Five Years Out: Joy Kim ’20

Associate Counsel, New York City Department of City Planning

Tell us about your current position. What are the challenges? What do you like most about it? 

I am one of the in-house counsel for New York City’s Department of City Planning (DCP). We advise on any and all legal issues that come up. My colleagues and I from counsel’s office are each assigned to different land-use applications and projects. Some of them are private applications, some of them are city-sponsored projects. Most of the time we’re just on these projects to advise and flag legal risks or issues that we see. If legal questions or issues come up during the process, then we research and answer those questions as well.

Sometimes, as agency counsel, we will be the ones to lead an application through the public review process if the main focus of the application is very legally involved, but most of the time we’re just advising on these applications. When you’re the only lawyer in a project team, you have to know what to flag and recognize things that other people may not be paying attention to.

Before I did this, I was a tenants’ rights attorney at the Legal Aid Society, also in New York City. I love when I get to combine my experience as a litigator with my current role as an advisor. When we get sued on a project after it’s gone through public review and it’s already approved, then we as agency counsel support the Law Department when they defend us in the lawsuit. I have a unique role as someone who’s been with the project from the initial conception. I can serve as the bridge between the lawyers at the Law Department, who are now getting on board, and the project team here, which is made up entirely of non-lawyers, so that’s really interesting.

What led you to work at the Department of City Planning?

My undergrad degree was in urban studies, and I have always been interested in eventually working for the government. About two and a half years after I joined Legal Aid, the DCP job opened up, which is kind of infrequent because it’s a pretty small team. So I thought, “You know, might as well try it.” And now I’m here.

How did NYU Law prepare you for your career path?

I was a Moelis Urban Law & Public Affairs Fellow at NYU Law. In connection with the fellowship, I took a lot of land use classes, including a seminar on land use, housing, and community development in New York City. It also gave me the opportunity to be a research assistant at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, and to intern in the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal’s Tenant Protection Unit and at Services for the UnderServed, a nonprofit whose mission includes providing permanent supportive housing for formerly homeless individuals.

One reason I was really attracted to NYU Law was because of the Furman Center and curricular offerings for people who are specifically interested in housing and urban law issues, which was really rare and special. I’m so grateful for that.

What were your favorite classes or activities at the Law School?

I was fortunate to be able to take two clinics taught by [AnBryce Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus] Richard Revesz: the Regulatory Policy Clinic and the Advanced Regulatory Policy Clinic. [Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law] Kenji Yoshino’s Advanced Constitutional Law Seminar was really great. I got to dig really deeply into issues that you don’t get to cover as much in regular con law. That semester was when Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, and we watched this very historical moment with Professor Yoshino. It was definitely a cool academic experience to hear our professor’s thoughts firsthand.

I also did a lot of extracurricular activities in law school—maybe too many. Law Revue was my favorite thing that I was involved in. I made such great friends through it, and that creative outlet was so cathartic. During my 3L year, we had started rehearsing and choreographing the 2020 show, and then we had to reconfigure it for Zoom because of the pandemic. To this day, I don’t know how we pulled it off. It was nice to be able to provide some reprieve for our classmates during a hard time.

I also did the other Law Review, and made wonderful friends in that as well. I really enjoyed being a notes editor, working with other student writers and trying to help elevate my peers. Later, I felt that support when I was getting my own note published. I was surrounded by such smart people who are so humble and supportive of each other.

In what ways did your law professors impact your academic and personal development?

I’m very grateful for how open so many professors were about sharing their own experiences in the profession and giving me confidence about certain skills like writing. Professor Yoshino was my substantial writing advisor, and that piece ended up getting published as a Law Review note. I’m still astounded by how kind and supportive he was, and how he helped me organize my chaotic thoughts into this piece of writing. That instilled a lot of confidence in me.

Another example is Professor David Kamin [’09], my 1L Legislation and the Regulatory State professor. At the time I was very anxious about choosing to pursue public interest jobs and was having kind of an identity crisis while everybody around me was preparing for Employer Interview Week. On the last day of class, he said, “Don’t feel like you have to follow a certain path. Forge your own path. Talk to me if you want.” So I had a few conversations with him that summer. He tried to share everything he knew about working in government.

Both of those professors, and others, were so good at never making you feel like you said the wrong answer in class. That really helped me going forward, not just to develop that habit of speaking up, but also in how I interact with other people.

Serving as a teaching assistant for Frank Upham [Wilf Family Professor of Property Law Emeritus] and Geoffrey Miller [Stuyvesant P. Comfort Professor of Law] gave me experience that’s helpful in my teaching now as an adjunct assistant professor of urban planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. I teach the Land Use Law course to non-lawyers. I enjoyed putting together a curriculum and synthesizing all of this knowledge from my experience and all of the case law out there. I had to think about how to present this in a way that people who are not lawyers would understand and that would be helpful to them. I feel like that also really helped me in my day job.

How have you stayed connected with the Law School community since graduating?

I keep in touch with a lot of friends from law school. You don’t go to law school to make friends, but I was so grateful and pleasantly surprised that I found such a caring community—I truly felt more cared for and supported than I ever had before in any other context. I went to the Law Revue show this year on alumni night. I try to attend APALSA [Asian-Pacific Allied Law Students Association] alumni events, too. I think we all kind of miss law school, although maybe not the cold calling.

If you could go back in time, what kind of advice would you give yourself?

I was often worried about pigeonholing myself and about choosing the right path. I think there’s particularly a lot of pressure within public interest to make those choices very early on and to do everything right. I would go back and tell myself to relax a bit, that skills are transferable, every experience is valuable. Your career is really long. It’s OK for you to not know what your path should look like, or if you change that path.

As somebody working in the legal field, in what ways do you think NYU Law graduates are distinct from those from other schools?

I feel like there’s like a civic-mindedness in our DNA as NYU Law alumni and students. Even people who are not working in the public sector have this. They’re still so thoughtful about their impact on the world and have a lot of respect for people who are in the public sector. I continue to see that with my classmates who are working in the private sector. I feel like I still relate to them so much because of that spirit they have, which I attribute to being part of the NYU Law community.