CHANGE OF VENUE
Lawyer Swaps Big Salary, Perks
To Represent Guantanamo Detainees
By PERRI CAPELL
CareerJournal.com
January 11, 2006

Jobs in human-rights litigation in the U.S. aren't plentiful, and anyone seeing Tina Monshipour Foster in 2004 might have said she was a long shot to get one -- or take one.

She was a fourth-year associate in the midtown Manhattan office of Clifford Chance LLP, one of the world's largest law firms, with annual pay of more than $200,000. She had a secretary, word-processing staff and a car and driver at her disposal when she worked late. At night, she went home to a loft apartment overlooking the East River.

But at age 29, Ms. Foster gave it up to become one of three attorneys working at the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of prisoners at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She earns less than $70,000 annually and works out of offices in an older building in the Soho area of New York City. Studded with gum, the rug in her office is "disgusting," she says. Home is a studio apartment one hour away by subway in Queens, N.Y.

"I love it," she says of her job.

The transition to human-rights work actually happened through Clifford Chance. Ms. Foster, a litigator, liked her colleagues and enjoyed having top-shelf clients with deep financial pockets. But she handled small portions of the cases and couldn't always see the value of her efforts. Clients were primarily large corporations, "and I didn't have a connection to any individual," Ms. Foster says.

Ms. Foster started pro bono work at the firm for CCR in the summer of 2004. By the fall, she was so involved with it that she requested a six-month unpaid leave of absence, which the firm granted. At the end of that period, she decided to leave Clifford Chance and join CCR full time.

The decision took plenty of soul-searching. Ms. Foster and her mother emigrated to the U.S. from Iran when she was three, and Monshipour is her birth family name. She grew up in Rochester, N.Y. Her mother and stepfather felt that in her corporate law job, she was in the "big leagues," she says, and they worried about her giving it up.

"They were concerned it would be difficult for me if I gave up all that money, and I questioned whether this would take me off track if I found I didn't want to do public interest law the rest of my life," she says. But the need to be more emotionally connected to her cases prevailed.

CCR typically receives about 150 applications for every job opening and another few hundred general work inquiries a year, says Michael Ratner, president of the center.

In certain cases, the center might be skeptical about hiring an attorney from a large corporate firm, Mr. Ratner says. Ms. Foster worried initially that the center might not take her seriously. However, the six months proved her commitment, and she was hired because she knew the Guantanamo issues intimately and "she's really smart and works really hard," says Mr. Ratner.

Her position as counsel for the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative has her coordinating more than 400 individual cases and a "John Doe" case on behalf of unnamed prisoners. Most of the cases are being handled pro bono by law firms nationwide. The prisoners, who have been held without being charged since after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, are challenging their detention.

"There are almost no human-rights litigation jobs," says Mr. Ratner. "And the important issues now are the post 9/11 detention and torture issues, so this is possibly the best job you can get in America."

Ms. Foster was an English major at Boston University and then went to law school because "I wasn't qualified to do anything else," she says. After graduating from Cornell University Law School in 2000, she wanted to eventually do international law. She clerked at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York for a year and then joined Clifford Chance because of its strong international connections. The firm has offices in Hong Kong, Brussels and Sao Paolo, Brazil, among other far-flung destinations.

The firm asks associates to do 50 hours of pro bono work per year, says Warren Feldman, a partner and chairman of Clifford Chance's pro bono and community affairs committee. After Sept. 11, it was asked to assist with cases related to the terrorist attack.

In 2002, CCR took on the cases of four detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay and sued for their habeas corpus rights, or the right to know why they were being imprisoned. After several lower-court defeats, CCR appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided the case, Rasul v. Bush, in favor of the detainees' habeas corpus rights in June 2004. 

With 600 prisoners still being held, the work had just begun. The detainees now needed to individually challenge their detentions in court, and CCR needed help from private law firms in filing the suits. At the time, detainees were reputed to have ties to al Qaeda, and working on their behalf was controversial for white-shoe law firms, Ms. Foster says. Still, Clifford Chance agreed to help CCR, and Ms. Foster volunteered for the project, says Mr. Feldman.

When she requested the leave of absence, the firm continued to provide her benefits, allowed her to keep her office and hoped she would return to her old job, says Mr. Feldman. Ms. Foster had saved enough money to live on for the six months but decided to scale back, starting with the move to the studio apartment in Queens. In April, she accepted a full-time job at a salary of between $60,000 and $70,000, says Mr. Ratner.

Besides being paid less, Ms. Foster has fewer resources. She shares paralegal help and makes her own photocopies and travel arrangements. No private car is available to drive her home when she works late. With debt from law school left to pay, "I completely changed my lifestyle" to survive on the new salary, she says.

Ms. Foster says she hasn't ruled out the idea of returning to a large law firm like Clifford Chance. "This work is very exhausting and it's possible I could get burned out on it," she says. Clifford Chance would welcome her back in future depending on its need for an experienced attorney, but she might not make partner at that point, says Mr. Feldman. "I don't know where on the track she would be," he says.

For now, Ms. Foster is at peace with that. "I really like what I am doing, and that means a lot in terms of your quality of life," she says.



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CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS (CCR)
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/home.asp