The Fighter

 

She got the summer position.

 

When Riker offered her an associate position, she accepted but deferred for a year so that she could clerk for Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano, who is now the senior judicial analyst on the Fox News Channel. Crawford was one of Judge Napolitano’s last clerks before he left the bench.

 

“It was a deep and profoundly gratifying experience to work with her,” Napolitano says by phone from his office at Fox News. “She was hardworking, gifted, and not afraid to express the moral analysis or view of what we were doing. She’s a great writer and an exceptional thinker.

 

“I wrote an opinion that year that created a new cause of action for battered women,” he continues. “Prior to that, a woman who was being battered had to persuade the government to prosecute her husband. Kelly drafted the initial round. We [wrote it] such that the opinion could be applied to married or unmarried couples, straight or homosexual partnerships — any intimate relationships where the physically superior partner assaults the physically inferior partner. Now these ideas are commonplace in the legal community, but in 1993 or 1994, they were considered radical. The opinion was very well received in the press at the time, and it was Kelly’s thoughtfulness that pushed me to go as far as I did.”

 

 

Since entering private practice, Crawford handles mostly defense work in mass tort and product liability cases, often involving pharmaceuticals. As the field has changed to include more class actions and mass torts, Crawford has developed the specialized skills necessary to try large-scale cases. “It’s much more common today to see plaintiff lawyers bringing in conglomerate or class action cases,” she says. “The law is expanding to deal with those.”

 

Bigger cases mean logistical challenges. “There are different legal theories,” she says. “There’s always a heavy motion practice about whether the case can be maintained as a class action — whether it meets the requirements, if it should be located in the federal or state courts. And you have to figure out how to deal with documents, how to deal with witnesses, how to manage the mass size of the litigation so it can be presented to the judge in a way that he or she isn’t overwhelmed.”

 

Crawford is also a member of Riker Danzig’s pro bono committee. She spent close to 10 years shepherding her own pro bono case through the Alabama courts before her client died this past November. The man was one of two defendants convicted and sentenced to death for killing a drug dealer. A group called the Equal Justice Initiative had gone looking for representation on their behalf, contending that they hadn’t received a fair trial.

 

Twice, Crawford visited him in a maximum-security prison in Alabama. He sent her homemade Christmas cards and called regularly. As the case dragged on, he became desperate. “He would say, ‘I don’t want to be here anymore. Can’t we just set an execution date? If we can’t fix this, let it be over,’” Crawford remembers.

 

When the man died (of a medical condition unrelated to his case), he was still waiting for the judge to make a decision on post-conviction release papers that had been filed in 1996. “In defense of the judge, he probably thought he was doing these clients a favor,” Crawford says. “He knew that the longer he held onto these papers, the longer they’d be alive.”

 

Not reaching a legal resolution was frustrating. “It’s very hard to work on a case and have your hands tied with what you can accomplish for your client,” she says. “It makes you realize that although our legal system is the best system we could have in place, it’s not infallible — it is flawed, and sometimes it doesn’t reach the right decisions.”

 

At least the inmate knew that he had a lawyer who never stopped fighting for him. It’s what all of Crawford’s clients have come to expect.