Lawyer Helps Women To Next Stage in Life

Lawyer Helps Women To Next Stage in Life

Let's stop lawyer-bashing long enough to consider the story of Denville attorney Bonnie Frost, a queen of pro bono work (For the uninitiated, pro bono means "free")

If you're involved with women's issues in Morris County, it's difficult not to know this partner in the firm of Einhorn, Harris, Ascher, Barbarito & Frost. She's constantly on the go- ubiquitous, in fact.

To hear her tell it, she's been going for decades. "I took one week off to have each of my children," she says. Go to The Women's Center at County College of Morris and you'll find her counseling displaced home-makers, individually, devoting a free half-hour to each woman's problem- debt, paternity, whatever.

Go to a talk on women and finance at the Rutgers Cooperative Extension Service and you'll find Frost there, as a volunteer, talking to hundreds of women on divorce and financial survival. "It's true that after a divorce, a woman's standard of living goes down 42 percent, and a man's goes up 73 percent," she says.

Go to The Resource Center for Women in Summit and you'll hear her giving seminars and helping in the legal clinic.

Recently, she helped write a small book called "What to Do If... Women's Legal Rights in New Jersey" for the Northwest New Jersey Regional Women's Center at Centenary College in Hackettstown. Dr. Deborah Diamond Fisch, director of the center, say Frost sat on the volunteer committee that edited the work, in addition to writing some of the chapters.

"Bonnie did rewrites and put in umpteen hours in the last year on this project," Fisch says. "She went far beyond the call of duty. We were on the phone sometimes for a couple of hours, on conference call, trying to meet our own deadline."

All this, and Frost doesn't need to do any of it to fulfill her professional obligation to do pro bono work. New Jersey courts can assign a lawyer to indigents who need representation. But Frost is exempt from that requirement since she sits on the District 10 Ethics Committee, which covers Morris and Sussex counties.

This is one attorney who isn't interested in what she has to do, but in what it's possible to do.

"My whole life has been helping adults to get on with the next step of their lives," says Frost, who recently was cited by The Displaced Homemaker Network of New Jersey for her volunteer work.

Before entering Seton Hall Law School at age 35, she worked in education administration for 15 years, 11 of them in the Parsippany schools.

"Since I was in education before, I can help people by telling them where to get help outside the legal arena," she says. "Their problems aren't always all legal."

One can't help but notice that, while Frost is devoted to helping all people, she apparently has a soft spot for women.

"More often than not," she says, "women don't have the access to knowledge that men do. What I do is a way of helping, of giving them something to think about. The smallest steps can sometimes make the biggest difference in a person's life."

She get's a charge out of giving a free consultation and seeing relief cross a woman's face. She loves hearing what she usually hears, "Wow, I feel a lot better just knowing that."

Knowledge, in Frost's book is power.

"A woman may be going through a tough divorce," she says, "and not realize that part of her husband's benefits at work is reduced-cost legal services. But just for him, not his spouse. There are corporations in Morris County that do offer that."

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She's helping to level that playing field.

The personal ethic that drives her to help for the sake of helping isn't consistent, of course, with the usual image of a money-grubbing lawyer.

"[The Image] is very distressing," says Frost, who specializes in matrimonial law, "My experience is that that's not the way lawyers are, especially in family law. The anger people have involving things in their lives gets deflected onto lawyers."

So she carries on with her half-hour counseling sessions and her booklets and lectures, intervening, she hopes, in the lives of women just when they need it with just the right information.

"Local women's centers are important," she says, "In them a woman can reassess her life vocationally, financially, in the legal system. Those types of intervention measures are ways of keeping people productive in society."

Copies of "What to Do If... Women's Legal Rights in New Jersey" are available for $6 plus shipping and handling by calling (908)852-9365. Ask for JoAnn.