In early 2015, Swapna Reddy volunteered for a week at the South Texas Family Residential Center, an immigration detention center near the U.S.-Mexico border that held thousands of asylum-seeking parents and their children.

That’s where Reddy met Suny Rodriguez Alvarado and her 7-year-old son, who had been at the center for four months after fleeing violence and persecution in Honduras. Reddy and three of her classmates—Conchita Cruz, Dorothy Tegeler and Liz Willis, who were members of Yale Law School’s Worker & Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic—later represented them in their immigration cases.

They not only helped Rodriguez and her son win her cases, but at her urging, they also founded the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project in May 2015 to assist other families facing wrongful detention and deportation.

“Regardless of how you feel about asylum-seekers, I think it’s hard to take issue with the idea that asylum-seekers deserve to know what the laws are and deserve to know how to follow them,” says Reddy, 38, whose parents emigrated from India and raised her and her brothers outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

In 2016, shortly before graduating from law school, Reddy and her co-founders took the project to the New York City-based Urban Justice Center. They employed what was then a unique model—rapid-response remote legal aid. They also built a private online community to connect asylum-seekers who would otherwise be geographically isolated.

“It’s hard to remember, but before the pandemic, the idea of remote work was pretty uncommon, and there was a lot of skepticism that it could be done effectively,” says Michael Wishnie, who co-directs Yale’s Worker & Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic and now serves on the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project’s board. “And yet they perceived that for new asylum-seekers who were settling in rural Georgia or Tennessee or Utah, there just wasn’t an option to provide on-the-ground legal services.”

The project provides its members—now more than 680,000 asylum-seekers from 175 countries—with access to a virtual legal help desk, news alerts and other critical resources as they navigate the immigration system. The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project no longer offers direct representation; instead, it gives asylum-seekers the tools and know-how to take control of their own cases, says Reddy, who serves as the organization’s co-executive director alongside Cruz.

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, which has a remote team of more than 20 lawyers, technologists and other experts, also asks its members to help set its priorities and advocate to improve the immigration system. Reddy says a top concern for members now is lengthy delays for work permits and asylum interviews.

Among its collective wins, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project and its members last year successfully advocated for new regulations that will allow immigrants facing delays in work permit renewals to get a year and a half of additional employment authorization.

“An awesome thing about Swapna is she’s a Renaissance woman,” says Becca Heller, the co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, who has known Reddy since law school. “She is a brilliant lawyer but also brilliant at technology. She’s been able to bring a lot of that to ASAP and think about how do tech and data and movement-building all intersect in this space, and how do you leverage that to something bigger?”

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

Some people talk about giving up their luxurious lifestyles to help those in need.

In 1999, Roy Ferguson actually did it.

He and his wife sold their Mercedes and their Houston house and purchased a used four-cylinder truck. They then moved to Marfa, a town of just under 2,000 in an ultrarural part of West Texas about 60 miles from the Mexican border, landing at a ranch with no air conditioning.

Working out of a shuttered hotel, Ferguson practiced what he calls “community law,” helping locals with civil and family law matters. Thirteen years later, Ferguson won the judgeship for the 394th Judicial District Court, the state’s largest judicial district, covering five counties in far-west Texas.

Immediately after taking the bench, Ferguson noticed the length of time it took per case.

“Because there are so few lawyers, they end up taking on more clients than they can help,” he says. “The result is that in a large scheme over time, the cases slow down.”

Ferguson visited his county courthouses and personally navigated every case, and he discovered that in a nine-month period, three counties had disposed of only 14 criminal cases total.

He implemented a streamlined case management process that dramatically sped up timelines, and in 2017, Ferguson secured a grant from the Texas Indigent Commission to create the Far West Texas Regional Public Defender’s Office, which serves the entire district.

On the civil side, Ferguson developed a template requiring cases to be disposed within specific deadlines. He also effectively eliminated stacking trial weeks. Soon, Ferguson’s civil docket dwindled, so he looked at other improvements he could make. He created a website and a new process for self-represented cases, and the average length of a pro se divorce went from 18 months down to 61 days, he says.

The Hon. Dean Rucker, a senior judge in Midland, Texas, considers one of Ferguson’s most innovative adjustments to be his protocol for recording civil and criminal court proceedings.

“For large judicial districts in Texas like the 394th District Court, these procedures, pioneered by Judge Ferguson and his able court coordinator/court recorder, are a welcome answer to a difficult situation,” Rucker says.

Ferguson likens himself to a teacher, saying that by “making the process better,” people will develop more trust with and faith in the legal system.

His teaching style was evident globally in 2021 when Ferguson explained to an attorney stuck behind a cat filter during a Zoom hearing—how to revert to human form. The video, nicknamed “I am not a cat” after said attorney felt the need to issue such a disclaimer, went viral and served as a representation of the early days of the pandemic.

Ferguson, 56, announced his retirement from the bench in 2023, but will remain on multiple committees and commissions, allowing him to help other judges make similar improvements.

“My belief is, if you do something you do because it’s always been done, you’re wrong,” he says. “Always ask, ‘Why?’”

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

When the Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners opened up applications for its Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination in May, some members of its Licensure Pathway Development Committee were nervous.

They knew the success of the program allowing ABA-accredited law school graduates to work closely with a supervising attorney instead of taking the bar exam hinged on the buy-in from the state’s potential employers. If no licensed lawyers signed up for the program, which consisted of a 675-hour paid apprenticeship under a qualified supervising state-licensed lawyer, there would be no places for the candidates to work and the program would fall apart.

Instead, within a month, 62 attorneys from 57 employers had applied to serve as supervisors. By early October, those numbers had grown to 101 attorneys from 87 employers ranging from Nike to Public Defender Services of Lane County to the Oregon Judicial Department.

“It’s more popular than we could even have imagined,” says Joanna Perini-Abbott, co-chair of the committee and a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. Taking the traditional bar exam produced by the National Conference of Bar Examiners remains an option to join the bar.

Other states are considering Oregon-style plans. In March, the Washington Supreme Court approved, in concept, additional pathways to the bar involving supervised practice. Nevada’s new three-pronged licensure plan includes supervised practice. And members of Oregon’s committee have consulted their counterparts in Ohio, Minnesota and Utah, says Addie Tobin Smith, the other committee co-chair and a legal consultant in Portland.

Brian Gallini, a former dean of Willamette University School of Law and a former committee member, believes the portfolio exam can do to the traditional bar exam what “the iPhone did to the Blackberry.

“Oh, wait—we can help people get licensed while addressing legal deserts and racial disparities and a host of other issues? Sign me up,” he says.

The committee was made up of 14 members, including deans of the state’s three law schools, a law student, practicing attorneys, the CEO of the Oregon State Bar, and representatives of the Oregon State Bar Board of Bar Examiners, the Oregon State Bar Board of Governors and the Oregon bench. A separate working group representing various stakeholders also offered input, Smith says.

The state’s move comes as jurisdictions consider if and when they will use the NextGen Bar Exam in place of the NCBE’s Uniform Bar Exam, which sunsets in 2028.

But the glimmer of inspiration dates back to just before the pandemic, Perini-Abbott says, as data emerged showing racial disparities in bar exam performance and other research questioned whether the bar exam was a good measure of minimum competence. Then when COVID-19 hit, Oregon scrapped the rigid rules surrounding the UBE and offered an option to take the bar exam remotely and grant diploma privilege to 2020 graduates.

In May, the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar approved a policy shift allowing states to use methods of licensure beyond the traditional bar exam. The May 2024 graduating class is the first to be offered the new pathway. By October, 49 applicants had received their provisional licenses to practice law and 27 were in process, according to the committee.

“It is not a rubber stamp,” says Smith, who has graded some of the provisional attorneys’ portfolio work, some of which did not meet standards. “It’s still an exam.”

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

Rodrigo Camarena has been advocating for immigrants since he was a child. By the time he was 8, this son of an electrical engineer father and an attorney mother was the family’s translator, navigating the bureaucracy when they immigrated to northern Virginia from Mexico City via a work visa.

“I watched my parents navigate our country’s very broken immigration system,” says Camarena, 40. “Language and accessibility is a real issue, and the laws are difficult to understand and navigate—even by folks that have authorization to be here and have support of advocates.”

With those ideas about immigration swarming through Camarena’s head, he dove into his studies, planning on tackling a legal career immersed in immigration law. He majored in economics and philosophy at New York University, intent on going to law school.

But that was a major stumbling block: Camarena attempted the LSAT, but his score wasn’t as high as he had hoped.

“I knew I needed an advanced degree, but there were a lot of barriers to going to law school,” he says.

So he pivoted, attending the London School of Economics instead. After graduating in 2011, he spent time in Mexico and Brazil. As soon as he returned to the United States in 2012, Camarena took a series of jobs in immigration. He was the executive director of Mixteca, an immigrant-rights organization in Brooklyn, New York; he then became a strategy director at Purpose Campaigns, where he led digital advocacy campaigns for nonprofits; and he is now the interim co-director of Pro Bono Net. There, he is helping the organization scale its tool, Citizenshipworks, which Camarena describes as “TurboTax for becoming a U.S. citizen.” He is also the director of Pro Bono Net’s Justicia Lab (formerly Immigration Advocates Network), a nonprofit that’s helped more than 500,000 immigrants find support.

Citizenshipworks helps permanent residents navigate the naturalization process in English, Spanish or Chinese. It also provides a list of all the nonprofit legal aid advocates in each community who may be able to help with a given case.

“We’re in a moment where being an immigrant is incredibly political when it shouldn’t be,” Camarena says.

In 2019, Camarena was reading a Spanish-language newspaper when he came across an article about wage theft, which costs American workers about $50 billion annually, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. He and Justicia Lab partnered with other policy work centers to create an app called ¡Reclamo! that has helped hundreds of New York immigrants screen, report and reclaim stolen wages. The app has a wage theft calculator to determine how much has been stolen, and it also streamlines the complaint-filing process. So far, Camarena says, the app has helped recover more than $1.5 million in stolen wages since launching the tool in beta in October 2022.

“Unscrupulous employers often prey on immigrant workers who they believe will be fearful of reporting violations,” explains Elizabeth Jordan, the co-legal director of Make the Road New York, a nonprofit helping immigrants, who worked with Camarena to develop the ¡Reclamo! app.

When he’s not working, Camarena spends time on his Brooklyn patio, tending to fruits and vegetables he grows. His favorite thing to do is take his wife of seven years and their 4-year-old son to not-so-nearby farms, where they can breathe fresh air, pick their own fruits and vegetables, and play with farm animals.

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

Noella Sudbury knew she was onto something big when she helped organize Utah’s first free “Expungement Day” in 2018. The former public defender and Goldman Sachs compliance attorney had gone to work in 2016 for Ben McAdams, then-mayor of Salt Lake County. McAdams had introduced initiatives to address criminal justice reform, and Sudbury had become immersed in improving the expungement process.

One in three adult Americans has a criminal record, which she says can create significant barriers to housing, employment or even volunteering in their children’s classrooms.

Expungement was also expensive and complicated and, at that time, typically took about 18 months to complete, Sudbury says.

After hundreds of people came to the Expungement Day event, Sudbury knew she needed to do more.”It was the first time I think as a lawyer that I realized how big of a justice gap we had and how access to this simple legal proceeding could absolutely transform someone’s life,” says Sudbury, 39, who earned a bachelor’s degree in social justice from the University of Utah in 2006 and a JD from the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law in 2009.

Sudbury founded Clean Slate Utah, a nonprofit that raises awareness of automatic record clearance, in 2021. She also had begun working on clean slate laws in other states; there are now 12.

Sudbury started Rasa Legal in 2022 to make the process of clearing a criminal record simpler and more affordable. She researched how to use technology to assist with expungement and learned about Pennsylvania’s Clean Slate law. By the following year, she had helped introduce and pass a similar clean slate law in Utah. It requires the government to automatically clear certain misdemeanor records.

“Noella sees individuals as they are and not by their record,” says Destiny Garcia, the executive director of Clean Slate Utah, who worked with Sudbury to clear her own criminal record. “She will sit down with someone, and she will listen to their story. She will take the time to get to know them and understand how to help them.”

In the course of her work, Sudbury realized many people still needed help determining their eligibility for expungement and finding a lawyer to complete the process. That’s where Rasa comes in. Using its $15 eligibility screening tool, in less than three minutes, people can see what’s on their record and whether it can be cleared. If they have eligible cases, they can hire Rasa to clear those records using custom software that streamlines the process. While law firms can charge thousands of dollars for expungement, Rasa starts at $250 per case.

“What sets Noella apart is she’s out there changing the structural framework of the laws that then enable her to serve consumers in a way she thinks is necessary,” says Natalie Anne Knowlton, the founder of Access to Justice Ventures and a 2023 ABA Journal Legal Rebel.

According to Sudbury, Rasa, which has 16 employees and now offers its services in Utah and Arizona, has helped nearly 17,000 people and fully cleared more than 3,000 records. It is currently working to expand into other states and provide workforce development services to clients.

In her free time, Sudbury loves spending time with her two kids, traveling and being in nature.

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

Before artificial intelligence became a common legal tool, Jacqueline Schafer was hooked on it.

This was back in 2018, and Schafer, a litigator who had started her career in BigLaw at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and spent several years doing appellate work as an assistant attorney general in Washington and Alaska, was working as in-house counsel at a national nonprofit. She had taken on her first pro bono asylum case, representing a mother and her toddler at risk for deportation to Honduras.

“There were really terribly scary stakes, and at the final hearing, the judge was very biased,” Schafer recalls. So she pointed the judge toward one of her exhibits showcasing the medical evidence.

In an asylum hearing, Schafer says, you have one final chance to show the judge why your client deserves asylum. “I had written a long brief where I referenced factual evidence, like the medical declaration. But what truly appeared to make the difference was when the judge went directly to review the declaration himself,” says Schafer, 42.

The experience helped Schafer envision how technology could make this simple for every judge: With the click of a button, they could access hyperlinked pleadings.

“The case really had a huge impact on how I thought about change,” she says. “We could make it so much less stressful to prepare the documents.”

In 2020, Schafer raised capital for what would soon become Clearbrief, a system using AI to search through volumes of discovery to find relevant facts and related concepts. Once the data is extracted, Clearbrief provides a fact-checking link that displays every cited source and scores how well other evidence in the record supports it.

“Just the idea of Clearbrief was transformational,” says Mark Britton, a former lawyer, founding investor in Clearbrief and Expedia executive who founded the legal marketplace Avvo. “The idea that whatever you assert or would like to assert in a brief is rated by an AI assistant that tells you how supported the assertion is in both the facts and the law—I immediately had goosebumps.”

Clearbrief is used by hundreds of law firms, including large global firms, courts and government agencies, Schafer says. And it can help smaller law firms compete with larger ones, says Joseph McMullen, an attorney in San Diego who used the technology for a big immigration case last year, winning $1.5 million for his clients.

“Justice and accountability in the courts can feel elusive for people without pockets deep enough to afford expensive law firms with large document review teams to distill vast amounts of records and data down to their essential facts,” says McMullen, who relied on Clearbrief to help him with a case against Customs and Border Patrol after it kept two children in an underground holding area for 33 hours before being released.

Schafer says the process of building Clearbrief has been one gigantic lesson in learning. She did not have a tech background, so she reached out to many people prominent in the tech field, asking each if she could meet them for coffee to talk about AI.

“That’s how I learned,” she says. “I had to be humble: I sounded like an idiot at first, and lawyers are afraid of looking foolish.”

But it worked. She learned venture capital and AI lingo, and built her vision piece by piece with a goal that every pleading prepared globally will be written with Clearbrief.

“We’re at a tipping point that I dreamed about: When a certain number of the larger firms start using it, then others hear about it,” she says.

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

For the last three decades, complaints about the bar exam were common but change was minimal. But Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt wanted to do more than grumble.

While most lawyers take the bar exam and then never want to think about it again, Merritt, 69, and Howarth, 74, have never forgotten. They have been diligently committed to keeping the conversation going about changes to the traditional exam, which launched 53 years ago.

Each marched forward, conducting research over 25 years that investigated why licensing processes need to change and what remedies would halt the inequities stemming from the current exam process.

Now, with the Uniform Bar Exam due to sunset in 2028, these two retired academics are the go-to advisers for jurisdictions evaluating wide-ranging options for licensure as they bring the duo’s ideas on reform closer to reality.

“They are two incredible thought leaders in the licensure space,” says Brian Gallini, dean of Quinnipiac University School of Law, who worked with both women on the Oregon State Bar’s reform efforts. “We should have been listening to them much earlier.”

Merritt, professor emerita at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, was co-principal investigator of the landmark 2020 report Building a Better Bar. She left teaching a year later to devote her retirement years to bar reform and has been hands-on in reform efforts around the country, including those in Oregon, Nevada and California. In addition, she has spoken to groups in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Utah, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas and Massachusetts about bar reform.

Howarth, who was dean at Michigan State University College of Law from 2008-2016 and, as of July 1, professor emerita at University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law, wrote the 2022 book Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing. Along with advising other states’ efforts, Howarth chairs Nevada’s Foundational Subject Requirement and Performance Test Implementation Task Force and is a member of the Commission to Study the Administration of the Bar Examination and Licensing of Attorneys. The commission developed the Nevada Plan, a unique three-stage licensing process mimicking that of medical licensure.

The pair, who met in 2016, also is involved with the National Center for State Courts’ look at practical suggestions for licensure reform: They both sit on its Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform’s bar admissions working group.

“The two of them are quite the dynamic duo,” says Susan Smith Bakhshian, the director of bar programs and a clinical professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, who worked with both women on California’s failed attempt to create a portfolio bar exam. “They work together, not in a way of two people who have exactly the same skills, but they complement each other.”

Bar none

Both women’s focus on the bar exam bloomed in the 1990s.

For Merritt, the obsession started after a colleague asked her to analyze statistics related to states raising their passing scores.

“The first thing that actually jumped out was that states were deciding to raise the score just as significant numbers of women and people of color were coming into the profession,” she says. “That naturally concerned and outraged me.”

Meanwhile, Howarth was then a professor at Golden Gate University School of Law, “very much a public-interest, nonfancy law school for working adults,” she says. She saw firsthand how the current system favors students with the financial resources to afford expensive bar prep and unpaid time off to memorize myriad legal standards, she says.

As educators, each saw good students who performed well in classrooms, moot courts and legal clinics but couldn’t pass the bar. Many times, it stemmed from racial and other inequity issues, they say. In 2023, white bar-takers in the U.S. had a first-time pass rate of 84%; Asians, 74%; Hispanics, 71%; and Blacks, 58%, according to the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.

And each encountered many law students who were not practice-ready at graduation, as law school curricula and the pencil-and-paper bar exam emphasized memorization over skills.

“I had been a very pointy-headed, front-of-the-classroom professor,” Merritt says, “but coming into the clinic, I just thought, ‘Wow, there’s all these ways in which we’re not preparing our students if they don’t take a clinic and really serve clients.’”

When the pandemic initially hit, academic peers fretted as jurisdictions were forced to rethink the necessity of in-person bar exams. But “Joan said, ‘You know, there’s an opportunity here for us to speak up about the bar exam,’” Merritt adds.

And they did just that. In March 2020, they worked with a group of other academics to publish “The Bar Exam and the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Need for Immediate Action” in the St. Louis University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series.

“My only complaint is, I can’t keep up with Debby in terms of her productivity,” Howarth says. “She’s supersmart and superbright and has a motor to keep working that is really remarkable. We are very happy to keep learning from each other.”

Howarth’s “values are not just ones that I admire and share, but she’s so committed to them,” Merritt adds. “I strive to be as committed.”

Still, they don’t always agree on tactics. It took Howarth a while to convince Merritt to work on Nevada’s new multiple-choice exam.

“I never in my life thought that I would spend part of my retirement working on a multiple-choice test,” Merritt says. “But in Nevada’s plan, it works.”

Howarth anticipates that 10 years from now, the licensing process will vary from state to state, and most new lawyers will have had some kind of supervised practice before becoming licensed.

“People will get that that’s fundamentally necessary for client protection,” she adds. “And we will have multiple pathways for licensure that are less expensive and that will help us to have a more inclusive and more effective profession.”

Merritt finishes Howarth’s thought: “And one that serves clients more effectively, and I hope, also gains more recognition among states—that if you’ve been licensed by one state, then you’re a competent lawyer, and you can simply come and practice in our state.”

These days, they are excited to be change-makers watching their own ideas come to fruition, with 13 jurisdictions making or considering moves to change licensure, according to the website devoted to bar exam changes that Merritt maintains.

“Sometimes, we still have trouble believing it is happening,” Merritt says. “Sometimes, we look back and say, ‘Remember, even as recently as 2016? Did we think any of this was possible?’”

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

In early 2015, Swapna Reddy volunteered for a week at the South Texas Family Residential Center, an immigration detention center near the U.S.-Mexico border that held thousands of asylum-seeking parents and their children.

That’s where Reddy met Suny Rodriguez Alvarado and her 7-year-old son, who had been at the center for four months after fleeing violence and persecution in Honduras. Reddy and three of her classmates—Conchita Cruz, Dorothy Tegeler and Liz Willis, who were members of Yale Law School’s Worker & Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic—later represented them in their immigration cases.

They not only helped Rodriguez and her son win her cases, but at her urging, they also founded the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project in May 2015 to assist other families facing wrongful detention and deportation.

“Regardless of how you feel about asylum-seekers, I think it’s hard to take issue with the idea that asylum-seekers deserve to know what the laws are and deserve to know how to follow them,” says Reddy, 38, whose parents emigrated from India and raised her and her brothers outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

In 2016, shortly before graduating from law school, Reddy and her co-founders took the project to the New York City-based Urban Justice Center. They employed what was then a unique model—rapid-response remote legal aid. They also built a private online community to connect asylum-seekers who would otherwise be geographically isolated.

“It’s hard to remember, but before the pandemic, the idea of remote work was pretty uncommon, and there was a lot of skepticism that it could be done effectively,” says Michael Wishnie, who co-directs Yale’s Worker & Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic and now serves on the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project’s board. “And yet they perceived that for new asylum-seekers who were settling in rural Georgia or Tennessee or Utah, there just wasn’t an option to provide on-the-ground legal services.”

The project provides its members—now more than 680,000 asylum-seekers from 175 countries—with access to a virtual legal help desk, news alerts and other critical resources as they navigate the immigration system. The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project no longer offers direct representation; instead, it gives asylum-seekers the tools and know-how to take control of their own cases, says Reddy, who serves as the organization’s co-executive director alongside Cruz.

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, which has a remote team of more than 20 lawyers, technologists and other experts, also asks its members to help set its priorities and advocate to improve the immigration system. Reddy says a top concern for members now is lengthy delays for work permits and asylum interviews.

Among its collective wins, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project and its members last year successfully advocated for new regulations that will allow immigrants facing delays in work permit renewals to get a year and a half of additional employment authorization.

“An awesome thing about Swapna is she’s a Renaissance woman,” says Becca Heller, the co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, who has known Reddy since law school. “She is a brilliant lawyer but also brilliant at technology. She’s been able to bring a lot of that to ASAP and think about how do tech and data and movement-building all intersect in this space, and how do you leverage that to something bigger?”

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

Some people talk about giving up their luxurious lifestyles to help those in need.

In 1999, Roy Ferguson actually did it.

He and his wife sold their Mercedes and their Houston house and purchased a used four-cylinder truck. They then moved to Marfa, a town of just under 2,000 in an ultrarural part of West Texas about 60 miles from the Mexican border, landing at a ranch with no air conditioning.

Working out of a shuttered hotel, Ferguson practiced what he calls “community law,” helping locals with civil and family law matters. Thirteen years later, Ferguson won the judgeship for the 394th Judicial District Court, the state’s largest judicial district, covering five counties in far-west Texas.

Immediately after taking the bench, Ferguson noticed the length of time it took per case.

“Because there are so few lawyers, they end up taking on more clients than they can help,” he says. “The result is that in a large scheme over time, the cases slow down.”

Ferguson visited his county courthouses and personally navigated every case, and he discovered that in a nine-month period, three counties had disposed of only 14 criminal cases total.

He implemented a streamlined case management process that dramatically sped up timelines, and in 2017, Ferguson secured a grant from the Texas Indigent Commission to create the Far West Texas Regional Public Defender’s Office, which serves the entire district.

On the civil side, Ferguson developed a template requiring cases to be disposed within specific deadlines. He also effectively eliminated stacking trial weeks. Soon, Ferguson’s civil docket dwindled, so he looked at other improvements he could make. He created a website and a new process for self-represented cases, and the average length of a pro se divorce went from 18 months down to 61 days, he says.

The Hon. Dean Rucker, a senior judge in Midland, Texas, considers one of Ferguson’s most innovative adjustments to be his protocol for recording civil and criminal court proceedings.

“For large judicial districts in Texas like the 394th District Court, these procedures, pioneered by Judge Ferguson and his able court coordinator/court recorder, are a welcome answer to a difficult situation,” Rucker says.

Ferguson likens himself to a teacher, saying that by “making the process better,” people will develop more trust with and faith in the legal system.

His teaching style was evident globally in 2021 when Ferguson explained to an attorney stuck behind a cat filter during a Zoom hearing—how to revert to human form. The video, nicknamed “I am not a cat” after said attorney felt the need to issue such a disclaimer, went viral and served as a representation of the early days of the pandemic.

Ferguson, 56, announced his retirement from the bench in 2023, but will remain on multiple committees and commissions, allowing him to help other judges make similar improvements.

“My belief is, if you do something you do because it’s always been done, you’re wrong,” he says. “Always ask, ‘Why?’”

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

When the Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners opened up applications for its Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination in May, some members of its Licensure Pathway Development Committee were nervous.

They knew the success of the program allowing ABA-accredited law school graduates to work closely with a supervising attorney instead of taking the bar exam hinged on the buy-in from the state’s potential employers. If no licensed lawyers signed up for the program, which consisted of a 675-hour paid apprenticeship under a qualified supervising state-licensed lawyer, there would be no places for the candidates to work and the program would fall apart.

Instead, within a month, 62 attorneys from 57 employers had applied to serve as supervisors. By early October, those numbers had grown to 101 attorneys from 87 employers ranging from Nike to Public Defender Services of Lane County to the Oregon Judicial Department.

“It’s more popular than we could even have imagined,” says Joanna Perini-Abbott, co-chair of the committee and a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. Taking the traditional bar exam produced by the National Conference of Bar Examiners remains an option to join the bar.

Other states are considering Oregon-style plans. In March, the Washington Supreme Court approved, in concept, additional pathways to the bar involving supervised practice. Nevada’s new three-pronged licensure plan includes supervised practice. And members of Oregon’s committee have consulted their counterparts in Ohio, Minnesota and Utah, says Addie Tobin Smith, the other committee co-chair and a legal consultant in Portland.

Brian Gallini, a former dean of Willamette University School of Law and a former committee member, believes the portfolio exam can do to the traditional bar exam what “the iPhone did to the Blackberry.

“Oh, wait—we can help people get licensed while addressing legal deserts and racial disparities and a host of other issues? Sign me up,” he says.

The committee was made up of 14 members, including deans of the state’s three law schools, a law student, practicing attorneys, the CEO of the Oregon State Bar, and representatives of the Oregon State Bar Board of Bar Examiners, the Oregon State Bar Board of Governors and the Oregon bench. A separate working group representing various stakeholders also offered input, Smith says.

The state’s move comes as jurisdictions consider if and when they will use the NextGen Bar Exam in place of the NCBE’s Uniform Bar Exam, which sunsets in 2028.

But the glimmer of inspiration dates back to just before the pandemic, Perini-Abbott says, as data emerged showing racial disparities in bar exam performance and other research questioned whether the bar exam was a good measure of minimum competence. Then when COVID-19 hit, Oregon scrapped the rigid rules surrounding the UBE and offered an option to take the bar exam remotely and grant diploma privilege to 2020 graduates.

In May, the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar approved a policy shift allowing states to use methods of licensure beyond the traditional bar exam. The May 2024 graduating class is the first to be offered the new pathway. By October, 49 applicants had received their provisional licenses to practice law and 27 were in process, according to the committee.

“It is not a rubber stamp,” says Smith, who has graded some of the provisional attorneys’ portfolio work, some of which did not meet standards. “It’s still an exam.”

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast: