A Week in Legal: What Our Work Looks Like in 2023
by Sabrina Rodriguez
Paralegal, they/she
Hello! I’m Sabrina and I’ve been a paralegal here with the Lavender Rights Project for a little over a year now. Today, I want to give you a glimpse into what it’s like to work in our small team as we support the Lavender Rights Project’s mission toward Black Trans Liberation. Our power trio consists of our attorney Nico Quintana, our paralegal Nicole Perry, and myself.
Each week, we receive dozens of inquiries from people seeking help in numerous different areas of law. Our focus is on criminal law because we believe that decriminalization and community support is necessary to help end gender-based violence, especially as it is perpetrated by the legal system against Black Trans Women and Femmes. Though we specialize in criminal law, we meet with folks from the community who have non-family-law related legal questions in one-time clinic consultations and give them the opportunity to speak directly with an attorney, ask questions, and get some advice.
With the amount of requests that our small team receives, we stay on track by reviewing cases and inquiries throughout the week, beginning with our Monday case review meetings. In these meetings, we make sure we do not miss any requests from over the weekend, and make sure we address the specific needs of each request.
On Wednesdays, we meet in-office with our Gender Based Violence Prevention Community Engagement Manager, Mahkyra Gaines, to strategize together about policy work and how we can support each other. This also gives us an opportunity each week to coordinate on projects we are working on and to reflect on how our work fits within our mission.
During the rest of the week, we get to meet with clients who we represent directly in their criminal law cases and we like to hold co-working spaces together to work on those cases. Between jail visits, meetings, and coffee runs, the days fill up fast, but it’s all in a week’s work. The work we do lets us help protect Black trans femmes from the systemic violence that the legal system inflicts on them across compounding levels of oppression, and as a latine trans femme, working toward Black trans liberation is working toward my own liberation as well. Being on a team that provides quality legal services is a way for me to get to work on this every day.
Sabrina Rodriguez is a paralegal with the Lavender Rights Project who worked advocating for immigrants prior to joining LRP. Originally growing up in Southern California and Eastern Washington, Sabrina is now based in Tacoma, where they can be found haunting local coffee shops or at home cooking Mexican food with their cats.