Criminal bar association forms in Queens
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The founding members of the newly established Queens County Criminal Bar Association. Queens County Criminal Bar Association
By Ryan Schwach
There are some new kids on the block in the Queens legal world.
The newly formed Queens County Criminal Bar Association, founded by a group of defense attorneys and prosecutors from across the field of New York criminal law, convened for their first meeting recently and hope to soon be the voice attorneys working in the borough’s criminal court.
From the state courts, to the Queens district attorney’s office, to private lawyers to public defenders from organizations like the Legal Aid Society, the new bar association looks to bring together lawyers and prosecutors to foster relationships and increase communication between attorneys, specifically in their realm of the Queens legal community.
“We felt as people who practice criminal law every day, who don't dabble in civil law, who don't go over to Sutphin Boulevard, that there needs to be a bar association that spoke for us and that presented educational opportunities for us,” said Richard Sikes, a court attorney and one of the organization’s 12 founding members. “We felt that the strongest work could be done for criminal practitioners if we had our own organization.”
“There's no bar association at the moment that brings everybody together in the same place,” he added.
Sikes and several of the other founding members spoke with the Eagle on Monday, and spoke about Queens’ newest bar associations goals and aspirations.
The group says that they are drawing inspiration from similar criminal court bar associations in neighboring counties like Brooklyn and Long Island, as well as one in Queens that fizzled out more than two decades ago.
According to Sikes, a criminal court bar association was created in Queens around 1952. However, by the late ‘90s, enthusiasm for the group diminished and young lawyers stopped joining, and, eventually, the group disbanded.
However, the new bar association feels enthusiasm and desire for such a group is high in Queens.
“I think it's good to have one voice for our community,” said Lisa Lin, who works for the Unified Court System. “We have a lot of attorneys that practice criminal law here on Queens Boulevard.”
That includes creating a single place to disseminate information about what is going on at Criminal Court from broken elevators to courtroom information.
“We're going to try to be a centralized place to disseminate information,” said Sikes.
The association's 12 founding members come from across the Queens legal community – three of them are private attorneys, two work for Legal Aid, two are from Queens Defenders, two come from the DA’s office, and three come from the court system.
By creating a network of criminal law practitioners from across the legal community spectrum, the bar association hopes that it will help foster relationships between lawyers who may mostly only see each other on opposite ends of the same courtroom otherwise.
“We wanted to create an environment where we can all socialize, interact, that's not necessarily adversarial and get to know each other on a more personal level,” said private attorney Seth Koslow. “So when you come to work, it's not us versus them.”
“It's to create that collegial atmosphere because we all do work together and have a lot in common,” he added. “We can share that outside of just the courthouse, and that's kind of where the basis came from, and we realized there was an opportunity to expand on that into educational opportunities, community shares, opportunities, social opportunities, things like that.”
Adding to their desire to create the new bar association was the fact that other social opportunities have not come back in the same way they existed before the pandemic.
“With COVID we lost a little bit of personal touch to this job,” said Legal Aid attorney Felipe Garcia. “We were in court every day and we knew the DAs and we could put a name to a face, we could engage in meaningful conversations about cases but I think that was lost when COVID took place.”
The bar association joins a long list of affinity bars in the World’s Borough, joining the ranks of the Latino Lawyers Association, the South Asian-Indo Caribbean Bar Association and others that look to provide specialized opportunities to a specific community in the Queens legal world.
“There are just so many other organizations that cater to their particular affinity group, that means that we can also collaborate on different types of events, programming, even within the court system,” said Jenninfer Saint-Preux, who works in the court system. “There's absolutely no reason why collaborating with the other organizations is something that's beyond our purview.”
The QCCBA is hoping to work with those groups, as well as the larger Queens County Bar Association.
“We're not thumbing our nose at the [Queens County] Bar Association, saying we don't want to work with them,” said Koslow. “We're just trying to do something to benefit us as a whole here, and if that includes partnering up with the Bar Association to co-host an event or supporting an aspect of the Bar Association that we think makes sense, we're not opposed to that. But we're just kind of starting up our own thing to represent the interest of the people here.”
Michael Abneri, the President of the QCBA, wished the new bar association luck, and said he hopes that any criminal bar members who are already bar association members keep their membership.
On Nov. 28, the board held the first of what they hope to be many events, which had over 150 attendees.
“We were just trying to drum up the initial interest in what our organization is going to be,” said Sikes. “It was to explain to people what our goals are going forward, what our dreams are, what we're hoping to accomplish. But more importantly, it was also to be a sounding board for the members.”
They said that ideas are already coming in, from charitable work to a mock trial program, to different committees within the association.
“The possibilities are endless,” said Sikes. “There's 85 next steps, but we'll focus on what the members want to do next so we can make their dues worthwhile and make the organization fruitful for them.”
They hope their first formal meeting, where they will establish bylaws and vote in a board, will take place in January.
