Pro Bono Spotlight
Bringing you news of pro bono opportunities and accomplishments.
Nancy Nowlis is very familiar with the bonds between parent and child. They were so important to her, in fact, that she once abandoned the legal career she’d worked so hard to attain in order to spend 10 years at home with her kids.
So recently, when a pro bono client came into her office seeking visitation rights with his daughter, there was little doubt this mother of two daughters understood his pain.
Nowlis went to work. First, she won shared parental responsibility and visitation for the client. Then she filed for a contempt order when visitation was being denied. And later still, she helped turn the entire relationship around by getting her client custody as the majority timeshare parent.
This one pro bono case has been going on for more than two years, and Nowlis says it may continue.
It is that kind of devotion that makes Nowlis an easy selection to be Jacksonville Area Legal Aid’s Pro Bono Attorney of the Month for December.
“Beyond being a truly talented and professional attorney, Nancy Nowlis just really understands the needs of parents and their kids and she works tirelessly to make sure that those needs are met and that the best interests of the children are always served,” says Sarah Fowler of Pro Bono JALA.
Fowler had originally sent the father to Nowlis in 2007, just hoping that he could win some kind of contact with his daughter. That the father is now actually the primary caregiver is due to the efforts of Nowlis, she says.
Nowlis admits, “It is a pretty big jump from having no parental rights other than a financial obligation to having the majority of time with your child,” but much of that, she adds, had to do with a change of circumstances in the mother’s life.
Still, she’s convinced that people like the father she helped are very much in need of legal representation when they enter the legal system in such situations.
“If you don’t have a lawyer when the Department of Revenue brings that lawsuit for child support, the chances are the father won’t get any rights other than the financial obligation,” Nowlis says. “A pro bono attorney is able to step in and bring it before the court. It’s definitely a lot harder for a person do it pro se. A lot of people wouldn’t begin to know how to do it themselves.”
Nowlis has been a partner at Zisser, Robison, Brown, Nowlis, Maciejewski & Cabrey, P.A. since 1991. It was there that she had reentered the legal profession as a law clerk in 1985.
“It was hard coming back,” she said. “I hadn’t picked up a law book in 10 years, and not much about being a stay-at-home mom translates to the legal profession. I can remember sitting in the library trying to recall how the citation system worked.”
But a little more than a year later, the University of Iowa law school graduate had completed her transition from stay-at-home mom to working mom by passing the Florida Bar.
Prior to her 10-year sabbatical, Nowlis had worked at the Pittsburgh public defender’s office doing mostly criminal appellate work. But that was before she experienced motherhood.
“I remembered reading quite a few autopsies back then,” she says. “But now I had two little kids, and I didn’t think I really wanted to be doing that type of thing again.”
Family law seemed like a natural fit for a woman with a family. But while she didn’t have to read any more autopsy reports, her new specialty had new challenges.
“It can be very stressful,” she says. “In family law, you’re dealing with people in very difficult situations, and they’re not always dealing with it very well. I’m kind of a calm person, so that works well for me.”
Nowlis says many of her pro bono cases are rewarding, but not all of them.
“Sometimes your clients are difficult and they’ll give you a hard time or they don’t cooperate,” she says. “But then you get a case like this, where there’s a highly motivated father who really was interested in his child. And it was good to be able to help him through the legal system so that he could really have an important role in his child’s life. If he hadn’t had an attorney, I don’t think that would have happened.”
And being the mother of two daughters — and now two granddaughters — Nowlis knows, firsthand, what a tragedy that would have been.
One Client. One Attorney. One Promise.
Requests for civil legal assistance from the Fourth Circuit’s low-income families have never been greater. Attorneys are needed in all areas of civil law for pro bono representation. Contact Kathy Para, Chairperson, JBA Pro Bono Committee, for information on areas of greatest need, volunteer opportunities in Fourth Circuit legal services organizations, and support for pro bono attorneys. 356-8371, ext. 363.