Jonathan Petts, Executive Director of Immigrants Like Us. Jonathan Petts, Executive Director of Immigrants Like Us

Former Big Law attorney Jonathan Petts has been working flat out ever since a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month shielded thousands of immigrants who arrived in the country as children from deportation.

President Donald Trump has said he will try again to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Most of the program's roughly 649,000 beneficiaries, known as "Dreamers," are young adults born in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

But in the meantime, Petts, who is executive director of the nonprofit Immigrants Like Us, says his organization has been flooded with requests for help with DACA applications. Immigrants Like Us deploys technology to expand access to legal services for low-income immigrants.

"It has been very busy these past two weeks," said the 40-year-old lawyer, who left a career in Big Law more than four years ago to dive full-time into nonprofit legal tech startups.

Immigrants Like Us helps prepare immigration applications, free of charge, through web applications similar to those used by Turbo Tax. Low-income users, victims of abuse, asylum seekers and Dreamers also receive a free attorney review of their completed forms.

The online tool has been built with Community Lawyer, which is a no-code product for document automation. Immigrants Like Us is funded by Fast Forward accelerator and incubated at Harvard Lab, which means the university provides office space and access to experts.

Immigrants Like Us is the second legal tech startup that Petts has co-founded. The first, Upsolve, helps low-income Americans file for bankruptcy. Upsolve sprang from pro bono bankruptcy filings he had been doing for New Yorkers swimming in medical debt while he worked as a corporate bankruptcy and restructuring associate at Morrison & Foerster.

"I realized that so much of this process was form-filling, document collection—all things that could be automated with technology, but weren't," Petts said.

Through his pro bono work, Petts saw that while the Big Law model of personalized attention and hand-holding might serve multinationals well, it wasn't functioning for those with modest incomes who can't pay hefty hourly lawyer fees.

"The way to solve the access to justice crisis is by taking the expertise of a few really expert lawyers and coding that into technology, supervised by lawyers, and making free legal services available to thousands of people who can't afford lawyers," he says.

Leaving Corporate Law

The decision to leave corporate law was "really scary," Petts said. "Big Law is actually a clear, straightforward path. It's a challenging one, but it does have the virtue of feeling linear."

Petts' legal career began with a Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by an associate position at Milbank and stints as a law clerk at U.S. bankruptcy courts in New York and Chicago.

His new path is full of twists and turns, with many problems to solve. It also represents a huge financial sacrifice but brings the possibility of building a tool that can help a lot of people.

"I'm so excited to get out of bed every day," he says. "That's something I never had in my former life as a big firm attorney."

Access to Justice

Petts sees immigration as the next great "access to justice" challenge. He knows firsthand how painful the process can be, having spent years and thousands of dollars on legal fees to secure a green card for his Romanian wife.

Immigration filings have grown more complex over the years. Filling out once-straightforward paperwork, such as family green card applications, now involves sifting through dozens of pages of legalese that are difficult to decipher.

The Immigrants Like Us website asks users standard questions to make sure the nonprofit can assist, while advising those with more complicated cases or past immigration problems to seek help elsewhere.

In the case of DACA, applicants must not have been convicted of a felony or a serious misdemeanor. Even those with clean records, though, are often reluctant to report their status to the U.S. government for fear of deportation.

Participants in DACA must renew their status to get work permits every two years. That task has become more daunting amid constant threats by the Trump administration to end the program, compounded by logistical challenges amid the COVID-19 crisis.

Petts' legal tech immigration tool comes at a particularly good time. Those who might have met with pro bono lawyers in the past may not have that option during the pandemic.

Many are also busy: An estimated 202,000 DACA recipients are considered essential workers during the health crisis. About 29,000 work in health care.