Top Rated Employment Attorney in New Jersey, New Jersey
Meet Chris Lenzo
Meet Chris Lenzo
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i chose to become a lawyer for two broad
sets of reasons one related to
um the service provided to clients and
one set of reasons related more to what
I saw as my strengths as an individual
in terms of my personality so in terms
of you know service to clients I wanted
to help people i didn’t want to
represent entities i didn’t want to
represent businesses or the government i
wanted to represent individual human
beings and I wanted to help people who
were in a position where they were at a
disadvantage and needed somebody to help
equalize the playing field for them u
and so I wanted to help the underdog i’m
one of those people who has always
rooted for the underdog i particularly
feel strongly
about folks who maybe feel like they’re
outsiders or they’ve been excluded um
and so civil rights law really appealed
to me in that regard it gives me the
opportunity to um advocate on behalf of
folks who are generally at an extreme
power disadvantage compared to the large
employers that they work for the folks
we’re representing have usually been
treated as outsiders in some regard you
know whether it’s in terms of being an
outsider racially or ethnically or
religiously or because of a disability
or an outsider because they’re the
squeaky wheel who refuse to go along
with unlawful or unethical conduct and
blew the whistle um so from that
perspective those were sort of the
principled reasons that I got involved
in the law i also chose the law because
I felt that it fit me well personally
um I’ve always liked to argue from the
time I was a child i like making oral
presentations
um it’s a socially acceptable outlet for
my more aggressive impulses and I wanted
to do something where I could be my own
boss if I wanted to um where I would
have that opportunity uh which is what
I’ve ended up doing for most of my
career so obviously you know those
reasons don’t necessarily have to do
with
um the law specifically but they have to
do with why law was a good fit for me
and I also chose employment law in
addition to the reasons I gave a few
minutes ago because it’s a developing
area of law there are a lot of cutting
edge issues that are interesting and you
have the opportunity to make new law you
have the opportunity to be creative as a
lawyer it’s not the same cookie cutter
approach as you might have in some other
areas of law where everything has been
cut and dried for decades or even
centuries and you’re just doing the same
thing over and over again
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in terms of scholarly lectures or
writings that I’ve done uh in connection
with my practice
I’ve given speaking engagements uh in
the context of what are called
continuing legal education seminars for
other lawyers uh going back to I think
the second year that I was practicing in
the mid 1990s um you know at this point
I’ve probably spoken
at close to a 100 seminars in terms of
writing I haven’t written as many uh
articles but recently I’ve written two
articles addressing what has become sort
of a a cutting edge and troubling uh
trend at the US Supreme Court in terms
of the court trying to carve out
essentially religious exceptions to
anti-discrimination laws particularly in
the context of legal protections for
folks who are gay or lesbian are
bisexual or transsexual and the US
Supreme Court is using the
constitutional right to free exercise of
religion as sort of a sword that
employers who profess to be religious
can use to attack employees who may be
gay or or or bisexual or lesbian or
transsexual and they can then hide
behind the shield that well we’re we’re
doing this because uh it’s our sincerely
held religious belief and so uh I’ve
written on how that’s sort of a slippery
slope that if we’re going to start
saying that people can start
disregarding generally applicable laws
simply because of their religious
beliefs it ends up with there being no
laws because everybody’s going to decide
for themselves based on their religion
what laws they follow and what laws they
don’t
Morristown, NJ employment law attorney Chris Lenzo talks about why he became a lawyer as well as the scholarly lectures and writings he’s done.
