Turnover Crisis: NYC Legal Services Workers Are Leaving in Droves, And Clients Are Paying the Price

June 26, 2025

By Navruz Baum

A review of union data by The ALAA Organizer reveals a staggering turnover crisis in New York City legal services. In the past year, over 500 workers left ALAA bargaining units—a loss of roughly one in six workers. Many didn’t just switch jobs within the sector; they left for higher-paying roles in adjacent fields like public defense, city government, and private practice.

This exodus is more than a workforce issue—it’s a crisis that destabilizes client representation, drains institutional knowledge, and worsens already chaotic working conditions.

A Revolving Door That Harms Clients and Overburdens Workers

When a legal services worker leaves, their cases don’t disappear—they get transferred, delayed, or dropped, often at critical moments. Clients must rebuild trust with a new attorney, recount traumatic histories, and hope their case doesn’t fall through the cracks in the transition. In criminal, eviction, family, and immigration defense cases, even a small delay can mean devastating consequences: extended imprisonment, a lost home, separation from children, or deportation.

For workers, high turnover makes an already unsustainable job even worse. Attorneys and advocates are constantly absorbing transferred caseloads, wasting time piecing together case histories, and struggling under workloads that violate ethical standards. Instead of focusing on client advocacy, they’re trapped in damage control.

Legal services should not be a temporary job before burnout or escape. It should be a career that allows workers to build expertise and serve clients effectively. But that won’t happen unless the cycle of underpayment, overwork, and high turnover is broken.

Workers are organizing to do just that.

Workers Are Fighting for Sustainable Careers

Legal services workers aren’t accepting burnout as inevitable. They’re fighting to make these jobs sustainable—not just for themselves, but for the clients who rely on them. That means raising salaries so workers can afford to stay. It means cost-of-living adjustments that keep pace with inflation instead of forcing workers to fall further behind every year. And it means enforceable workload standards that prevent chronic overwork and ensure that every client gets real representation instead of rushed, last-minute advocacy.

Legal services should not be a temporary job before burnout or escape. It should be a career that allows workers to build expertise and serve clients effectively. But that won’t happen unless the cycle of underpayment, overwork, and high turnover is broken. Workers are organizing to do just that.