Litigation Director, Family Defense, Queens

The Center for Family Representation Inc. (CFR) is an award-winning, innovative law and policy organization that serves primarily Black and Brown families and youth in Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island with an interdisciplinary legal defense model that serves more than 2400 clients every year. CFR was originally founded in 2002 to dramatically change the trajectory of indigent parents being prosecuted by the City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). Our goal is to defend and protect our clients’ rights, reduce the harm of family separation and prevent or minimize the time any child spends in the foster system. 

CFR provides interdisciplinary family defense with a model that was unique at our founding and that is now being replicated nationally: we assign every client an attorney and a social work staff member, and teams have the support of parent advocates, who are parents with direct personal experience of being investigated and prosecuted by ACS. CFR was the first agency in the country to integrate parents with lived experience into legal teams and now has 7 parent advocates working in all three of our family defense locations. CFR’s Community Advocacy Project represents parents during a child protective investigation (to avoid court involvement where possible) and assists parents in clearing their names from state maltreatment records.

As an agency committed to securing justice for families, we built the Youth Defense practice (YDP) to defend youth at risk of family separation through incarceration. YDP uses the same interdisciplinary model to represent youth being prosecuted in Queens and Manhattan in Supreme Court Youth Parts, during Probation Adjustment and in Delinquency proceedings in Family Court. CFR’s Home for Good program provides legal and social work services to CFR clients in immigration, civil legal services and criminal defense matters, to afford clients an efficient and well-coordinated one-stop solution to a range of issues that threaten family stability. 

Recognized as experts in our fields, we annually train over 500 practitioners in the city, state and around the country on strategies to promote family preservation and interdisciplinary representation, and we provide community based “Know Your Rights” presentations to parents, youth and service providers. We advocate at the city, state and national level for policies that reduce the harm of family separation, and promote parent engagement and justice for youth and families.

Current opening: 

CFR has an opening, starting in October 2025, for a Litigation Director in our Queens Family Defense Practice. In partnership with the Queens Social Work Director, CFR’s other Directors and the Senior Leadership team, the Litigation Director is responsible for the overall administration of the Queens County Family Defense practice including strategic planning, orientation and ongoing training, leadership and active engagement with DEIB activities at CFR, supervision, practice administration, professional development processes, and problem solving in all areas of staff, program, and client management.  CFR is seeking someone to fill this position that brings experience working alongside social workers and people with lived experience. The ideal candidate for this position will have demonstrated experience in supervising legal staff with varying levels of experience as well as in aggressive, client centered trial practice. This position reports to the Managing Director of Litigation.

Responsibilities would include but are not limited to:

• Maintaining alignment with CFR’s values and high quality client-centered representation
  • Along with the Social Work Director, providing strategic guidance and day to day management of the Queens County practice to ensure high quality representation, consistent practice, and quality assurance to achiev