Big Firm Lawyer Leaves the Dark Side and Heads to Gitmo

Lawyer Swaps Big Salary, Perks to Represent Guantanamo Detainees

KJ

By PERRI CAPELL, CareerJournal.com, January 11, 2006

Jobs in human-rights litigation in the U.S. aren’t plentiful, and anyone seeing Tina Monshipour Foster in 2004 might have said she was a long shot to get one — or take one.

She was a fourth-year associate in the midtown Manhattan office of Clifford Chance LLP, one of the world’s largest law firms, with annual pay of more than $200,000. She had a secretary, word-processing staff and a car and driver at her disposal when she worked late. At night, she went home to a loft apartment overlooking the East River.

But at age 29, Ms. Foster gave it up to become one of three attorneys working at the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of prisoners at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She earns less than $70,000 annually and works out of offices in an older building in the Soho area of New York City. Studded with gum, the rug in her office is “disgusting,” she says. Home is a studio apartment one hour away by subway in Queens, N.Y.

“I love it,” she says of her job.

The transition to human-rights work actually happened through Clifford Chance. Ms. Foster, a litigator, liked her colleagues and enjoyed having top-shelf clients with deep financial pockets. But she handled small portions of the cases and couldn’t always see the value of her efforts. Clients were primarily large corporations, “and I didn’t have a connection to any individual,” Ms. Foster says.