The head of a legal services group that provides public defenders and other lawyers for the needy tried to induce a union delegate to help bring in a new management-friendly union in exchange for a lighter work load, according to a charge submitted to the National Labor Relations Board on Friday.
The Association of Legal Aid Attorneys-UAW Local 2325 alleges that Brooklyn Defender Services executive director Lisa Schreibersdorf summoned a staff member to a private meeting in her office on Sep. 16 and proposed a covert campaign to kick out Local 2325 and affiliate workers with a new union its place.
Schreibersdorf allegedly promised the employee that, if successful, the employee would be appointed chair of the new union and receive a halved workload at a full salary.
Brooklyn Defender Services, in an unsigned statement, did not deny the specific allegations.
“It has come to our attention that the Union has filed charges alleging BDS has attempted to instigate the formation of a new union to represents [sic] its employees,” the statement read.
“If the employees decide to change the current Union structure lawfully, as is their right and some have indicated they desire, BDS would follow the law and honor those wishes as well,” the statement continued. “BDS recognizes these internal union matters are for the employees to decide, not BDS and not the ALAA.”
Brooklyn Defender Services director Lisa Schreibersdorf testifies at a Council budget hearing, May 29, 2025. Credit: Screengrab via NYC.gov
Tensions have been high between unions and management across the city’s public defender organizations, which are funded by city government to provide legal services to the poor. Workers at multiple groups with expiring union contracts went on strike this summer.
Brooklyn Defender Services’ contract runs through next July. Earlier this year, Schreibersdorf told the City Council on behalf of legal service provider leaders citywide that the organizations need an additional $100 million to support and recruit staff.
The employee Schreibersdorf allegedly spoke with told THE CITY that she and the ALAA want Schreibersdorf to resign. The employee, who agreed to speak to THE CITY on condition of anonymity, said she reported the meeting to the ALAA right away but wrestled with moving forward with a formal complaint to federal regulators. Ultimately, she said she felt “that it was the right thing to do.”
“I would not be able to sit with the idea that I had an opportunity to call her out on something and did not do anything, and that she continued these efforts with other people and perhaps even successfully undermined our bargaining or our union as a whole.
“And I feel angry at her, that she put me in this position, and somewhat insulted that she thought that I would go along with what she asked me to do,” added the source.
It is the latest controversy to rock the legal services organization in recent months.
On three occasions since July, union workers picketed BDS’ offices after Schreibersdorf eliminated work-from-home schedules and allegedly required employees to install location tracking applications on their devices. The union claimed that she implemented these changes without negotiating with the union first, in violation of the contract.
Brooklyn Defender Services in its statement said that the organization “has never repudiated any of its obligations under the existing contract, including the grievance procedure or any obligation to bargain with the Union.”
The new controversy comes after Brooklyn Defender Services picked up the core work of another legal services provider, Queens Defenders, that had imploded in scandal. In June, the founder and head of Queens Defenders, Lori Zeno, was arrested and indicted on federal fraud charges, months after being forced out by the organization’s board of directors.
Brooklyn Defender Services has since absorbed Queens Defenders’ criminal practice and now has 500 union members in all.
In the complaint submitted to the NLRB on Friday, the union accused Brooklyn Defender Services of “unlawfully” supporting the dissolution of the union, according to a copy that was obtained by THE CITY.
Only members of a union can submit requests to dissolve — or decertify, as the process is formally known — their union if they collect support from a majority of the bargaining unit’s members. Once approved, the petition culminates in a ballot election overseen by the NLRB.
But those petitions can only be submitted within one year of the existing union contract’s expiration date.
The collective bargaining agreement between Brooklyn Defender Services and the ALAA, which has represented attorneys and staff at the organization since 2021, expires in July 2026 — a fact that Schreibersdorf acknowledged in the secret meeting, according to the employee.
Schreibersdorf said the timing presented a “golden opportunity” to kick out the ALAA, the employee told THE CITY, according to her recollection of the meeting.
Schreibersdorf allegedly acknowledged in the course of the private meeting that what she was proposing was illegal, according to the union’s press release, and encouraged the employee to identify trusted people to carry out the plan.
She apparently went as far as suggesting names of employees whom she believed to be anti-union in order to get the ball rolling, according to the ALAA.
“Her actions betray a contempt for the organization’s employees, their concerns, and most of all, their democratically elected representative: the Brooklyn Defender Services Union,” Andrew Eichen, the union’s co-chair, said in a statement on Friday. “The city’s second-biggest public defender office shouldn’t be run through spying, bullying, coercion, and union busting.”
So-called “sham” unions — aligned with management and their interests while collecting member dues — are illegal under U.S. labor law. Often members don’t even know that they are in one.
Brooklyn Defender Services was established in the mid-1990s out of a different labor dispute.
After unionized employees of the Legal Aid Society went on strike in 1994, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani broke the city’s exclusive contract with the organization to represent indigent clients of the city’s courts and opened requests for proposals for other organizations to go into business with the city.
Workers at Legal Aid ended the strike, but the Giuliani administration forged ahead anyway, creating agreements with a coterie of new non-union legal services groups that spun off from the dispute — including Brooklyn Defender Services.
Brooklyn Defender Services was non-union for decades until 2021, when its staff voted to join the ALAA as part of a post-pandemic wave of educated workers and legal staff that unionized in New York.
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