Attorney Kree Filer follows the family pathway to law

Attorney Kree Filer had to beat her own path to an esteemed profession she has seen past down and through her family linage. Her father is Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Kevin D. Filer, who sits on the bench at the Compton Superior Courthouse.

Her cousin, Lance M. Filer, has his own law practice in Long Beach. Anthony S. Filer Sr., who runs Community Legal Aid SoCal as the supervising attorney, is Filer’s uncle. The patriarch of the family, Maxcy D. Filer, once sat on the Compton City Council and was a champion for civil rights.

This history-building legacy of her family is not lost on Kree Filer, who opened The Filer Law Office (FLO) in Long Beach, California, in 2021.  

“It means a lot, you know, being the only woman and the work that my family has put in, my other relatives who are in this field and standing out in their own way,” Kree Filer said. “My father had his own law firm, and then he was ultimately appointed as a judge. Seeing his work ethic and hearing about it and seeing that when I go to places, people know him as being dependable, reliable; the first one to come in, the last one to leave there. All of those things, I’m following in those footsteps.”

Filer is walking in the shadow of some pretty big shoes as a practicing attorney. But the laundry list of lawyers in the family was birth more out of happenstance as opposed to folks sitting around the dinner table contemplating what profession they wanted to map out for themselves.

This was especially true in her case, said Filer. Earning her undergraduate degree at UC Santa Cruz, Filer said she made it a point to steer away from the jurisprudence field.

“Originally, a lot of people when I was a kid, everybody would say, ‘Are you going to be an attorney just like your dad? You’re just like your dad,” Filer said. “And I was like, no. I am going to find my own way. I’m going to see something different. I am not going to be an attorney.”

Those plans went by the wayside for Filer. A feminist studies major who later attended and earned a law degree at Loyola Law School, Filer said some of the courses that she was taking such as race and the law and gender and the law, piqued her interest about the cold reality of the disproportionate impact the criminal justice system has on people of color.

“In reading these things and doing these discussions from a feminism perspective, I learned about how people of color are disproportionately incarcerated versus their white counterparts, and about just the struggles that African Americans and women of color have to go through in this country, things that you hear about,” Filer said. “But really diving into it and speaking critically about it in college, thinking about those issues, I said I want to make an impact and I want to help change these inequalities.”  

Filer said she was so intrigued about making a difference to help eradicate the racial and gender inequities as it applied to the law, she decided to attend law school.

The recidivism rate (a study published in 2018 by Justice Quarterly lists Black men with the highest recidivism rate of any ethnic group) for people of color and more awareness of the so-called prison pipeline for disenfranchised communities set Filer on a pathway she intentionally tried to avoid. 

“One of the things that I found myself really interested in was this stigma of people who have been incarcerated have, once they re-enter society, and how the prison pipeline and how you can’t get past that stigma,” Filer said.

“You can’t get a job even if you have been rehabilitated and how that ultimately funnel people back in the system and just how funds aren’t appropriated equally, and how all of that contributes to the prison complex,” Filer continued. “It was through that when I said I want to go to law school to learn the law, understand it to know who it protects, who it leaves out, and find a way to push against that.”

Since wrapping up her law school studies in 2016, Filer has hit the ground running in her full dose of practicing the law. She got a head start in her career working as an attorney at her cousin’s law office.

Building her portfolio, Filer put in work as a staff attorney for the Los Angeles Dependency Lawyers. With a brief but solid resume, Filer, who specializes in criminal, dependency, and civil law, said she was ready to step out on her own.  

“If you have a strong belief of what your dreams are and being able to achieve those things that you can, you can go for it,” Filer said. “It’s okay to have help, but also understanding that…look, no matter what family you come from, their reputation, at the end of the day, when I opened my law office on February 1, that was my Day One, Page One. I still have to go out and work for it just as hard. I’m extremely fortunate that my family has laid these amazing and huge steps for me to follow, but it’s on me to rise to the occasion and do that.”

Note: This article, written by Dennis J. Freeman, first appeared in the Compton Bulletin