"Remind yourself that you have one
of the most competent, best trained minds in the country and you are
critically needed by millions of underserved members of the public. There are
thousands of ways to help them. Know that you never have to take a position
where your talents are unappreciated or wasted, or where you are abused or
misused." Ronald W. Fox, "Lawful Pursuit: Careers in Public Interest Law"
A
graduate of
Harvard
College
(class of '60) and
Harvard
Law
School
(class of '63), Ron worked for a
large law firm, served in the US Army JAG (the army's legal branch), worked in
an insurance company, and worked for a sole practitioner. In 1971 he had
abandoned the world of corporate law to start a practice representing low and
middle-income people with minimal access to legal advice. He became one of the
first lawyers in the country to offer divorce mediation, a service that can
make the process less traumatic than the traditional adversarial approach.
During that time he served on the board of a
legal services program, created referral
programs for the Massachusetts
Bar Association and the National Lawyers Guild, started an
association of legal clinics, and served as president of a family mediation
association
In 1983, Ron joined the
staff of the Harvard Law School
as Public Interest Career Advisor, where he counseled law students who hoped
to use their degrees to help the disadvantaged and was the editor of
Harvard
Law School’s Public Interest Directory. His
experience at Harvard led him to found the Public Interest Law Career Planning
Center (later the Center for Professional Development in the Law) with the
goal of helping lawyers find ways to make their professional work consistent
with their personal values and beliefs whether they be secular, philosophical,
spiritual or religious. Since 1990, he has presented workshops at over 20 law
schools and bar associations and provided individual guidance to over 1000 law
students and lawyers. His book Lawful Pursuit: Careers in Public Interest
Law was published by the American Bar
Association in 1995. He was the co-founder and co-editor of “
Find Satisfaction in the Law”
an on-line career planning resource sponsored by
FindLaw and served on the Board of Advisors of the International Centre for
Healing and the Law at the Fetzer
Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Ron has also been active in the Jewish community at
both the local and national level for over thirty-five years. In 1971, he and
Joan, his wife, formed a "havurah" with several other families
which for fifteen years shared Jewish holidays, retreats and celebrations.. Ron
and his family spent five weeks touring
Israel
and
working on Kibbutz Gevim in 1981. Ron has served on the boards and social
action committees of numerous religious and charitable organizations,
including his local
United Way
and Jewish Federation, the
Tikkun Leadership Committee through which he raised funds to build
a medical clinic for an impoverished unrecognized Bedouin community in
Israel and is on the Board of Directors of
the Israel Fund, a federation of the Combined Federal Campaign.
If you haven't already done so, look at Description
of My
Services to learn more about his approach to
professional development and career planning.
