DLA Piper’s Elena Rizzo Honored for Devoted Representation in Complex Family Law Matters

Kate Powers

At this year’s Above & Beyond Awards, Sanctuary for Families is thrilled to honor Elena Rizzo, Associate at DLA Piper.

At this year’s Above & Beyond Awards, Sanctuary for Families will be honoring DLA Piper associate Elena Rizzo for her steadfast and devoted representation of multiple clients in complex contested divorce, custody, Order of Protection (“OP”), and appeals cases. 

Elena Rizzo has secured positive outcomes for Sanctuary’s clients through masterful brief writing and successful argument before the First Department in a complicated divorce matter. Most recently, Elena shot into action on a highly complex, lengthy, and time-sensitive contested divorce case where she prepared the case for trial in a matter of weeks.  The case involves a mother of five children whose husband has repeatedly engaged in physical, emotional, and financial abuse.  Just some examples of such abuse include sexually assaulting the mother, failing to pay required child and spousal support, having the mother and children evicted from their home, and constantly violating the OP in the case.

The case was scheduled to go to trial in March 2023 and Elena wasted no time submitting requests for medical, school, dental, and other records for all five of the client’s children, securing copies of prior and current OPs and getting transcripts of prior cases which helped to impeach the client’s abuser.  Armed with as much information as she could get, she immediately turned to trial prep mode.  This involved drafting lengthy direct and cross examinations and preparing dozens of exhibits, including prior court filings, photographs, screenshots of text messages, videos of abuse, copies of police reports, and more.

Though ultimately the trial was rescheduled on the very day it was set to begin, Elena’s work to get this case trial-ready on such a tight timeline was nothing short of remarkable.

Reflecting on this case and Elena’s work, Lindsey Song, Associate Program Director of the Family Law Project at the Queens Family Justice Center explained,

“Elena is extremely dedicated and devoted to her clients and work and immediately shot into overdrive to prepare for an extremely contested and complex custody/OP trial with only weeks to prepare. Despite managing a caseload of her own at her firm, Elena prioritized preparing for the trial and, stunningly, came up with trial-ready exhibits and materials within less than a month of time.”

As to her work with Sanctuary, Elena explained,

“You have a gift when you have a law license. When you do have that gift, you have to make sure that you use that to help others.”

Join us at our Above & Beyond Awards Ceremony on October 25, 2023, as we honor DLA Piper’s outstanding pro bono work.

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Kate Powers is counsel in the White Collar Defense & Government Investigation practice group at Akin’s New York office. She is also a member of Sanctuary’s Pro Bono Council.

Simpson Thacher’s Susan Cordaro Honored for Dedicated Representation of Survivors

Romy Felsen-Parsons

At this year’s Above & Beyond Awards, Sanctuary for Families is thrilled to honor Susan M. Cordaro, Deputy Pro Bono Counsel at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.

At this year’s Above & Beyond Awards, Sanctuary for Families is honoring Susan M. Cordaro, Deputy Pro Bono Counsel at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, for her outstanding dedication to helping survivors of gender-based violence and her work with numerous pro bono clients within Sanctuary’s Family Law Project and Matrimonial/Economic Justice Project.

For several years, Susan Cordaro has provided compassionate and skilled legal services to dozens of Sanctuary’s clients, delivering trauma-informed legal advice and representation in a range of cases, including appeals, asylum matters, divorces, custody/visitation cases, and orders of protection.

In addition to representing survivors, Susan leads and coordinates the Sanctuary/Simpson Thacher Family Law Screening Project in the Bronx Family Justice Center (Bronx FJC). For the last several years, Simpson Thacher attorneys have participated in Bronx FJC legal screenings conducted by Sanctuary attorneys, during which Simpson Thacher volunteers take detailed notes and then assist with any follow-up pro se assistance or research that the client may need, including drafting pro se petitions. This Project has enhanced our ability to more significantly serve Bronx FJC clients and meet their needs. Susan’s leadership and commitment to the Project has been invaluable to its success. Susan doesn’t just manage the Project for Simpson Thacher, she also supervises, provides advice, and has herself volunteered to participate in many legal screenings. Susan has become so adept at understanding survivor legal needs that she has even started conducting legal screenings on her own.

Karla George, Associate Program Director of Sanctuary’s Bronx FJC Family Law Project, said,

“Susan’s leadership in supervising our screening clinic in the Bronx with Simpson Thacher has been outstanding and life-changing, supplementing our staff resources and enabling us to provide more and deeper services to clients. I have personally enjoyed this collaboration with Susan, who always shows up with positive energy and cares deeply about our clients. We are eternally grateful to Susan and her pro bono team!”

In addition to her work with the screening project, Susan was also nominated for an Above & Beyond award this year for providing direct representation to multiple survivors. She has been indispensable in many cases, and in particular on appeals from Family Court decisions. Two recent cases provide examples of Susan’s critical work with survivors and their families: a grandparent visitation petition won on appeal after the original petition had been dismissed, and a successful appeal from a final order of custody granted to our client.

In the first case, which Susan staffed in the Appellate Division along with Simpson Thacher  former associate Sara L. Estela, Litigation Counsel Sarah Phillips, and Retired Partner Mary Beth Forshaw, and then subsequently in the Family Court with associates Isabel R. Mattson, Lauren Smith, and former associate Rebecca Sussman, the court had originally determined that the grandmother of one of Sanctuary’s clients did not have standing to seek visitation with her grandson. This was particularly troubling given that the grandmother had helped to care for the child during the early years of his life when his father was either not present or was present but extremely abusive toward the child’s mother and neglectful toward his son. Despite this and as a result of a long and unsettling legal history, the father has full custody over the child while our client tragically lost her green card and is unable to re-enter the US to visit her son. Given these circumstances, being able to guarantee the grandmother’s continued presence in the child’s life was critical to his well-being. After two years, an appellate victory, numerous Family Court appearances after remand, and the commencement of a trial, Susan and the team were able to settle the case on very favorable terms.

Sanctuary Senior Staff Attorney Ruchama Cohen, who worked with Susan on this challenging case, said,

“I’m thrilled to see Susan Cordaro recognized for her exceptional work on behalf of our clients. Her skill in the courtroom is matched only by her compassion for her clients. Susan has been a long-time mentor for me personally, and she is an inspiration to those of us at Sanctuary who are privileged to work with her.”

On the second case, Susan won a successful appeal from a Final Order of Custody granted to a survivor in Bronx Family Court after an extensive, highly contested trial, in which the abusive father was granted only email contact with the child, with no visitation. In response to questioning from the bench during oral argument, Susan strategically suggested a tweak to the Order that was adopted by the Appellate Division and, therefore, saved the Order from being struck or remanded for additional hearings.

Senior Program Director of the Family Law Project, Jennifer Friedman, noted,

“This case was extremely hard fought, over many years. … This client and her daughter were severely traumatized by the father, but also by the case. If this case had been remanded, it would have been devastating to them both.”

Susan’s brilliant brief and litigation skills enabled the avoidance of an otherwise catastrophic outcome for this family. On working with Susan in general, Jennifer said,

“Susan is always available, always endeavors to assist us when we ask; always has a positive attitude, and is delightful to work with.  Her commitment to our clients and our work is amazing!”

Pro Bono Counsel and Director at Simpson Thacher, Harlene Katzman, concluded,

“We are incredibly proud of Susan’s leadership of the family law appeals that anchor her pro bono work with Sanctuary for Families. Through this project, Susan provides invaluable hands-on mentoring and guidance to litigation associates who may be writing an appellate brief and arguing in court for the very first time. Susan’s contributions at Simpson Thacher extend far beyond her family law practice. She is a critical part of our pro bono team, sharing her wisdom, experience, strategic thinking and creative solutions to problems big and small. Congratulations Susan on this very well-deserved honor!”

We are deeply grateful to Susan for the incredible time and energy she has put towards serving survivors of gender-based violence.

Join us at our Above & Beyond Awards Ceremony on October 25, 2023, as we honor Simpson Thacher & Bartlett’s outstanding pro bono work.

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Any presidential plan to ‘take on tech’ in 2024 must address power and consent

Tanuja Jain Gupta

The New York Cyber Abuse Task Force offers a framework for humane technology product design that tech product teams can use next year.

The New York Cyber Abuse Task Force is a coalition of legal and non-legal professionals, survivors, and technology workers to fight tech-facilitated gender-based violence in all its forms. Our findings consistently show that the most dangerous and persistent forms of tech abuse occur in the context of intimate partner violence and image-based abuse.

The New York Cyber Abuse Task Force offers a framework for humane technology product design

The first 2024 presidential debates start this week (I know, I’m sorry) and one question is certain: what is each candidate’s plan to take on tech?

In the past, when someone asked me what I thought of the impact of tech or AI on society, it was like being asked “what do you think of … hammers?” I, like many working in tech, found something like artificial intelligence to simply be a tool to augment human’s brain power rather than physical power. How it gets deployed depends entirely on a human’s will power. For example, hammers are great for assembling a new crib, but we’d never give a hammer to a baby. Construction workers can use hammers to build homes, but not to threaten their spouses. We expect industries and governments to apply the same common sense discretion to technology and intelligence tools. Especially when those tools have the speed and scale beyond any single swing of a hammer.

Now, thirty years after the internet’s mainstream debut, our hunger for that discretion crescendos. And with good reason, considering the explosion of child pornography on the web (and how AI contributes to it); the flourishing of hate groups online; the biases created by the lack of diversity in algorithms’ data sets; the harm of social media features to adolescents; the proliferation of image-based sexual abuse and deep-fake porn; the digital safety risks of financial technologies for survivors of intimate partner violence; and the erosion of privacy in technology.

Yet no branch of the U.S. government seems poised to make those discretionary calls any time soon. Congress has hope, but no real plan (maybe a plan for a plan?). The Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Counterman v. Colorado and Gonzalez v. YouTube both signal a lack of willingness to apply real-world discretion to the digital world. And whatever soaring rhetoric our presidential candidates offer this election cycle, we know that campaign promises don’t always translate to executable plans. So without a government protecting its people, we wait for the industry to self-regulate (ex: New Zealand), but how much longer should we wait?

A coalition of legal and non-legal professionals, survivors, and technology workers came together, as the New York Cyber Abuse Task Force, to fight technology-facilitated gender-based violence in all its forms… because we couldn’t wait. Technology accelerates the speed and magnifies the scale of existing illegal sexually-abusive behavior such as stalking, spying, spoofing, impersonation, sextortion and non-consensual distribution of sexually explicit images and videos beyond imagination. Lawyers and law enforcement support the survivors of these crimes who are forced to retreat from a digital life – or life altogether. We published the 220 page NY Cyber Abuse Task Force “Manual for Advocates” to help lawyers navigate the courts for the issues that plague abuse victims, but we still need more. We need the engineers, designers, product managers and analysts – the ones with the technical know-how and a desire to use technology for building a better future – to change the industry from within.

Now, if I’m working in big tech, as I did for twenty years, I hear that call, but question what I can realistically do from my perch. I’m juggling too many projects already and wondering when the next round of layoffs will hit. However, the answer is less burdensome than one may think. Because when you build for the users most affected by the harms of technology, the future of all your users will be brighter. All those projects you’re juggling will benefit because a rising tide really does lift all boats.

Reviewing the aforementioned litany of tech-accelerated abuses, five overlapping groups emerge as the most vulnerable to the harms of technology: children, women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, people of color and low-income individuals. When product teams consider these groups as primary users rather than edge-cases, all users benefit. Point in case: the recent updates to air tag tracking devices, which help domestic violence survivors avoid being stalked by their abusers … but also help all users better protect their privacy. Our task force has found that ‘humane’ product design boils down to a product team being able to answer ‘NO’ to the following three questions:

  1. Could your product let someone exert P.O.W.E.R. over another person?
  2. Is that power exerted without the subject’s C.O.N.S.E.N.T.?
  3. Does anything prevent your company from providing law enforcement the right E.V.I.D.E.N.C.E. needed to hold an abuser accountable?

The three acronyms of P.O.W.E.R., C.O.N.S.E.N.T. and E.V.I.D.E.N.C.E. address twenty factors of online abuse that can help protect survivors long before the lawyers are involved.

Whether you’re writing the PRD, presenting wireframes or mocks, architecting the database, writing the technical design doc, determining and implementing API calls, or performing a security or privacy review etc, you can ask these questions below to determine how humane your product design is for vulnerable populations (download one-sheet here):

1st Question: Could your product let someone exert P.O.W.E.R. over another person?

P: Does the success of your product depend on the propagation of content your company did not create?

O: Do you treat behavior in your product differently than if it happened offline? Is there a chance the product could reflect activity online differently than it is occurring offline?

W: Could anyone who is watching, changing settings or asking for help on the user’s account differ from the user herself in your product?

E: Does your product entangle the user’s account to either another account belonging to the same person or another person all together?

R: Could your product be used by one person to malign the reputation of another person?

If YES to any of the above, move to the second question.

If NO to all of the above, first check if others on your team would answer the same way. If they all say NO, great – move to the third question.

2nd Question: Is that power exerted without the subject’s C.O.N.S.E.N.T.?

C: How does a user determine if their account or device has been compromised in real-time in your product?

O: Is the default feature setting opt-in or opt-out in your product? Is the user aware?

N: How does the user negotiate their presence in your product? Does she have an opportunity to understand how her data will be used and where it’s going?

S: How does the user screenshot, store, save and send proof of unconsented-to activity to authorities in your product? Conversely, can a user prevent someone else from screenshotting/saving material intended for them to receive, but not to be distributed to others?

E: How do you monitor points of egress (and ingress, for that matter) for anomalies in your product?

N: If you use social features, how does a user notify her network that she’s cut ties with someone, and warn of potential impersonation in your product? Conversely, is there a way for the user to know if someone reaching out to her is tied to the network of the person who she blocked?

T: Can a user report harm in-product in a timely fashion? Do you respond to the subject’s reports of harassment in a timely manner? Are your revocations of access and removals of content timely? What does it take to trigger your break-glass plan in a timely manner? (ex)

If you don’t have an answer for one or more of these sub-questions, consider whether your product’s features deny options of privacy and consent.

3rd Question: Does anything prevent your company from providing law enforcement the right E.V.I.D.E.N.C.E. needed to hold an abuser accountable?

E: What is your team’s plan for how to work with law enforcement to decrypt encrypted messages?

V: How do you provide verification of identity and data authenticity as required in court? Can you connect the actor to the activity?

I: How does your product back-end integrate with other databases of evidence from previous cyber abuse violations / bad actors to learn and detect future abuse?

D: Enumerate the data logs of user activity with protocols for when that data should be stored, for how long, etc.

E: How do you ensure that your data logs have plain descriptions of each field to explain the meaning of each field, its metadata values and what could be a sign of manipulation?

N: How do current legal protections cover the next iteration of your product or feature?

C: How does your product understand when crimes and confessions are being aired or live streamed?

E: How quickly can the above data be exported to law enforcement in a human readable format in a timely fashion?

If you don’t have an answer for one or more of these sub-questions, consider whether your product is ready to release if you can’t hold abusers of your product accountable.

A handful of examples to get your minds going:

P.O.W.E.R. means possessing control, authority, or influence over someone or something. Could your product let someone exert P.O.W.E.R. over another person? Consider if that person is a historically underrepresented minority and/or a child.

Propagation – Does the success of your product depend on the propagation of content your company did not create? (Propagation is the action of widely spreading and promoting an idea, theory, etc.) Another way of asking this is “Can you hit your GEMS metrics without propagating user-generated content?” For those not in tech, GEMS stands for growth, engagement, monetization, and satisfaction (ex: information satisfaction, regulatory compliance, etc). So can you grow your number of users, lengthen the time they spend in/on a product, increase the revenue you make on them or satisfy their needs without having to propagate content your company didn’t create? If not, you’re inherently incentivized to build a product that encourages fast, frictionless propagation of content – which is at odds with the measures like a cooling period normally associated with rational, deliberate decisions (much less give your product team time to determine if the content adheres to your product policies). For example, social media companies rely on a robust content ecosystem to have users scroll infinitely through a feed. Search engines need content to fulfill user queries (just look up a query like [track my girlfriend] or [stalkerware]). App stores rely on apps like Dream Zone to satisfy some men with ads that gamify rape. Maybe this kind of issue isn’t inherently at odds with your goals, but it’s a consideration.

Offline Parity – Do you treat behavior in your product differently than if it happened offline? Is there a chance the product could reflect activity online differently than it is occuring offline? Showing your genitals to someone without consent is sexual violence. Sending a dick pic to someone should be treated the same.

E.V.I.D.E.N.C.E.

Verification of identity and data authenticity: Can you provide verification of identity and data authenticity as required in court? Can you connect the actor to the activity? Directly from a prosecutor: “At trial, the main hurdle is often proving that a specific perpetrator sent a specific transmission. Offenders tend to use new devices and public Wi-Fi when distributing the photos/videos. Services exist to mask IP addresses. Some may also use throwaway devices and/or a virtual private network (VPN) to make it seem as if the distribution originated from China or Russia. Getting logs and connection data from a foreign VPN provider (if the logs even exist) is difficult and tedious. Defendants will commonly argue that they themselves were hacked. A well-organized evidence chart can be used to show that only that perpetrator would have the motive and ability to create the campaign of cyber sexual abuse your client endured … but that is usually directly at odds with the internal privacy mandate of a company.”

How do current legal protections cover the next iteration of your product or feature? Here’s a common clause used in temporary restraining orders and orders of protection: The Respondent is not to post, transmit, or maintain, or cause a third party to post, transmit, or maintain, any images, pictures, or other media, depicting the Petitioner in a naked state or participating in any sexual act OR threaten to do the same. The Respondent is to refrain from using Petitioner’s likeness or impersonating Petitioner on any social media. If your product counsel can’t fit your feature into that language, how will you communicate to lawyers and legislators that legal protections need to be updated?

You get it.

The members of our task force, and the technology industry professionals who partnered with us to create this framework, all realize that some of these questions may be addressed at varying seniority levels. We know this framework may be more useful for some types of technologies than others. And in some countries with more authoritarian governments, turning over evidence to law enforcement may require different considerations than this framework considers. But good, iterative product design does not permit perfection to be the enemy of progress – so let’s get started. Instead of doom-scrolling through your social media feeds while watching the presidential debates this week, listen to the candidates’ plans to see if they come close to addressing the groups most vulnerable to tech-enabled abuse. And then maybe take a moment to ask yourself these questions of power and consent in the products you build.

What will be your plan to build more humane technology products in 2024?

Tanuja Jain Gupta is former senior engineering program manager of twenty years, with eleven of those years at Google. During this time, she also advocated for workers’ rights in the form of leading a global walkout against sexual harassment in 2018 and successfully lobbying for Google to end its policy of forced arbitration in March 2019. Gupta was a key advocate for HR 4445, which became law in March of 2022, bringing together survivors of sexual harassment around the country to end forced arbitration at the federal level. For this work, she received the 2019 American Association for Justice Steven J. Sharp Public Service Award. While managing a large team at Google and working on some of its highest profile engineering and regulatory initiatives, Tanuja built a diversity, equity and inclusion program that was replicated by several teams within the company. During this time, Gupta also chaired the Board of the Crime Victims Treatment Center from 2017-2023. Gupta is now a rising 2L at Cardozo Law School, advocating for caste equity and tech reforms. She joined the NY Cyber Abuse Task Force to channel her tech expertise for the benefit of survivors, and hopes her former colleagues in the industry will do the same. Deep thanks to the multiple engineers and trust & safety analysts who contributed to the near year-long development of this framework.

In Memory of Amanda B. Norejko

Sanctuary for Families

Sanctuary for Families proudly announces that the Director of its Matrimonial/Economic Justice Project (Mat/EJP) will be renamed the “Amanda B. Norejko Fellowship” in honor of former Director Amanda B. Norejko.

Sanctuary for Families announces that the Director of its Matrimonial and Economic Justice Project will be renamed the “Amanda B. Norejko Fellowship” in memory of former Director Amanda B. Norejko, an extraordinarily dedicated and visionary champion of gender violence survivors.

Our dear friend and former colleague Amanda Norejko, who helped found and lead the Legal Center’s Matrimonial and Economic Justice Project (Mat/EJP) for over a decade, has passed away after a long battle with ovarian cancer. Amanda was an extraordinarily powerful, inspirational leader at Sanctuary and the Women’s Bar Association and her legacy of groundbreaking achievements and place in our hearts lives on.

To honor Amanda’s legacy, Sanctuary has announced that Lisa Vara, the Director of our Matrimonial/Economic Justice Project (Mat/EJP), is now the “Amanda B. Norejko Fellow” in memory of Amanda.

Joining Sanctuary as a student volunteer at NYU Law School in our Courtroom Advocates Project (CAP) alongside her future husband Ryan Candee, Amanda worked for sixteen years in Sanctuary’s Legal Center, where she played an indispensable role in the leadership of the Legal Center and the development of Mat/EJP. She specialized in the representation of survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking in complex contested divorces. Amanda also supervised a team of staff and pro bono attorneys in family law and matrimonial and housing and public benefits matters in all five boroughs of New York City.

Amanda also spearheaded legislative and policy initiatives aimed at combating violence against women and advancing gender equality and the fair administration of justice on the local, state, national, and international levels. She demonstrated on a daily basis what strategic, survivor-centered representation looks like and continues to inspire all of us, especially attorneys handling matrimonial cases. An expert practitioner, mentor, and teacher, Amanda provided a quality representation of the survivors we serve that was truly the gold standard. Her leadership made Sanctuary’s Legal Center stronger and more effective.

Amanda left Sanctuary for Families to become a Support Magistrate in New York County Family Court, where she presided over paternity and child and spousal support matters with great knowledge, compassion, fairness, and attention to issues of gender, racial, and economic equality.

We extend our deepest condolences to her devoted husband, Ryan Candee, and her parents and sister, as well as to her many close friends on Sanctuary’s staff and in the domestic violence survivor advocacy community.