Steve Gray

Legal

Steve recently “retired” as Senior Counsel at the National Employment Law Project.  Prior to that Steve served as the director of The State of Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency (for a term which included the first 8 months of the Pandemic). Prior to that he was a clinical professor and Director of the University of Michigan Law School’s Unemployment Insurance Clinic. He was general manager of the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Project, a nonprofit legal aid organization he established to marshal law students to provide representation to jobless workers denied unemployment insurance. 

Steve’s primary areas of focus throughout his legal aid career have been public benefits litigation and advocacy and administrative law. Steve, who earned his JD from the University of Illinois College of Law, taught and helped establish a legal aid clinical program at the University of Namibia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar in 2008–2009. Prior to that, he was managing attorney at the Michigan Poverty Law Program; senior attorney at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law; managing attorney at Legal Services of Southern Michigan; and staff attorney at Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance.

Steve is currently spending his golden years splitting time between Michigan(in the States) and Namibia. As time allows he also teaches a poverty law seminar at MLAW and is a union steward in LEO - Lecturers’ Union, AFT-MI Local 6244, AFL-CIO and is a proud member of the OYO Board.