Sunday Reads Q&A: Kristen Sonday Is Working to Solve the Justice Gap

A conversation with the Latina entrepreneur and mother of two — who inspires me big time.

Welcome back to the Sunday Reads interview series. These conversations are a super selfish way for me to indulge my desire to speak to women I admire about how they pursue their dreams. I’ve previously interviewed this brilliant bestselling author, and this fearless travel adventurer. Suggestions for women I should interview next? I’m all ears.

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Today I’m so excited to bring you my conversation with entrepreneur Kristen Sonday. Kristen is the co-founder and CEO of Paladin, which helps legal teams run more efficient pro bono programs while increasing access to justice. Kristen and I went to Princeton together, and I have long admired her ambition and her brain. Watching her navigate the professional world as a Latina CEO, a first-generation college graduate, and a mother of two, has only caused that admiration to grow. Here is our conversation.

Could you tell us how Paladin started and how you got it off the ground?

My first job out of Princeton was with the US Justice Department and I was doing international criminal work in Mexico and Central America. I was splitting my time between our office in D.C. and our embassy in Mexico City, and I was one of the few Latinas on the team. A lot of our survivors and victims were also Latino and I felt this deep sense of responsibility to do justice by them. I got to see firsthand how complicated our judicial system is to navigate and how having an advocate with you, whether it's the US government or an attorney, can really mean the difference between winning and losing your case. I thought there had to be a better way to help people from underserved communities gain access to lawyers and representation that can make a meaningful impact in their case.

I met my co-founder a couple of years later in New York. She was a litigator at a big firm and had done pro bono with the UN International Criminal Court. She'd just come off of winning asylum for this Colombian man Eduardo, and his family who were being persecuted by a local guerrilla group. She told me about the power of pro bono, how every attorney in the US has this professional responsibility to do 50 hours of pro bono work per year to help low-income individuals, which I didn't know about. That's when the light bulb went off that there might be a tech solution. There had never really been a lot of innovation in this space, so I thought there might be an opportunity to leverage technology to help people who need legal assistance gain access to high quality lawyers who can help them navigate their case.

How does Paladin work for someone who needs a lawyer?

There are about 400 nonprofits across the US called Legal Services Organizations who intake clients, screen their cases for eligibility, and then refer them out for pro bono lawyers or take them on internally. We provide a free version of Paladin to those organizations to input their pro bono cases into the system, and then with the click of a button they can send them out in real time to all the big law firms, corporate teams, bar associations, US government attorneys on the network to help pick up their case. Prior to Paladin all this referral work was done via emails and spreadsheets so we're making it a ton more efficient, and we're increasing the number of people who can get help. Over the past couple of years we’ve been able to make over 30,000 pro bono connections.

Starting your own organization like this is just mind bogglingly hard. Was being an entrepreneur something you always knew that you wanted to do?

The short answer is no. Neither of my parents went to college, and my dad didn't even graduate from high school, but he built this really large, successful business in law enforcement technology. Growing up I got to see firsthand his building a business from the ground up and all of the ups and downs that came with that. At the end of the day, he was working on something that he was so passionate about, he was his own boss, he was figuring out all the solutions through his blood, sweat, and tears. There's something really alluring about being able to see something that you dream about come to life, and knowing that you built it.

To shift a little to your life outside of work, you are a mom. You have two kids. How does being a mom impact your career and how you structure it?

For me there isn't work-life balance, it's more about work-life blend. I try to be present on whatever I'm working on at the time. I'll drop the kids off in the morning and then I'm present at work from 9 to 5, 6, 7, whenever I go back home. When I'm home, I put my phone away, we do dinner, we play, we do bath time, and then after bed I’m usually jumping back online to catch up on what I missed and reset for the next day. Being present has been really important for me to be able to excel at both.

This might sound like a weird question, but we follow each other on Instagram and I notice that you don’t post your kids, which only sticks out to me because so many other people do. Is that a personal choice, a work choice?