Justice Denied: Excessive Workloads are Driving Systemic Ethics Violations in NYC Legal Services
June 5, 2025
By Navruz Baum
Workers at Catholic Migration Services picket for a fair contract — July 9, 2024
New York City legal services attorneys are routinely assigned workloads that violate the profession’s core ethical standards. Across the sector, attorneys are forced to triage cases, skip essential steps, and work nights and weekends just to stay afloat—while knowing their clients deserve more.
This article draws on the experiences of more than two dozen legal services workers and a close analysis of three major workload studies: the Hurrell-Harring caseload standards, the RAND Corporation’s National Public Defense Workload Study, and the Universal Access caseload report commissioned by New York State’s Office of Court Administration.
Together, the data and testimony tell a clear story: by underestimating the time each case demands, overestimating attorneys’ available hours, and misapplying even these flawed standards, management is assigning workloads that cross ethical lines. The result is a legal services sector failing both its workers and its clients.
Workers Sound the Alarm
In interviews and data provided by twenty-eight workers—spanning seven of New York City’s legal services organizations and multiple practice areas and job titles—legal services staff described a crushing reality: impossible caseloads, missed deadlines, forgotten cases, and a daily struggle to uphold the ethical duty of competent representation. Many requested anonymity to speak freely about routine violations of professional standards.
Attorneys spoke of having to choose between calling clients and filing motions—sometimes missing court-ordered deadlines simply because their workload was too overwhelming. “I am constantly triaging,” said one criminal defense attorney at the Legal Aid Society. “I’m inevitably putting some clients on the back burner.”
The emotional toll of this pace is just as severe. Many attorneys reported mental health struggles, strained marriages, and fraying social relationships. One described regularly waking up in the middle of the night, panicked about unfinished work.
Many attorneys expressed a strong desire to provide better service—through fuller research, regular client communication, and more thorough motion practice. But under current conditions, they said, that level of service simply isn’t possible.
These are not isolated breakdowns. They are the predictable outcome of a system built on overwork. When caseloads exceed ethical standards and burnout is treated as business as usual, ethical violations aren’t aberrations—they’re structural.
Quantifying Workload
Each of the major workload studies reviewed—Hurrell-Harring, RAND, and the Universal Access (UA) caseload report—relies on two core assumptions to estimate how many cases an attorney can ethically handle in a year: how many casework hours are available annually, and how many hours each case requires. Dividing one by the other yields a benchmark caseload. While the basic methodology is shared, the underlying assumptions vary significantly, leading to wide variations across the three studies.
*The RAND study does not prescribe a standard number of casework hours per year, but highlights that judicial workload studies typically assume 1,100 to 1,400 hours
Of the three, the UA caseload report’s estimate of 1,400 casework hours per year is the most credible and locally grounded. Developed by the New York State Office of Court Administration, the UA report reviewed schedule and leave policies in collective bargaining agreements and personnel manuals across NYC legal services organizations—producing a number that reflects real schedules in the sector. In contrast, Hurrell-Harring assumes 1,875 casework hours, a figure that fails to fully account for vacation, sick, and other leave. While the RAND report doesn’t specify a set number, it acknowledges that most judicial workload studies use 1,100 to 1,400 hours of available case-related time—placing the UA figure at the high end of a defensible range and making it the most relevant standard for NYC legal services practice.
However, even the UA study conflates casework hours with total working hours, overlooking significant non-casework obligations such as administrative tasks, continuing legal education (CLEs), mentoring, brief services, and helping clients secure public benefits. The study draws on data from seven housing providers and finds that anywhere from 40% to 84% of working time is spent on casework. Yet instead of summarizing this range with an average, median, or any other standard method, the UA study authors inexplicably choose to assume that 100% of working time is spent on casework—a condition observed at none of the organizations surveyed.
Hurrell-Harring and RAND both estimate the number of hours various types of criminal cases require, but their figures diverge sharply and RAND’s estimates are often multiple times larger than Hurrell-Harrings. In housing defense, the Universal Access (UA) report provides the only existing estimate of hours per case.
Criminal Defense Standards: Misaligned and Outdated
The Hurrell-Harring caseload standards, established in 2016, were developed after New York State was sued for the constructive denial of counsel in five counties. Commissioned by the state’s Office of Indigent Legal Services (ILS), the report set a limit of 300 misdemeanor-equivalent cases per year, based on an assumption of 1,875 casework hours annually.
But these figures are deeply flawed. As examined above, the assumption of 1,875 casework hours is significantly higher than more credible estimates, and the hours per case calculations predate the New York 2020 discovery reform, which dramatically expanded disclosure obligations and imposed new, frontloaded burdens on defense attorneys. Today’s criminal defense cases require far more preparation than the Hurrell-Harring model ever contemplated.
This chart compares case time estimates from Hurrell-Harring and RAND. Category mappings are approximate, as the two studies have different approaches to case categorization.
RAND offers more credible estimates of hours per case, which are often multiple times larger than Hurrell-Harring’s estimates. RAND’s methodology is more rigorous, combining a meta-analysis of 17 public defense workload studies with structured Delphi panels of experienced public defenders. These experts were guided through carefully designed exercises to reach consensus on the time required for effective representation. RAND’s study also better reflects the expanded discovery requirements that have been adopted in many jurisdictions since Hurrell-Harring was developed—something the earlier study does not.
And yet New York City public defenders report caseloads that not only violate the RAND study’s rigorously developed recommendations, but regularly blow past even the inflated thresholds set by Hurrell-Harring. These caseload numbers also obscure the full burden: defenders are expected to spend substantial time on non-casework duties—such as arraignment shifts, intern supervision, administrative tasks, and helping clients navigate the collateral impacts of arrest—which are unaccounted for in estimates of the number of hours available for casework each year.
In interviews, criminal defense attorneys described their workplaces as more akin to understaffed emergency rooms than law offices—operating in a constant state of triage. They spoke of being forced to take calculated risks, knowingly missing certain deadlines to prioritize more urgent matters. “I’m often simply unable to effectively represent somebody because I have too much work to do,” said one attorney. Others described the impossible tradeoffs they’re forced to make—delaying filings, deferring client meetings, and rushing through preparation—just to keep pace with the demands. Many reported working nights and weekends just to stay afloat, with little time left for family and friends. The result is not just burnout—it’s a systemic inability to provide the thorough, client-centered representation that both ethics and justice require.
Housing Defense Standards: Ignored and Misused
In 2023, the Universal Access (UA) Caseload Working Group, convened by the New York State Office of Court Administration, released the most comprehensive study to date on housing defense workloads under the Right to Counsel (RTC) program. It recommends a standard of 48 new cases per year, or 4 new cases per month.
However, the report has two important caveats. First, it assumes that an attorney spends 100% of their working hours on casework (despite that number ranging from 40% to 84% at the seven organizations surveyed during the study). Second, it assumes an attorney is experienced—familiar with the intricacies of housing law and navigating the court system.
Despite these caveats, management routinely treats the 48-case standard as a blanket target—or worse, a minimum. Every housing attorney interviewed for this article reported being assigned at least four new cases per month, despite having significant non-casework duties like intakes, benefits advocacy, CLEs, and administrative tasks. Several also noted that it typically takes about three years to build the experience needed to manage a full caseload. Yet even attorneys with less than three years on the job—including one with just seven months of experience—were already being assigned workloads at or above the standard.
In practice, the UA standard is being stripped of its context and misused by management. What was designed to establish realistic and consistent caseload guidelines for experienced, full-time litigators has become a floor applied indiscriminately—regardless of an attorney’s experience or non-casework responsibilities.
In interviews, housing attorneys described overwhelming workloads that left them working late into the night and constantly falling behind. “So much falls through the cracks that isn’t fair to my clients,” one said. Another reported being unable to research cases until just days before court—because “there are always other urgent things on my to-do list.” Many spoke of a relentless pace that left them exhausted and unable to fully show up for their clients. Some described missing sleep, skipping meals, and spending weekends too drained to cook, clean, or connect with loved ones. “Eighty percent of my life is dedicated to working, preparing for work, or bare-minimum taking care of myself,” one worker said. These aren’t just signs of exhaustion—they are indicators that the current system makes ethical, high-quality representation impossible.
The Ethical Stakes
By forcing attorneys to regularly carry workloads in excess of established guidelines, legal services executives are not only jeopardizing worker well-being—they are opening the door to serious ethical violations, both for their staff and for themselves.
At stake is not just internal policy or burnout—it’s the legal profession’s core obligation to the people it serves. Under the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Model Rules of Professional Conduct, every attorney carrying a caseload is bound by standards that overwhelming workloads routinely breach. The rules are clear: “a lawyer’s workload must be controlled so that each matter can be handled competently” (Comment [2] to Rule 1.3). Competent representation, as defined by the ABA, includes “thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation” (Rule 1.1), and acting with “reasonable diligence and promptness” (Rule 1.3). The conditions described by attorneys interviewed for this article—missed deadlines, triaged clients, chronic exhaustion—are in flagrant violation of those standards.
And these responsibilities do not stop with frontline staff. Supervising and managing attorneys have an affirmative duty to ensure that those under their direction are meeting professional obligations (Rule 5.1). If they know—or should know—that conditions prevent attorneys from practicing ethically and fail to act, they too are in violation.
When the ethical foundation of legal representation collapses, it’s not only the lawyers who bear the consequences. It’s the clients—disproportionately low-income, Black, Latine, disabled, and undocumented—who are left to face eviction, incarceration, or family separation without full legal protection. In short: justice is denied.
Workers Fight for Justice
Legal services workers have sounded the alarm—pleading with management, city officials, and state agencies to address unmanageable workloads and ethical breaches. Yet the crisis persists. Many legal services organizations are overseen by Wall Street executives more focused on bottom lines than justice. City and state officials often voice sympathy, but prioritize bloated police budgets and tax cuts for the wealthy over adequately funding indigent defense.
But workers are not waiting for permission to act. Since unionizing in 1969, NYC legal services workers have a proud tradition of fighting for what their clients deserve—striking for vertical representation, confidential meeting spaces, and even access to office phones. Today, that fight continues.
Across the sector, union members are taking their demands to the bargaining table. They are pushing for enforceable workload standards to ensure every client receives the thorough, competent representation they’re entitled to. They are calling on management to hire the interpreters, investigators, paralegals, and support staff necessary for attorneys to focus on legal work—not burnout triage.
Management has failed to protect the integrity of legal services. But workers are stepping up—not just to survive the system, but to transform it. To defend their clients, uphold their ethics, and ensure that justice is served.