Public defenders say $100M boost needed to prevent attorney shortage
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(From left to right) Piyali Basak, Lisa Schreibersdorf, Juval Scott, Tina Luongo, and Stan Germán testify before the City Council. The group of public defender organizations leaders called for the city to allocate an additional $100 million to $150 million to the legal aid groups. Screenshot via City Council
By Jacob Kaye
Leaders of some of the city’s largest public defense organizations warned last week that without at least $100 million in additional city funding, they’ll risk an exodus of attorneys that would leave low-income New Yorkers struggling to secure legal representation.
Officials with The Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn Defender Services, New York County Defender Services and the Bronx Defenders told the City Council on Thursday that they need an additional $100 million to $150 million in the coming year to recruit and retain their public defense attorneys, many of whom are currently paid far less than their counterparts at the federal level and in neighboring states.
Current funding for attorney pay also creates a major disparity within the city’s criminal justice system, in which they play a major role, the public defense groups told the City Council during a hearing on the mayor’s preliminary budget. The attorneys are often paid far less than the prosecutors who appear across the courtroom from them and from the officers who arrested their clients and began to craft the evidence against them.
Without the new city funding, the organizations say they won’t be able to boost attorney pay, which in turn may again lead to a threat that could bring the city’s courts to a grinding halt.
After hundreds of attorneys went on strike last summer as their unions negotiated new contracts with around a half dozen organizations, a similar strike could be on the horizon this year.
Attorneys at five public defender groups will see their contracts expire at the end of June – over 1,000 attorneys at the Legal Aid Society will begin negotiating their salaries around the same time, though their contract does not expire this year.
In all, over 2,000 attorneys and legal aid staffers will be negotiating new salaries later this year.
Tina Luongo, the chief attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s criminal defense practice, said that without the new funding, the city wouldn’t just be failing attorneys who have struggled to make ends meet in the five boroughs on a public defender salary.
Without additional funding, legal aid groups said they would struggle to pay their attorneys. Over 2,000 unionized attorneys will begin to renegotiate their salaries with their employers in June, a year after hundreds of them went on strike. Eagle file photo by Noah Powelson
“We are failing the people who are dragged every day to the criminal legal system, the family separation system and the immigration detention system,” Luongo said. “Because that is who is at the heart of representing clients and representing those families.”
The public defender groups said the new funding would go directly toward attorney salaries, which begin around $80,000 to $90,000 at most organizations in the five boroughs.
Salaries for public defense attorneys in places like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, Oakland and San Francisco begin at upward of $100,000. The same is true for public defenders in at least seven counties in upstate New York, according to Stan Germán, the executive director of New York County Defender Services.
“Our staff are forced to choose between, ‘Do I have a child and incur all the expenses with child care? Or do I stay as a public defender?’” Germán said. “What we see increasingly is, of course, they're leaving our offices, whether it's to buy a home or to start a family.”
“When you lose that experience, case processing takes a hit,” he added. “A more senior lawyer can adjudicate a case more quickly than a younger attorney who's learning the process.”
Though they said a disparity between public defenders and prosecutors already exists in New York, it would likely only grow larger if the additional funding for staff isn’t allocated by the city in its upcoming Fiscal Year 2027 budget.
District attorneys’ offices have seen new funding to hire prosecutors and buy new technology for case processing from both the city and state in recent years. The NYPD’s budget, which is currently over $6.4 billion, has also consistently grown over the past decade, though Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s preliminary budget plan keeps police department funding relatively flat for the coming fiscal year.
“Year after year, this city and this Council has found money to keep police officers and district attorneys in their jobs and guarantee them a pension, while at the same time, our union members have been pushed out, told they are not worthy of an affordable wage or dignified retirement because of the people we represent every day,” said Jane Fox, the chair of the chapter of the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys at the Legal Aid Society.
ALAA union members at The Bronx Defenders, Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem, Catholic Migration Services, the Center for Family Representation and Brooklyn Defender Services will all see their labor agreements expire in June.
Fox said that without city funding, there won’t be enough money for the union to demand “fair contracts” from the organizations.
“Austerity budgets in legal services hurt our union and they hurt New Yorkers,” she said. “Settling fair contracts will provide stability and ensure working-class New Yorkers get the absolute best legal representation, because they deserve nothing less.”
