Experienced Attorney (5+ years in high-volume legal aid)

**NOTE: Do not submit your application using Idealist. Submit via email as specified below.

Organization: Governments, landlords, employers, and other powerful actors use artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and related technologies to make decisions about how low-income people work, live, learn, and survive. When people are hurt by AI decision-making, they have few places to turn. TechTonic Justice exists to change this.

TechTonic Justice is a newly launched organization to fight the ground-level harms AI causes low-income communities. We do this mainly by supporting local justice movements--legal aid organizations, frontline service providers, grassroots organizers, and affected communities--to identify and fight harmful uses of AI. We emphasize a multidimensional advocacy approach that blends litigation, community activation and organizing, public education, and narrative advocacy. We are based in Los Angeles and offer our services nationwide, with emphasis on the South and the West Coast.

Position description: This permanent, full-time Experienced Attorney position is fully remote with significant travel anticipated (~1-2 trips per month). Candidates who live in or have extensive working experience in the U.S. South are particularly encouraged to apply. As discussed below, candidates must have at least 5 years of experience actively representing clients in a high-volume, civil legal aid organization (including disability protection and advocacy organizations). Candidates that lack this practice experience do not have the qualifications to move forward.

This position will be the organization’s first attorney hire and will join the existing staff of three, which includes the Founder/President (also an attorney) and two senior community organizers. The successful candidate will be onboarding around the same time as another new staff member in organizational operations.

Any chance of long-term success in improving the lives of low-income people and minimizing the harms that AI causes requires that those closest to injustice—the communities affected and their allies and advocates—be front and center in change efforts. To that end, the Attorney’s primary activities include:

• Build our legal advocacy approach in harmony with our organizing strategy
• Train and educate attorneys, policy professionals, and affected communities
• Offer technical assistance to advocates challenging harmful AI uses
• Devise strategies to challenge AI-based decision-making in core legal aid issue areas, like benefits, employment, education, housing, child welfare, and domestic violence
• Research and track reported uses of AI in core legal aid issue areas
• As resources permit, co-counsel with local advocates on litigation and write amicus briefs
• Build infrastructure to facilitate engagement by affected communities and their frontline advocates in AI policy discourse
• Supervise legal interns and fellows
• As needed, support internal organizational compliance with applicable laws around taxes, employment, tax-exempt status, and the practice of law

Job requirements:

• Candidates must have at least 5 years of experience actively representing clients in a high-volume, civil legal aid organization (including disability protection and advocacy organizations). Specifically, you must have experienced the pressures that frontline attorneys with significant caseloads face, understand the emotional toll of injustice on client communities and their attorneys, have litigated cases with imperfect facts under less-than-ideal circumstances, encountered the tensions between adequate resolutions for individual clients and opportunities for systems-level advocacy, and have broad familiarity with laws that regulate the activities of federally-funded legal aid organizations.
• ****Note: Candidates who lack this practice experience do not have the qualifications to move forward, no matter how otherwise accomplished. This Attorney position requires a deep familiarity with the civil legal aid world. We will welcome applications from attorneys with different professional backgrounds in future openings.
• Knowledge of and/or experience advocating around AI-related injustices and commitment to learning what isn’t known
• Experience collaborating with community organizers in some capacity, whether through legal clinics, “know your rights” workshops, other community education activities, or coordinated issue or electoral campaigns (can be in personal capacity)
• Substantive expertise in one or more of TTJ’s issue areas: public benefits, workers’ rights, housing, K-12 education, child welfare, and domestic violence
• Experience with fact investigations through Freedom of Information laws, community relationships, and outreach and interviews
• Demonstrated capacity for and success in complex affirmative litigation and/or appellate advocacy to effect systemic change
• Risk tolerance to litigate cases that have narrow, but reasonable, paths to victory
• Familiarity with the access to justice ecosystem and social services infrastructure
• Extensive experience with trainings and/or presentations to audiences that include other attorneys, policy professionals, and affected communities
• Excellent public-facing communication skills, both verbally and in writing
• Independent initiative that does not require intensive, detail-heavy supervision
• Flexibility to adapt as needed to a fluid environment of a startup nonprofit organization where immediate needs and timelines may shift
• Comfort moving with urgency (meeting tight deadlines, shifting focus, etc.)
• Emotional intelligence, empathy, and righteous fury
• Collaborative spirit and the skills needed to work affirmingly with teammates, partners, coalition members, and the communities we exist to serve
• Ability to manage several different kinds of work activities concurrently, prioritize appropriately, and deliver quality work product promptly
• Comfort articulating the intersections between poverty, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, language, age, disability, and related characteristics
• Driver’s license, access to a car, and proximity to a convenient airport for travel
• J.D. and active bar license

Other valued attributes:

• Functional fluency in a second language that is used by significant numbers of low-income people; Spanish is particularly helpful
• Candidates who live in or have extensive working experience in the U.S. South are particularly encouraged to apply

If you meet the core experience requirement and some, but not all, of the others, please still consider applying or email us to ask about where you fall short.

We encourage applications from Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, women, LGBTQI+ people, people with disabilities, formerly incarcerated people, and people most impacted by systemic injustice.

Salary: $95K-$125K, depending on experience. Current budget projections anticipate annual cost-of-living salary increases. Service time raises are anticipated but still to be determined (subject to budget considerations).

Schedule Flexibility: TechTonic Justice will allow flexibility in scheduling regular work hours to fit the successful candidate’s personal situation, including health needs or caregiving responsibilities. This flexibility will be limited by reasonable organizational needs, including sufficient availability for internal meetings, external meetings, and community relationships. Candidates should anticipate occasional deviation from scheduled work hours to complete deadline-driven projects.

• ***Presently, we do not anticipate offering regular four-day workweeks. ***

Benefits: The benefits package presently includes (1) 100% of quality medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance for the employee, (2) 50% of dependents’ medical, dental, and vision insurance, (3) an automatic contribution by TechTonic Justice of 4% of annual salary to a Vanguard 403(b) retirement account (employees may also choose to contribute a portion of their salaries), and (4) unlimited paid time off, subject to approval by the President in accordance with relevant operational considerations.

To apply: Submit the following to admin@techtonicjustice.org by 8:59 p.m. pacific time on July 1. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis. Applications received after this time will not be considered. Please include the following:

• Cover letter of up to 2 pages explaining your specific interest in and qualifications for the job (please, no generic cover letters)
• Resume of up to 4 pages
• Litigation-based writing sample (pleading, brief, memo, pre-litigation letter) of up to 10 pages, plus up to 2 pages of explanatory context needed to orient the reader

Process: Applications will be reviewed as they come in. The most promising applicants will be selected for a first interview. The most promising interviewees will be selected for a second interview. There is a possibility that we will ask candidates to complete a short exercise requiring no more than 1 hour of time. We will check references of finalists. We reserve the option to conduct a third round of interviews if necessary. We plan to make a decision in July with the successful applicant starting in August (the specific start date is flexible).

Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities during the application process and after hiring. Please write admin@techtonicjustice.org to request any needed accommodations.

Questions: Please submit any questions to admin@techtonicjustice.org. Please do not call unless needed for purposes of accommodations.

English proficiency is required.

Functional fluency in a second language that is used by significant numbers of low-income people is valued, with Spanish being particularly helpful.