Chet
Randall
Nominated by Helen Meyer
"After graduating from Hunter College in New York, Chet spent three years addressing housing needs of low-income families in the Bronx, including two years as a bilingual housing specialist at the East West Eviction Prevention Center in the Bronx and then his final year as coordinator for the Bronx Task Force on Housing Court.
Chet entered Northeastern University School of Law in the fall of 1993. His law school co-ops included time with Mass Law Reform Institute, a judicial clerkship with a federal judge in Oregon, his law school's Criminal Trial Advocacy clinic, and work as a legal intern with the Office of Public Advocacy (court-appointed criminal defense) in Anchorage, Alaska. The latter captured his interest and attention and, after graduation in 1996, Chet returned to Anchorage for a full-time criminal defense position where Chet worked for almost five years, handling both felonies and misdemeanor crimes. In 1997, Chet also managed to squeeze in a three-month role in Sarajevo working on the Dayton Peace Accords.
In 2001, Chet and his family moved to Maine where he joined Pine Tree Legal Assistance as a staff attorney. At Pine Tree, he handled a wide range of civil legal cases. It is a testament to his great lawyering skills that from 2001 through 2007, Chet only lost four cases. In another display of his commitment to public service, Chet chose to use his "retention incentive leave" not in vacationing on a sunny beach, but volunteering with the Red Cross helping Alabama residents recover from Hurricane Katrina.
In 2007, Chet took a leadership role in developing a foreclosure prevention program at Pine Tree Legal Assistance that went on to gain national recognition. Chet helped with the formation of a "Maine Housing Counseling Network" to increase the capacity of HUD housing counselors to provide foreclosure support, formation of the pro bono initiative "Maine Attorneys Saving Homes" and creation of Pine Tree's hugely popular web-based ""foreclosure prevention tool-kit."" And from all of this came nationally recognized foreclosure defense work on behalf of thousands of Maine homeowners, the recruitment of MASH Coordinator Tom Cox, the 2010 Nicole Bradbury deposition that made "robo-signing" a new phrase in our national lexicon and landed Pine Tree on the front page of the New York Times and Washington Post, and a nationwide halt to foreclosure proceedings for a significant period of time.
In 2009, Chet was selected by the Maine Judicial Branch to lead a 23-member commission drawn from all the players involved in foreclosure work and charged with studying ways to better manage the growing volume of foreclosure cases, which ultimately led to adoption of Maine’s mandatory foreclosure diversion process.
In 2016, Chet became the directing attorney of Pine Tree’s Augusta Office and in 2018, he became Pine Tree’s deputy director. During his tenure, Chet has improved almost all aspects of Pine Tree’s program, most notably increasing opportunities for professional development and leadership, support and training for managers, and response to the pandemic-era and post pandemic era housing crisis. In 2022, after the unexpected passing of Pine Tree’s executive director, Chet served as interim executive director for close to nine months where he led the organization through a challenging transition."
