Tony Essaye

Nonprofit co-founder
Washington, D.C.

Tony Essaye retired from his law firm at 68 and helped launch the International Senior Lawyers Project, a nonprofit that promotes the rule of law in less developed nations and has placed 100 lawyers in 40 projects around the world. Essaye now volunteers full time as the organization's co-president.

Why I chose this work & why I keep doing it:

I am the type of person who is not interested in doing all that much of that anyways....I feel really good about what I'm doing. I get an emotional reward and I feel it's productive.

My best day:

When we sent our first lawyer over to South Africa and we just didn't know how it would go. [The volunteer] was supposed to teach a [commercial law] class to 30 students and we didn't know how interested they would be. He sent us an email that night after his class and he said, "All 30 showed up....I told them at the start we'd take two hours with a 15-minute break and when we finished the first hour, they all said, 'We don't want a break, we want to use that 15 minutes for more instruction.'"

How I planned for my next chapter:

It's encouraging that seniors do bring something to the table that others don't bring.

As [my lawyer friend Bob Kapp and I] talked, we started thinking, maybe there are a lot of people like us, and we might consider creating an organization that would try and tap that talent....We offer the skills, experience, and judgment of people who have been practicing 25 or more years. That's more than a niche, it's a set of attributes that there is a need for, and it's encouraging that seniors do bring something to the table that others don't bring.

My toughest challenges along the road:

Right now, we probably have more potential projects than we can handle administratively. We probably have the volunteers out there but with only two staff members and myself...we want to administer every project very carefully....Like any small organization, the challenges are to find the projects, find the people, get them interested, do the match up, and raise the money to have the staff and wherewithal to do all that.

My source of heartfelt connection to the work:

My belief that an effective legal system and the rule of law is just a necessary basis for a democratic civil society and that to the extent lawyers could help ensure that such systems were in place and maintained in developing countries, that would be an enormous service to the world community.

A second belief, or hope, was that there were at least a fair amount of senior lawyers that would be interested and available and whose expertise could be used. And the third belief or hope was that there would be needs where someone with American law experience could apply their experience and skills.