service to The Door. We're sad to see her go but we are also happy to announce that Kaavya Viswanathan has been appointed as the new Director of Legal Services. We are grateful to have two dynamic & fearless women as leaders.

https://twitter.com/Door_NYC/status/1120373907503157250

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3828910&forum_id=2#38653024)

Meet the executive team

(success is built on a strong foundation)

https://www.csdisco.com/about-us

As we mentioned this morning, K.A.D. (Kiwi) Camara was on the wrong side of the news cycle yesterday.

A federal jury ruled that his client, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, violated copyrights on 24 songs she downloaded, and hit her with a whopping $1.92 million judgment — which works out to $80,000 per downloaded song.

https://abovethelaw.com/2009/06/80000-per-song-could-backfire-says-k-a-d--camara/

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Entrepreneur-has-made-a-discovery-filled-journey-5569031.php

Entrepreneur has made a discovery-filled journey

His office near the Galleria looks more Silicon Valley than Vinson & Elkins, fitting for a Harvard-trained lawyer turned Houston software entrepreneur. The walls are adorned with playful pop art. A stuffed animal, a white harbor seal, is on his desk.

Seated there is Kiwi Camara, a babyfaced 30-year-old wearing an open-collared shirt under a tan sport coat, a young man in cowboy boots who moved here seven years ago with impressive credentials for someone of any age. At 11, he wrote a paper on alternative treatments for rheumatoid arthritis and got it published in the Hawaii Journal of Medicine. He skipped high school and studied computer science and math as an undergraduate. At 16, he became the youngest student in Harvard Law School history.

Now he runs CS Disco, an emerging player in the burgeoning e-discovery industry, a technology-driven field that is expected to reach almost $10 billion in annual revenue in 2017, up from $3.6 billion in 2010, according to market research firm Transparency Market Research.

Last December, the company raised $2 million from Austin-based venture capital firm LiveOak Venture Partners, which allowed CS Disco to double its engineering staff.

"We expect to double it again by the end of the year," Camara said.

Camara, who was born in Manila and raised primarily in Hawaii, moved to Houston at the urging of a close friend from law school, and in 2009 they co-founded Camara & Sibley. The partners would spend millions on legal discovery software, which Camara says he found lacking.

So he put in $400,000, hired two engineers and in January 2013 created his own e-discovery software company. By November, he said, CS Disco was turning a profit. Sales revenues have been growing an average of more than 20 percent per month, he said.

Camara counts more than 130 clients and said the company charges clients from a few hundred dollars a month for the smallest case to $40,000 a month for the largest. The company has 14 employees, including sales personnel.

A fairly new area

Legal discovery software is a relatively new field, said Roger Fulghum, who heads the intellectual property rights division of the Houston office of law firm Baker Botts.

Fifteen years ago, when people did legal discovery work, they had to sift through "boxes and boxes" of paper documents usually housed in space called a war room, Fulghum said, but today documents are imaged and managed electronically.

"You can put all the information on a hard drive, which makes moving your materials to a remote trial site in another city that much easier," he said.

In large cases, lawyers may have to find evidence buried in millions of emails and documents collected from dozens of witnesses around the world, Camara said. A company like CS Disco takes the data and puts it in a form that lets lawyers search and classify, or "tag," the data to find evidence that they want for the case, he said.

Clients pay CS Disco for access to its software based on the amount of data involved.

From his desk computer, Camara gave a demonstration. He called up the CS Disco homepage and clicked on "Live Demo."

The sample demo gives the user access to 385,000 Enron emails. He typed in a few search words and an Enron email popped up: "This week is no good. I have too large a pile of documents to shred."

"Competition is intense in the e-discovery industry, and you're not seeing clear winners and losers," said Barry Murphy, senior vice president of product marketing at Pasadena, Calif.-based X1, a search and e-discovery software company. The services side of the industry is booming, he said, because many companies are slow to understand how to use advanced technology on their own.

Among the leading revenue-generating e-discovery software companies are Symantec Clearwell, Nuix, Transperfect Digital Reef, Lexis Nexis Concordance and kCura, Murphy said, along with his own company, X1.

Fulghum's department at Baker Botts uses a number of discovery software tools, and he hasn't tried CS Disco, he said.

Ben Garry, an associate at the Houston office of litigation firm Diamond McCarthy, uses several e-discovery softwares, including CS Disco, and he said CS Disco gives him more independence and enables him to work faster at a relatively inexpensive price.

'Channel partners'

Camara said he markets his software through a network of local "channel partners" who provide litigation support services throughout the U.S. and London.

The "Disco" in the company's name is short for discovery.

A Google search of Camara's name reveals that, during his first year at Harvard Law School, he sparked a campus controversy after using a racially offensive term in a long written summary of a Supreme Court decision involving race discrimination and then posting it on a website for students. He later expressed his regret and said he was "very sorry" for the pain he caused.

'Well covered' issue

But the incident continued to draw attention and may have cost Camara a teaching job at George Mason University's School of Law, according to a 2007 Washington Post article.

"The issue has been well covered, and I have nothing else to say about it," he says now.

Camara taught law at Northwestern University before moving to Houston to partner with his law school friend, Joe Sibley, who is from Houston.

Sibley served as a U.S. Army Ranger before entering law school and was one of the oldest students, but he and the youngest student, Camara, became best friends.

Camara saw Houston for the first time when he moved here in 2007.

"I love it," he said, "although I am still adjusting to the summers."

For fun, he said, he rides horses in Tomball and plays chess.

Camara said owning a business is a more efficient way to make a living than practicing law.

An entrepreneur can build something and sell it over and over, he said, as opposed to law, in which he had to do custom work for each client.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3828910&forum_id=2#38653237)