WILLIAM STEINWEDEL

Maryland Legal Aid

William Steinwedel serves as deputy advocacy director for homeownership preservation with the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau’s Foreclosure Legal Assistance Project, representing clients in Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy and foreclosure mediations with a focus on helping people save their homes. He also handles expungements and participates in outreach programs, including Lawyer in the Library.

“I wanted to go into the legal field to give honest advice and trusted counsel to those people in our society who unfortunately do not have the opportunity to obtain that in most circumstances,” Steinwedel said.

Before joining Maryland Legal Aid in December 2014, he spent two and a half years as an associate at Melehy and Associates LLC, a general practice firm where he worked primarily in bankruptcy, family and employment law. Prior to that, he spent about a year and a half as an associate at Bender and Radcliffe, P.A., a medical collections firm.

Steinwedel earned a degree from Washington College in Chestertown in 2007 and a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 2010. He has been an enrolled agent with the Internal Revenue Service since January 2017 and volunteers with the CASH Campaign of Maryland during tax season, preparing tax returns for low-income communities. He also gives presentations to law schools on areas of law such as bankruptcy and has noted that tax clinic volunteering shows accounting students that law provides an avenue for those interested in math and accounting to help people and pursue change.

His contributions to the profession have been recognized within the Consumer Bankruptcy Section of the Maryland State Bar Association, where he is a past president and a past recipient of the Alan J. Belsky Award for contributions to the section. He currently serves as co-chair of the section’s Ocean City Committee and will moderate their program this year.

Though he has described himself as a below-average speaker early in his career, Steinwedel addressed the challenge by volunteering for every opportunity to speak in public — including at work conferences — so that he would become more comfortable. He has said he is still not a polished speaker but is much better than he was before. His long-term goals include becoming an executive director of a legal services organization or a federal bankruptcy judge.