It Was 20 Years Ago Today ...

The following attorneys all began practicing around the time New York Metro Super Lawyers magazine was first published in 2006. Since then, one has prosecuted international genocide in The Hague, another joined U.S. marshals on an early-morning raid, while a third sued Rikers Island over an inmate who was given no access to his meds and tried to kill himself.

After law school, David B. Rankin worked out of his apartment. “Now I’m talking to you in a corner office on Park Avenue and 40th Street,” he says. “I had so much help from so many people. The legal community in New York City helped me get from a bedroom in Williamsburg to where I am now.” 

The law has changed significantly during this time: No-fault divorce is in effect, filing fees are up significantly in immigration courts, and AI has made the profession more efficient and more worrisome. These attorneys address such changes and more.

The Law

Camisha L. Simmons, Simmons Legal; Bankruptcy: Business; Texas Tech University School of Law 2006: I was thinking about becoming a biochemist or a geneticist. But in the ‘90s, what happened with Rodney King and the police beating, then the trial where the police officers were found not guilty, that just surprised me and inspired me to say, “OK, there’s obviously injustice in the justice system. So maybe I need to be a lawyer.”

Allison Gray, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer; Immigration; New York University School of Law 2005: After undergrad I spent a couple months in a French literature Ph.D. program at Penn. I quickly realized that was not the greatest career path in terms of job offers. When I was younger, teachers had encouraged me to consider law school because they said it was a good career path for people who enjoyed research, writing, things like that. I don’t have any lawyers in my family, so I decided, “Let me get a job as a paralegal to figure out what do lawyers even do.” I enjoyed it, so I applied to law school.

Danielle R. Petitti, Petitti PLLC; Family Law; New York Law School 2005: Probably like a lot of other children who are precocious, you hear “You should be a lawyer.” I have, probably, a natural personality that is geared towards litigation. The other part was I wanted to do something that I thought could make a difference in the world but also make a good living.

Viren Mascarenhas, Mascarenhas Law; International; Columbia Law School 2005: I was a dual economics and English literature major. I took the LSAT and the GRE. I was on the fence as to whether to apply to a graduate program and get a Ph.D. in comparative literature. I also had a job lined up in investment banking at Citigroup in London. I ended up thinking that law was the right way to combine my intellectual aspirations but in a practical setting—in the real world.

Mason Weisz, ZwillGen; Privacy Data Protection, Internet Law; New York University School of Law 2005: I liked constructing arguments when I was a kid, and I thought that would be an interesting way to make a living.

David B. Rankin, Beldock Levine & Hoffman; Civil Rights; New York Law School 2005: I had a friend’s dad who fought some of the first needle-exchange cases [in which activists were arrested for distributing clean hypodermic needles to prevent the spread of HIV]. My friend’s dad was not rich by any stretch of the imagination, and I thought, “Wow, you can do really cool legal work and really cool work for society, and actually still have a middle-class living.”

The Cases 

Weisz, Privacy Data Protection: Early in my career, when I was doing IP litigation, I went on an anti-counterfeiting raid, where we met the U.S. marshals and a locksmith at 6 a.m. We got an order from the court saying, “You’ve got permission to go in there and seize documents and counterfeit goods.” The locksmith drilled the lock and the marshals went in. That was one of the wildest and craziest days of my legal career. … That day, a lot of my friends were sitting in warehouses, doing hour No. 752 of some document-review for litigation, representing Bank A against Bank B, and I was in sunny San Diego with the marshals busting down the door. It was a lot of fun.

Gray, Immigration: I remember a case many years ago with a foreign national. We were working on his green card, and I could see from the questionnaire that he was married but he wasn’t providing information about his spouse. It turned out his wife was transgender. It was my first time working for a transgender client. Interestingly, the law, at that time, did not recognize same-sex marriage for immigration purposes, because it was before the Supreme Court case legalizing same-sex marriage on a federal basis. However, because the [transition] happened before this couple got married, and she was now considered female, it was viewed as a heterosexual marriage. So she was able to get the green card.

Simmons, Bankruptcy: One case not too long ago dealt with a difficult client with some oceanfront property in Southampton. The owner of the properties—they were held by LLCs—was controversial, and publications like The Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair did articles related to that bankruptcy in the Eastern District of New York. It was a long, drawn-out case. The upstream owner insulted everybody. … There were two homes on the compound—so two LLCs. The owner of the LLCs listed them for $150 million. I represented the LLC on one of the homes. I had to replace previous counsel that the upstream owner grew disgruntled with. This case still hasn’t been closed out. We’re at the tail end.

Mascarenhas, International: A pivotal case in my career was the Genocide Convention case between Bosnia and Serbia. I was a law clerk, tasked with reviewing the voluminous evidence that Bosnia put forward that was building its case for why Serbia should accept liability for breaching the Genocide Convention. The evidence was newspaper accounts, reports published by human-rights organizations, photographs of atrocious things that happened, affidavits signed by doctors or other people about killings and murders. … You have to keep being human about what you’re doing, but you also have to put on your lawyer hat. That meant not being clinical, but essentially making sure you were marrying the evidence to the legal elements and seeing whether one party had met the burden of proof. That’s the approach I take in my cases very much now.

Petitti, Family Law: The two senior lawyers in the office were on vacation, someone came into the office and I did the consultation—filing an emergency application and a writ to take two very young children from [the client’s] wife, who was schizophrenic, untreated, and holed up in an apartment with the children in Upper Manhattan. Then we had to go to the police to serve that order and physically remove the children. I was right out of law school. When we were there, I was hiding, standing with my back against the wall, when the police opened the door. It was such an uncomfortable thing—you’re coming to this woman’s home to take her kids.

The police open the door and the 5-year-old son runs out to my client and says, “I knew you would come, I knew you would come, I’m getting my shoes, just wait for me.” The child knew it was dangerous. When we opened the door to the apartment, it was just what you’d expect a seriously mentally ill person to do in an apartment holed up with two kids. It was very serious. We got custody of the kids.

Rankin, Civil Rights: Nicholas Feliciano, who should have never been at Rikers Island in the first place, got into a fight to protect a buddy, gets punched, then gets taken to a holding area in an adult section of the jail. He should have been taken to medical hours earlier—he wasn’t—and continued to experience a mental-health crisis. He was off his meds, they hadn’t given him his prescription in weeks and he continued to decompensate. Instead of doing anything to help him, they just watched him try to hang himself. They had the audacity to say his suicide attempt was some kind of manipulative gesture—like trying to kill himself was somehow trying to impose something on the guards. It was deeply offensive. My work around Rikers Island, that case and a number of other cases, shows how completely broken that place is. [The city agreed to pay Madeline Feliciano, Nicholas’ grandmother, $28.75 million to settle her civil rights lawsuit in 2024 as a result of team effort with Jonathon Moore and Regina Powers, after Nicholas survived with severe brain damage.] We understand it to be the largest civil rights settlement in New York’s history, and second or third in the nation.

The Changes 

Gray, Immigration: Filing fees have really increased. There’s something called premium processing, where you pay a fee to the immigration service for certain case types. In 2008, it was $1,225. Today it’s $2,805. … You used to be able to call and speak with an immigration service officer on the phone. Nowadays, it’s much harder to get through to an actual person, and they typically say, “Send us an email.”

Petitti, Family Law: When I started practicing, we did not have a formula for spousal support [a calculation that takes both spouses’ incomes into account]. We also didn’t have no-fault divorce in New York. People used to have to fight to get divorced—grounds had to be established. If you couldn’t, you could not be divorced. The court is also making progress in how it views domestic violence—not enough progress, in my opinion, but they’ve certainly made progress. Laws have shifted. The courts are now mandated to consider findings of domestic violence when making a visitation or custody order.

Simmons, Bankruptcy: We went from Delaware and the Southern District of New York being the main two jurisdictions getting a lot of the big company bankruptcies to, over the last 10 years, the Southern District of Texas as one of the busiest bankruptcy courts in the nation. It started when we had that oil and gas restructuring wave in 2015-16. A large firm started steering a lot of the large oil and gas cases to the Southern District of Texas, particularly Houston. Debtor-side bankruptcy attorneys got more comfortable with that court. 

Gray, Immigration: Our clients are definitely still hiring foreign nationals where it makes sense for them to do so. The big theme is there’s a lot more anxiety both among the company sponsors and especially among the foreign nationals—about traveling and getting calls from green-card holders who don’t feel safe traveling because of some of the news reports. We’re encouraging companies to start the green-card process much sooner during someone’s employment. It used to be if they still had three years of status left, that should be plenty of time, unless they were from India or China. That’s no longer the case.

Mascarenhas, International: There’s a lot of instability right now. It’s difficult for governments and businesses to plan ahead, because of, for example, the threat of or enactment of tariffs. Planning gets disrupted and trade relations get disrupted, and that uncertainty gives rise to disputes, because parties can’t negotiate and do business with each other with certainty. Difficult times, whether economic or political, require solutions that oftentimes can’t be resolved through negotiation or mediation and might therefore require going to courts or arbitral tribunals.

The Future 

Gray, Immigration: I’ve seen various attempts to accomplish bipartisan immigration reform. It’s come close but the system remains flawed. It’s made some improvements in some areas. An example of a good thing is the H-1B registration process [for employers hiring non-immigrant foreign workers as temporary workers] now happening online, whereas in the good old days we had to prep and file a bunch of paper-based filings, only for two-thirds of them to be rejected and sent back to us. Now it’s more efficient, because you register online with just some pieces of information, and you only file the full case if you’ve been selected. By and large, it’s a pretty similar system to what I walked into almost 20 years ago. If I hope for anything, it’s for better training of immigration officers to improve consistent adjudication. 

Mascarenhas, International: I do a lot of work in which I have to represent a sovereign government, or investor or company, suing a foreign government or state-owned company, and there has been more of a trend of non-compliance to pay these awards of judgments that are being rendered. I find that a cause for concern. Rule of law and accountability means compliance.

Simmons, Bankruptcy: AI is going to conduct the basic analyses that usually you would see junior attorneys or support staff perform. AI is still developing; you have to train AI, you have to have accurate information to plug into AI. But in time, it’s going to be very accurate, and it’s going to be used, because it’s more efficient and it’s going to cut costs. That’s one thing we’ve got to watch for: Is the industry going to embrace AI tools, and what is that going to mean for the junior attorneys and for the legal support staff? 

Weisz, Privacy Data Protection: Practicing AI law isn’t just old skills applied to new laws and new tech, it’s an entirely different sport. For example, our team runs “red team” exercises, testing to see if we can trick clients’ AI systems into crossing legal lines—like spilling trade secrets, violating copyright, giving unsafe health advice, and committing libel. Sometimes we see that the AI system is trying to trick us, lying about its sources and methods, and denying that it did anything wrong. When I was a litigator, usually only the opposing parties were telling tall tales, but now our clients’ own systems are suspect. … These new ways of practicing are just the start, and they’re why I’m not worried about AI replacing me. Nobody who’s seen AI hallucinate is going to let AI police itself.

Petitti, Family Law: A lot of people are concerned about the Supreme Court. I was born in 1980. Did I ever think Roe v. Wade would be overturned? No, I didn’t. Ever. That did not cross my mind. When I was growing up—college, law school—when people would talk about it, I thought it was literally impossible. I call myself a centrist, but it doesn’t matter what political party you’re behind, it should be concerning. Well-decided precedent is just overturned in what seems like a split-second.

Rankin, Civil Rights: I hope the legal profession continues to stand up. Now is the time where the executive has been overstepping and overstretching. We’re supposed to be one of the things that’s pushing back against that, and we need to do it, and we need to do it in a collective way. I think we can. The people are there for it.