Lawyers with the Legal Aid Society in New York City, the state’s largest provider of criminal and civil legal services for indigent clients, were locked in a struggle for higher pay Monday after authorizing their union to strike.
If negotiations fail, members could walk off the job for the first time in 30 years, leaving the courts scrambling to cope with the sudden absence of more than 1,000 lawyers who represent the most vulnerable defendants.
The Legal Aid members, whose contract ends Monday, have not set a strike deadline, said Jane Fox, a staff attorney with the agency and chair of the union.
“I’m very hopeful that we will continue our good-faith negotiations,” Ms. Fox said. “But our employer and the city should know we now have what we need if we need to move forward to call for a strike.”
While Legal Aid, a nonprofit that contracts with the city, is the dominant public defense organization in New York, several others provide similar services. Some also have contracts ending soon and will vote on whether to strike, Ms. Fox said.
The defenders’ complaints are not new. Legal Aid lawyers have said low starting salaries have forced some of them to take second jobs. In recent years, defender organizations have lost large numbers of staff.
The high attrition — which at one point meant 200 people quitting Legal Aid in 12 months — has left the remaining staff overburdened. In the Bronx, where Legal Aid is the primary defense organization, 24 lawyers are responsible for all of the felony cases, Ms. Fox said, a drop from nearly 80 several years ago.
“It’s just a breaking point,” she said on Monday.
The problems stem from what Ms. Fox called “decades of underfunding” and the “failure of our employer to really push the city to get more money put into legal services.”
In 1994, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani terminated Legal Aid’s decades-long contract hours after lawyers voted to strike. They returned to work shortly after, but the city ended the agency’s monopoly and encouraged the creation of other public defender organizations to increase competition.
Defenders are in a stronger position now, Ms. Fox said. Almost all of the once-competing organizations have unionized under the umbrella of the United Auto Workers, she said.
Legal Aid members have been in negotiations since March. An offer from management includes a 4 percent salary increase for one year. The union rejected the offer, saying the raise would not increase the salaries of more experienced staff members — the ones most likely to quit — enough to keep them from leaving.
Members have asked for pay on par with that of federal defenders in New York, where a base salary for a trial attorney starts around $115,400. Currently, Legal Aid attorneys have a starting salary in the low $80,000s.
Twyla Carter, chief executive of the Legal Aid Society, agreed with the union’s position that the city underpays the defenders.
“The Legal Aid Society has long recognized this inequity and, over the past three years, has made significant headway in its efforts — in Albany, at City Hall, and beyond — to secure the additional funding needed to begin meaningfully addressing this longstanding funding problem,” she said in a statement on Monday.
In the statement, Ms. Carter said staff attorneys had received or been offered base salary increases equivalent to 17 percent since she took the helm in August 2022, and that a retention bonus of $6,500 was instituted in 2024. The new offer would make increases “at key points along the salary scale” and provide “other much-needed benefit improvements for staff attorneys,” she said.
The potential strike comes as the city’s representation of indigent clients has already suffered a blow. A founder of the Queens Defenders was charged this month with diverting tens of thousands of dollars from the organization for personal use, further destabilizing the faltering agency.
The Brooklyn Defenders said this year that it would oversee the Queens Defenders’ $32 million annual contract. A spokesman said Brooklyn Defenders is taking over the contract on Tuesday and will handle about 40 percent of the criminal cases that come into Queens every year.
The Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice said that the city was preparing for the potential effects of a strike, and noted that Mayor Eric Adams’s administration had added $20 million to help legal service providers hire more staff and adjust salaries.
Al Baker, a spokesman for the state court system, said officials had been “in touch with the City and the Legal Aid Society, in the hope that the work of our courts will not be disrupted, and that if there is any disruption, it will not prejudice the rights of the parties.”
“The courts will, of course, remain fully open,” Mr. Baker said.
Although a strike could hamper court proceedings, the city has a network of private lawyers who can be appointed to serve indigent clients. They are typically used when one of the public defender organizations is unable to represent a defendant. During the 1994 strike, supervisors stepped in to substitute for striking lawyers.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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