This week, Haynes Boone announced the hiring of Rachel Elkin as the firm’s first full-time pro bono counsel.
Elkin has had a pro bono-exclusive practice for her entire seven-year legal career. She joins the firm from Genesis Women’s Shelter & Support, a Dallas-based nonprofit dedicated to sheltering battered women and their children fleeing abusive relationships and helping domestic violence survivors build their independence and new lives away from their abusers.
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At Genesis, Elkin served as the nonprofit’s director of legal services after previous roles as staff attorney and senior staff attorney. While there, Elkin helped Genesis develop a trauma-informed legal department that represented survivors of intimate partner violence as they pursued protective orders against their abusers, custody of their children and other legal remedies associated with leaving an abusive relationship.
Elkin regularly partnered with attorneys at Haynes Boone who volunteered their skills pro bono with Genesis and developed friendships in the process. She said she was drawn to Haynes Boone’s commitment to pro bono, which has recently earned various awards. Last month, the State Bar of Texas’ Legal Services for the Poor in Civil Matters Committee named Haynes Boone its 2024 recipient of the W. Frank Newton Award. Last year, the firm devoted more than 16,000 hours to pro bono work valued at $12.6 million in legal fees.
“Having already worked with many of the lawyers at Haynes Boone, I am honored to join a firm that is renowned for its outstanding pro bono practice and dedication to community service,” Elkin said. “I look forward to working alongside such passionate and committed attorneys to expand our pro bono efforts and make a meaningful impact in the communities we serve.”
In the following Q&A, Elkin tells The Lawbook more about her decision to become a pro bono lawyer, her time at Genesis and what she hopes to achieve at Haynes Boone.
Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Texas Lawbook: Tell me about your background and how you first got into doing pro bono work.
Rachel Elkin: Coming from a family of attorneys who practiced in big law, I truthfully did not want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a book editor and spend my days reading novels — literally with my nose in a book. After college, I started working for a textbook publisher in Boston and to pass time, I started reading the newspapers for the first time in my life. My dad likes to tell a story that I was riding the train one day reading the news and had a sudden “a-ha” moment that I wanted to go to law school and be a nonprofit attorney for women’s rights, but it was more of a 23-year-old’s gradual awakening to the injustices of the world and discovering that I was interested in helping.
Lawbook: How did you choose Southern Methodist University for law school after deciding you wanted to become a nonprofit lawyer?
Elkin: The short answer is that I missed home and my Texas community (and having a car). When I was thinking about the place and people that I wanted to be surrounded by while I was living the struggle that is law school, I wanted my family and friends that I knew outside of school to lean on. Dallas was that place for me. The first person I connected with when I knew I was going to SMU was an old family friend, who just so happened to be the director of the Consumer Law clinic. I had always known her as “Jake and Joey’s mom” and not as this powerhouse attorney. She connected me with the public service director at SMU, who became one of my greatest mentors and connected me with the gender-based violence clinic director.
Lawbook: Did you participate in any of SMU’s pro bono clinics while you were a law student?
Elkin: I was a student in the Judge Elmo B. Hunter Legal Center for Victims of Crimes Against Women for two semesters and worked in the Child Advocacy Clinic for one summer. Those were both life-changing experiences. I tell every law student that I can to participate in a clinic — no matter what the subject is — because it is invaluable hands-on experience that few clerkships or internships will be able to give you.
My policy project in the Hunter Legal Center was writing a report on the intersection of firearms and domestic violence and it spanned my entire 3L year, culminating with its publication and presenting our findings at the Conference on Crimes Against Women (an annual conference hosted by Genesis Women’s Shelter in Dallas). The recent Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Rahimi shows that this is very much still an ongoing issue, and one that I hope to still be involved with in my role as pro bono counsel at Haynes Boone.
Lawbook: Was your work with the Hunter Legal Center how you first got acquainted with Genesis and its CEO, Jan Langbein?
Elkin: Yes. While putting together our report, we met with stakeholders in the domestic violence community, including Jan. If you’ve never met her before, Jan is affectionately called “human lightning” because of her ability to own a room and make change. She swept in and asked each of us wide-eyed 3Ls what we wanted to do after graduation. She had told us that she hired her first-ever staff attorney, so I told her that I wanted to work for her. She told me to call her after graduation, and I started working for her the August after I took the bar.
Lawbook: What is it about pro bono that made you want to dedicate your practice to this work?
Elkin: Jan would always say that I had a fire in my belly for this work. The wins are hard-earned in pro bono work and it is extremely rewarding to fight for people who have felt ignored and beaten down by unfeeling systems of power. If I can make someone feel like they have an advocate in their corner who will fight for them when no one else has, sometimes that’s more powerful than just “winning” a case. Sometimes all someone needs is to feel less alone in their struggle, and I want to help contribute to that.
Lawbook: Tell me more about your six years at Genesis. What are some highlights from your time there, some challenges you faced and biggest lessons learned?
Elkin: We would always say at Genesis that getting justice is not always our most important goal, but rather finding the safest outcome in a system that does not yet understand the true monster that is violence against women and children. One of the biggest highlights for me as an attorney was developing skills to be trauma-informed and client-centered while honing my litigation practice to be able to go toe-to-toe with the most seasoned, high-dollar attorney that an abuser might hire. For me, it wasn’t just about being able to stand with my client, but also being able to show her that I knew the law and would spend just as much time on her case, whether I was pro bono or not. The lesson learned from that, however, is that it can make you feel like you need to give everything to your job.
Lawbook: Could you please describe one or two pro bono matters you’ve handled in your career that stick out the most to you?
Elkin: The first case I would highlight involves finalizing the case of a client I had for almost three years who had been a legal client of Genesis for almost six years — the entire duration of my time at the agency. When she first sought services in 2016, she had lost custody of three of her children to two different abusers and had a felony conviction with a finding of family violence. Throughout our representation of her, she maintained stable employment and housing, won back custody of one of her sons and began the fight to win back her other two sons from the other abuser to terminate his parental rights. In 2022, after a three-year battle, we won her case and the abuser’s parental rights were terminated. She and her children are now living in peace, free from violence and fear.
Another case would be one I call a “rescue mission” to help a mom get her daughter back from the father, who had taken the child to another state with his parents. Because she didn’t have any custody orders, law enforcement in the other state would not do anything. She also did not have an address where the father was staying because his mother repeatedly told the police he wasn’t there. We successfully got our client a temporary protective order for her and her daughter, and I had to call three different law enforcement agencies before I could find someone to serve it. Together with myself, the client, her sister-in-law, her mother and the internet, we were able to find that the father was staying in the guest house of a friend’s parents, further proving that women with an internet connection are more powerful than the FBI. Within two hours of finding the address, the father had been arrested and our client was driving to the other state to pick up her child. Once she had her child, she was granted a full two-year protective order, her divorce was eventually finalized, giving her sole custody of her child, and she is now seeking immigration relief through the Violence Against Women Act.
Lawbook: How did the move to Haynes Boone come about and why was it the right next chapter of your career?
Elkin: I developed a personal connection with the firm when I managed the pro bono partnership network at Genesis. Several Haynes Boone attorneys are also volunteers at Genesis, so I developed friendships with them as well. At Genesis, we always tried to find a way to get to “yes” to help a client and I found the same thing to be true with the Haynes Boone pro bono attorneys. The deep sense of commitment to pro bono work was not lip service to Haynes Boone; it was ingrained in the culture. I knew asking Haynes Boone for pro bono assistance would never be difficult, but rather a question of how they were going to get to help. I wanted to be a part of that culture. The move to Haynes Boone is one that allows me to help inspire and train other attorneys to do this work in an environment with significantly more reach and more resources while still keeping those personal connections with local agencies and communities.
Lawbook: What will you do as Haynes Boone’s pro bono counsel?
Elkin: I will be overseeing the pro bono program for the entire firm across all offices. My goal is to execute the firm’s objectives and values through pro bono work. I will be working to advance the quality of pro bono opportunities for the firm’s lawyers by seeking partnerships with legal services organizations, the firm and the firm’s clients. I will also be working to improve the effectiveness of the firm’s pro bono representation and the breadth of the firm’s pro bono work.
Lawbook: What are some short-term and long-term goals that you have as you settle into this role?
Elkin: Short-term, I will be meeting with the wonderful attorneys across the firm throughout all of our 18 offices to learn about all the exciting pro bono projects that we are currently engaged in and seeing how I can assist. I am also engaging with our attorneys in our offices to learn what pro bono projects they are interested in and what the needs of their specific communities are. That should feed into my long-term vision, for Haynes Boone to be known as the destination for quality, impactful pro bono work. I think this is eminently possible, because for Haynes Boone, pro bono is not lip service as it is already ingrained in the culture.
Lawbook: Any trends, challenges or observations you’re noticing in the pro bono legal world right now?
Elkin: There is a huge trend towards firms investing in their pro bono programs and using full-time pro bono professionals to increase the breadth and quality of the pro bono work that firms are doing. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be doing pro bono work and I feel incredibly lucky to be joining this cohort of pro bono professionals.
Lawbook: What haven’t I asked you about that I should have?
Elkin: Your questions have been great and have covered a lot of ground. Perhaps one additional question that I can answer is whether it appears it will be difficult to interest the lawyers here at Haynes Boone to do pro bono work, and if my hire is simply to implore them to do more pro bono work. The answer is, fortunately, an emphatic “No!” These lawyers have already been doing significant pro bono work for decades and I can tell they are chomping at the bit to do more and on a broader scale. My vision will be to work with all of our lawyers in all of our offices to make sure their fervor to do pro bono work is met with challenging work of the type each lawyer wants to do. The desire is there and I want to help them with any and all of their prospective pro bono work.