The next normal: After wrestling the coronavirus, a lawyer rethinks his practice
Attorney Cesar Estela is making changes to his practice after he, his wife and their three children all contracted COVID-19 in the fall of 2020.
For Cesar Estela, surviving the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted him to rethink the entire focus of his legal practice.
Raised in an immigrant family, Estela has built an immigration law practice based on representing blue-collar workers in deportation hearings in Newark, New Jersey’s immigration court. He feels a strong sense of duty to his clients.
But now, Estela is cutting back on the number of complex immigration cases he handles. He’s raising his rates and being more selective about which cases he accepts. He charges a flat fee that’s premised on cases resolving within a certain period, but backlogs and administrative problems since the pandemic mean his cases take more time and effort than before, making it harder to earn a living.
‘Operating at 80%’
To bridge the gap left by his deemphasis on removal proceedings, Estela is looking to expand his involvement in criminal cases with immigration consequences, where he might work in concert with a criminal defense lawyer. He also hopes to take on more special immigrant juvenile custody cases, in which courts grant custody of abused and neglected children of immigrants to an individual or agency. Those cases are heard in state court, which he finds a welcome relief from the conditions of immigration court.
“You might have a tough judge, you might have tough law, but you’re not dealing with the craziness that it is to be in Newark immigration court,” Estela said.
The increasing challenges of his practice has been harder because Estela, his wife and their three children all contracted COVID-19 in the fall of 2020, along with his brother, sister and parents. They all survived, but some of his distant relatives died. Although he is recovered, Estela has impairments in his sense of smell and taste, and has difficulty breathing.
“I’m always operating at about 80%. If you’re operating at 80% and you need to be at 100%, it takes a toll mentally,” he said. ”You’re drained. You get sad. You get depressed. You get to wondering, why did I become a lawyer? And all lawyers have that conversation but it becomes more frequent, because the victories are so infrequent.”
The decision to refocus his practice hasn’t been an easy one, and is driven by a combination of factors that has made practicing in the immigration court much harder.
“I owe a debt to this country because of the opportunities it afforded to my family, and I want to pay it forward for my clients. It’s just really hard to do that when you can’t tell them what the immigration court is going to do next week. You can’t tell them if their court hearing is going forward.” Estela said. “It saddens me, because I know that I have a specialized knowledge, and I could help a lot of people, but you can’t help everyone, because I’m not running a nonprofit,” he said.
Client expectations
As a solo practitioner in Newark, Estela worries that working under the difficult conditions of Newark’s immigration court will hamper his ability to achieve a positive outcome for his clients, and he’s also worried about a greater risk of malpractice.
“It’s about getting these immigrants a good result in court, and if I can’t do that, I’m not going to be taking their cases,” he said.
While courts everywhere have struggled during the pandemic, conditions have been especially difficult in Newark’s immigration court. Last year, while other courts were closing or switching to remote proceedings, the Newark court was requiring lawyers and their clients to attend in-person sessions until the American Immigration Lawyers Association filed a suit over the unsafe conditions.
The court has a heavy case backlog and many of the judges and staff are on long-term absences. Currently, four of the 13 judges are on leave. The Newark immigration court has 69,644 cases pending with an average age of 1,053 days, compared to 27,457 cases pending and an average wait of 786 days in 2016, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
In addition, the court’s ability to disseminate notice of hearing dates has deteriorated, and Estela said his cases are scheduled and rescheduled without noticing him, or asking him if his schedule is open that day. And calling the court to inquire about scheduling of a case is unavailing because the staff is rarely present to answer the phone, Estela said.
“The pandemic laid bare that they are not able to handle their court cases in a way that gives everyone notice,” he said. “It’s like dealing with the DMV in 1997.”
The case backlog and scheduling difficulties in the Newark court are compounded by the legacy of micromanagement of policies in immigration courts during the Trump administration, according to Estela. The Biden administration has yet to make clear whether Trump-era policies will continue, he said.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series for ALM’s Small Business Guidance program, providing insights and information for small and medium-size firms and companies.
