The American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division recognized 40 young lawyers, including NEO Law Group senior counsel Erin Bradrick, with the On the Rise – Top 40 Young Lawyers award, providing “national recognition for young lawyers who exemplify a broad range of high achievement, innovation, vision, leadership, and legal and community service.” Congratulations Erin!
Excerpts from her nomination
Erin Bradrick is an exceptional young attorney who represents the profession and the nonprofit organizations practice area with great integrity, competence, and heart. She has made significant contributions to several nonprofit organizations while acting in a legal role, including in the consolidation of a national health organization, devising a complicated alteration of governance structures for a leading private foundation undergoing a change in generational control, creating an affiliated social welfare organization to a high profile charity focused on storytelling to inform and engage the public about the realities and impact of inequality and the imbalance of power, and counseling a national human services organization focused on performing arts professionals on a key acquisition.
In the past year, Erin became a columnist for The Daily Journal, California’s largest legal news provider, for which she writes on legal and policy issues affecting nonprofits. She may be one of the youngest columnists of a major legal newspaper and has drawn very favorable feedback from the community. Erin has also written articles published by The Nonprofit Quarterly, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the ABA’s Business Law Today. In addition, she has written numerous posts for our firm’s Nonprofit Law Blog, ranked as the 29th most popular legal blog by Avvo and the 65th most popular nonprofit blog by Top Nonprofits. Many of her articles focus on difficult substantive issues from the threat of a new regulation to the nonprofit sector (“New California Regulation Poses Threat to Nonprofits Not Properly Registered”) to gender-based compensation issues (“Women Leaders Still Make Less Than Their Male Counterparts…Even in the Nonprofit Sector”) to failures in corporate governance (“Where Nonprofit Boards Fall Short”).
Erin has spoken at several conferences and events for Continuing Education of the Bar–State Bar of California, BoardSource (formerly, the National Center for Nonprofit Boards), Northern California Grantmakers, the Foundation Center–San Francisco, the Center for Nonprofit Management, Care.com, and the Yale Law Alumni Nonprofit Alliance. In addition, she has presented webinars for the American Law Institute, the California Family Resource Association, Lorman Education Services, Lawline, NonprofitWebAdvisor, and MyLawCLE. The demand for her appearances is impressive. It is not, however, surprising given her exceptional skills, strong desire, and the consistently favorable feedback she has been receiving.
Erin has led various advocacy efforts on behalf of our firm and the sector, including drafting our letter of comments to the Office of the Attorney General of the State of California regarding proposed regulations that could adversely impact hundreds of thousands of nonprofits. This letter was co-signed or endorsed, without revision, by some of the country’s most important nonprofits including Independent Sector, the National Council of Nonprofits, the United Ways of California, the California Association of Nonprofits, and the Alliance for Justice, and the CEOs of BoardSource and the Nonprofits Insurance Alliance of California.
Erin’s commitment to serving the legal needs of the nonprofit sector was first demonstrated while at Yale Law School (“YLS”), where she served as (1) Director of the YLS Temporary Restraining Order Project, a student-run office in the state courthouse, training and managing more than 100 law student volunteers providing assistance to more than 500 individuals; and (2) Student Director of the YLS Advanced Community Lawyering Clinic, conducting more than 50 intake and legal outreach clinics at local community services organizations and assisting in the preparation of a course syllabus for a domestic violence clinic. Erin also spent a summer in India working as a Research Assistant for the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, authoring a report examining the activities of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka for publication and presentation at the Asia Pacific Forum for National Human Rights Institutions.
While Erin was working at Simpson Thacher, she was most proud of her pro bono work, which was almost entirely on behalf of domestic violence survivors and was very much a continuation of her work at Yale. It was her desire to focus her professional life on serving nonprofits and the broader sector that led her to NEO Law Group. Although she has had opportunities to pursue substantially higher paying positions at prestigious firms and organizations, she has chosen to work in an environment that allows her to best advance her goals of serving nonprofits and the broader communities they serve.