Editor’s note: This story was updated at 8:50 p.m. July 30, 2025, to add a Lowell district judge’s order to pay three bar advocates $100 an hour to represent three defendants.
Private defense attorneys in Massachusetts blasted the state legislature on Wednesday, after Democratic leaders announced a deal to give the attorneys pay raises, saying the proposal fell short of the mark.
The attorneys, known as bar advocates, stopped taking on new cases in late May over low wages. Since then, thousands of criminal defendants in Massachusetts have gone without lawyers, even though they are constitutionally required to have one appointed for them if they can’t afford one.
Now, the situation threatens to spiral further. On Wednesday, top Democrats on Beacon Hill announced a long-awaited proposal to address the crisis — a $10 hourly raise each of the next two fiscal years. The raise would bring the hourly rate to $75 in fiscal year 2026 and $85 in 2027.
But for many of the bar advocates, the proposal fell far short of meeting their needs.
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Elyse Hershon, a bar advocate who works in Suffolk County, said she expected the bar advocate work stoppage to continue.
“I highly doubt most bar advocates would go back to taking cases for this small amount,” she said.
“It’s a slap in the face for a lot of my colleagues,” added Jennifer O’Brien, a bar advocate who works in Middlesex County.
In fact, the proposal is likely to drive a further wedge between the roughly 2,600 bar advocates in Massachusetts and the Legislature, O’Brien said.
Bar advocates represent roughly 80% of Massachusetts criminal defendants who can’t afford their own lawyers. The state’s public defender agency, the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS), represents the rest.
Bar advocates hourly rate higher in other New England states
After they stopped taking on new cases around Memorial Day, the bar advocates requested a $35 hourly raise — and many said they wouldn’t return to work unless that wage was met. That raise would bring the hourly rate for district court cases to $100.
Bar advocate pay rates were last increased in fiscal year 2021, rising to $65 an hour from $60.
In New Hampshire, bar advocates make $125 an hour. They make $112 per hour in Rhode Island and $150 per hour in Maine. The cost of living in Massachusetts is higher than in all of those states, yet the rates remain significantly lower, the lawyers have pointed out.
Sean Delaney, a defense lawyer who works as a bar advocate in Middlesex and Barnstable counties, said the Legislature fell well short of the mark.
“They have a disregard for not only the bar advocates, but a total and complete disregard for the poor in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who get accused of crimes day in and day out,” Delaney said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
“What they did today, or proposed to do, falls well short of bringing the constitution to the forefront.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Lowell District Court Judge John Coffey ordered a rate of $100 an hour to be paid to appointed attorneys in three criminal defendants’ cases. It factored whether CPCS could take any further additional steps and if the defendants’ release would “result in a threat to public safety.”
Coffey’s order took into consideration “individualized findings” based on “the charged conduct and the commonwealth’s concern for public safety and the defendant’s criminal history.”
‘Exacerbating a public safety crisis’
With bar advocates refusing to take on new cases, a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court initiated what is known as the Lavallee protocol, which calls for the release of unrepresented defendants after a week and the dismissal of criminal cases for those who don’t have representation after 45 days.
Both private lawyers and prosecutors agree — the protocol’s implementation represents a public safety crisis for the two counties where it is in place.
The Legislature’s proposal gets Massachusetts no closer to the end of that crisis, Hershon said.
“They ensured that with this offer, that’s not serious at all,” she said. “They are exacerbating a public safety crisis they caused in the first place.”
In a statement, Massachusetts House Speaker Ronald J. Mariano, D-3rd Norfolk, said the deal announced Wednesday provides a raise for the bar advocates while also balancing the state’s responsibility to budget in a “fiscally prudent manner.”
Legislators previously told MassLive they were concerned a $35 raise could set the state back by up to $100 million, and that lawyers have a “responsibility” in their role to show up for clients.
“This does feel kind of retaliatory to me,” said O’Brien.
Mariano and other democratic leaders have not met with bar advocates, despite repeated attempts from the attorneys to sit down with the legislators, according to multiple lawyers. But some bar advocates did meet with Republican legislators, including Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr, R-R-1st Essex/Middlesex, on Wednesday.
To the lawyers, the lawmakers are acting out of emotion, not reason.
The legislators “need to get over their anger” and “stop acting like children,” Delaney said.
“Let’s all come together as adults and solve this crisis in Massachusetts that has been brewing for nearly two decades,” he said.
The current work stoppage is the result of legislators’ ignoring repeated calls for additional funding, a group of bar advocates, including Delaney, said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
Unwilling to take on indigent clients
In recent years, defense attorneys have been increasingly unwilling to take on indigent clients because of the low pay, the advocates said.
“The Legislature must act decisively — with funding — to ensure the stability of the public defense system by implementing a meaningful pay increase before heading out on their summer recess,” the statement reads.
In addition to the pay raises for bar advocates, the Legislature is allocating $40 million for CPCS, the public defender agency, to double its workforce of full-time public defenders, in an apparent effort to decrease the state’s reliance on bar advocates.
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But neither Delaney nor Hershon saw that as a viable solution to the crisis that has rocked the state’s court system.
“They’ll never be able to fill 350 full-time defender spots,” Hershon said. “They’ve tried to do this before, time and time again. It won’t work.”
It would likely take more than $40 million to actually achieve what the Legislature is suggesting, Delaney said. Hiring new attorneys to work as public defenders in CPCS would be an ineffective solution because they lack the level of experience bar advocates possess, he added.
“$40 million? I’d like to see how they arrived at that number,” he said.
CPCS Chief Counsel Anthony Benedetti called the Legislature’s proposal a “critical starting point.”
The agency appreciates the Legislature taking action, he said, calling the proposal the “most significant progress ever made toward improving bar advocate pay and strengthening the statewide right to counsel.”
Taking on the cases of those who can’t afford their own representation is a way to give back, attorneys explained. There are other areas of law where they can earn significantly more, but several still make time for indigent cases.
“This comes from a passion of mine, just doing this work,” Delaney said.
MassLive Reporter Irene Rotondo contributed to this report.
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