EXPERIENCE BEFORE PRIVATE PRACTICE

Before starting his own practice in 1984, Mr. Steinglass worked briefly at a plaintiff’s personal injury firm in New York City. 

As an Assistant District Attorney (“ADA”) in the New York County District Attorney’s Office, he was in a trial bureau. For five years, he investigated and tried murder cases and other felonies, including robbery, assault, sex crime, and gun possession (1979-84). 

As an ADA in the Appeals Bureau for four years, he wrote briefs and argued cases in the New York Court of Appeals and the Appellate Division, First Department. He also handled case in the federal district court in Manhattan and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on “habeas” petitions challenging convictions on constitutional grounds (1975-79). For example, he briefed and argued the landmark “Payton” case in the New York appeals courts, and was on the team which wrote the brief in the U. S. Supreme Court--which decided that, if time permits, the police must get a warrant before entering someone’s home to make an arrest. 

Mr. Steinglass served briefly as an Assistant District Attorney in Orange County, New York (1975), where he tried approximately a dozen DWI cases. 

Mr. Steinglass was in charge of two federally funded legal services programs in upstate New York (1970-1974). In the first program, he re-started a dormant law office in a rural county near Buffalo, hiring and supervising the three-lawyer staff. He was co-counsel to a group of about 100 families living in shacks who went on a successful rent strike and ultimately obtained government-assisted new housing. 

He was brought in to run the second legal services program after a crisis--which arose when a car with program staff leaving a migrant farm worker camp was hit with a machete by a grower. The grower’s lawyer-brother then brought a lawsuit claiming the grower had been struck by the car. Federal litigation followed. He supervised approximately ten lawyers in the program’s three offices in Orange, Dutchess and Sullivan Counties, which handled civil rights, class action, employment and other cases for low-income clients. 

As an associate at a large New York law firm (White & Case), Mr. Steinglass worked on securities, antitrust and other corporate litigation (1968-1970). 

He was a law clerk for federal District Judge Walter Mansfield (1967-68).