Chlece Walker-Neal-Murray, attorney and Co-Founder of Chicago Advocate Legal, NFP, sits down with us to discuss how she’s leveraged her social work background to launch The Preventative Law Initiative to help people resolve conflict before it surfaces and avoid the court system.
From a very young age, Chlece knew she wanted to go to law school. Shortly after getting her J.D. and Masters in Social Work, Chlece joined the CBF Justice Entrepreneurs Project and Co-Founded Chicago Advocate Legal, NFP with her law partner Brian Gilbert. After working on a case that involved 13-year-old and 17-year-old parents, a case that had no business being in the court system, Chlece and her law partner Brian Gilbert knew that something had to change and thus the birth of the Preventative Law Initiative.
Together, we talked about:
- All the interesting work Chicago Advocate Legal (CAL) is doing, including the details regarding CAL’s Preventative Law Initiative;
- How attorneys can incorporate preventative law into their practices;
- How attorneys can partner with social workers to offer more holistic services;
- CAL’s unique income-based, flat fee, sliding scale pricing model;
- How she has found success through endless learning (she has three advanced degrees and she recently enrolled in a PhD program!) and helping people at an affordable rate while they are in crises; and
- How secondary trauma is a real thing and how she works through it.
