Here’s my recent profile of Elena Karabatos, a very interesting – and very modest – NY attorney who is so beloved that her divorce clients invite her to their 2nd — or 3rd or 4th– weddings.
A preview:
On a Monday earlier this year, three of the partners at the Garden City matrimonial law firm Schlissel Ostrow Karabatos kept getting text messages from other Nassau County attorneys: Where are you? What are you doing? Will you be here soon?
They were confused. Where were they? At the office, working, as usual.
All but one of them, it turned out. Senior partner Elena Karabatos was at an event hosted by the Nassau County Bar Association, an organization she once led, where she was being honored for advancing the group’s diversity and inclusion initiatives, expanding its community outreach by offering pro bono clinics and educational workshops, and creating and co-funding a pre-law scholarship program awarded to local college students from underrepresented backgrounds.
It was a pretty big deal, partner Joseph DeMarco notes. And she hadn’t mentioned it at the office.
“Elena is definitely not great about boasting about her accomplishments,” DeMarco says.
It’s the same during the interview. That award? Just something they give to former NCBA leaders, she says. The NCBA Karabatos Pre-Law Society? “Just call it the Pre-Law Society,” she says.
Then she talks about what really matters to her. “My job as an attorney is to actively listen to what my client is saying, understand their situation and to give them a voice—to advocate for them and to help them achieve their goals,” she says. “A divorce can be like a death—there is grief involved—and to be able to watch people go through the stages, the progression, and then see them come out on the other side … is an incredible gift.”
“She’s passionate about what she does,” DeMarco says. “One of her greatest strengths is being able to resolve super complicated cases—handling not just the case itself, but all the personalities involved. She’s the person I want working with me when I’ve got a difficult adversary or high tension between parties.”
“She gets her energy from being with people,” says Skarlatos, a partner with Manhattan’s Kostelanetz LLP. “She has real empathy and can understand where people are coming from. Clients appreciate that. They feel understood and know she has their back.”
Bryan Skarlatos, Karabatos’ husband of 34 years and self-designated No. 1 fan, credits her success to a true love of people and their stories, a desire to serve and make life easier for all, and an emotional intelligence level that is “off the charts.”
“She gets her energy from being with people,” says Skarlatos, a partner with Manhattan’s Kostelanetz LLP. “She has real empathy and can understand where people are coming from. Clients appreciate that. They feel understood and know she has their back.”
“It’s easy to escalate but hard to de-escalate,” says Andrew Schepard, a professor and director of the Center for Children, Families and the Law at Hofstra Law School. “It’s easy to get dragged down into the emotional lives of clients, who are often good people going through the worst time in their lives. If you’re an angry bitter person, I’m not sure she’s your lawyer. But for 95% of the human race, she’ll make a bad situation tolerable and that’s a big accomplishment.”
Schepard says Karabatos’ empathy sets her apart. “The matrimonial legal system would be better if everyone had her gifts,” he says. “It’s like what Atticus Finch told Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Elena lives that.”
The direct quote from Harper Lee’s classic is this: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Read more here