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Family Practice

Attorney Alanna Goldman helps families navigate the murky waters of adoption law

By Ian Chang

The life of adoption attorney Alanna Goldman (L.A. '91) seems defined by flashes of chance followed by periods of intense commitment. There was the time in college when, flipping through a magazine in the airport, she came across an article on Teach For America's inaugural class. A year later, Goldman had joined the corps and was headed for an under-resourced classroom in Los Angeles. Then there was the desk she was assigned to share with another young law student named Mark, during a summer job at the Alliance for Children's Rights. They were married four years later. Finally, there was the day she was driving down Ventura Boulevard, considering ways to leave her job at a big law firm to spend more time with her two young children. (She now has three: Ryan, 5; Jake, 3; and Bryce, 1.) Out of the corner of her eye, she spied a small adoption agency tucked into a row of offices. She went in and offered the owner part-time legal assistance, but he was more interested in finding a successor.

By the time the dust settled, both Alanna and Mark had quit their corporate jobs, and three years later, their AdoptHelp Law Center is a thriving practice with four full-time caseworkers, one of the highest placement-success rates in the nation, and hallways covered with photographs of smiling babies and their ecstatic new parents.

Fortuitous beginnings notwithstanding, Goldman clearly has a taste for hard work. Teach For America was "a life-changing experience," she says. "When you're a teacher, you're on the front lines-you're right there, in front of the kids every day, and you have to be on." Goldman finds that same sense of immediacy in the daily crises of adoption law. AdoptHelp is a "total commitment," she says, and she and Mark give their work the personal touch she developed as an elementary school teacher. AdoptHelp provides all manner of adoption, from domestic adoptions to surrogacy, and is available (in English or Spanish) to adoptive parents and birth mothers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Goldman credits AdoptHelp's success to a team motivated by high stakes. "We are driven by the collective knowledge that our work [determines] whether or not a child will have a permanent home and a parent or parents to come to at the end of each school day." Even back when Goldman was working for that large law firm, she recalls, "I used to look out my office window and say, 'There's this whole world out there waiting for me, and I can't wait to be a part of it again.' I felt a part of it when I was in Teach For America, and I feel like I'm there again."