Helaine M. Barnett has devoted her entire professional career to the provision of civil legal aid to the poor and in the pursuit of equal access to justice. In January 2004, she was appointed President of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), in Washington, DC, the first legal aid attorney and first woman to serve in that position, where she served for six years. Under her leadership, LSC issued the groundbreaking Justice Gap Report, which documented the unmet civil legal needs of low-income Americans. Before joining LSC, she spent 37 years with The Legal Aid Society in New York City, where she became the Attorney-in-Charge of its multi-office Civil Division. Among her accomplishments, she created its Homeless Family Rights Project and mobilized its 9/11 disaster assistance response. In 2010, she was appointed by the Chief Judge of New York State to chair the Task Force to Expand Access to Civil Legal Services, which has become the New York State Permanent Commission on Access to Justice. She was appointed an Adjunct Professor at New York University School of Law where she taught a class on Access to the Civil Justice System. She founded Legal Hand, which began with neighborhood storefront centers staffed with community volunteers, who are not lawyers, who provide legal information, assistance, and referrals to try to prevent issues from turning into legal actions, which have now been expanded to virtual Legal Hand Call-In Centers. She has held leadership positions in the American Bar Association, serving on its Board of Governors and its Executive Committee, the only legal services lawyer to have held these positions, and is a member of the ABA House of Delegates. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including the ABA Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York Law Journal, the New York State Bar Association Gold Medal for Distinguished Service in the Law, and the ABA Fellows Outstanding Service Award, and has published several law review articles on access to justice. She is a 1960 graduate of Barnard College and received her law degree from New York University School of Law in 1964.