NORTHAMPTON — Less than a month after one of its attorneys was invited to visit the White House, a prominent immigration law firm in Northampton will shut down at the end of the month.

The law firm Curran, Berger & Kludt, also known as CBK immigration, sent an email to its employees on Friday saying that its last day of operation would be July 31. Located on Masonic Street, the firm is run by two attorneys, Dan Berger and Megan Kludt, and has more than 30 staff including paralegals, case managers and front office workers.

The attorneys explained in their email that the decision to close came from the fact that Kludt, the firm’s managing partner, had been tentatively selected for a new job that would require her to leave the law firm, and that Berger had decided to leave the practice rather than take over as managing partner.

“We do not do this lightly, or without understanding that we are losing the practice we have tried to build together,” the email states. “We know how difficult this will be for everyone who has worked so hard to make the law firm great.”

In an interview with the Gazette, Berger said that in addition to the law firm, he has been working with a newly founded clinic at Cornell University known as Path2Papers. The program helps immigrant recipients of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program secure work visas in case the federal program, which protects immigrants who arrived as children from deportation and provides for work authorization, ends in the future. It was his work at Cornell that led to Berger’s invitation to the White House last month to see President Joe Biden announce changes in the DACA program.

“I’ve been doing two jobs for about a year now,” Berger said. “It seems like an opportunity with her [Kludt] leaving for me to rebalance my life.”

CBK, founded by Joe Curran in 1984, serves thousands of clients immigrating to the United States in helping them find temporary or permanent work and residency visas, and also has a small team working with humanitarian and asylum clients. Curran retired from the firm in 2020.

Berger said he and Kludt would work to help them either find a new law firm or take their client with them to their new place of work.

“Ethically, we have an obligation to give them a choice,” Berger said. “We’re working that out client by client, I’m calling individual clients and figuring out a plan with them, we have an obligation to make sure they’re OK.”

Employees of the law firm who spoke to the Gazette said they were shocked by the news.

“There were no warning signs for this at all,” said Alisha Seney, a senior paralegal and team lead at the law firm. “The thing that startled me the most is just how tight of a timeline they were giving us, essentially two weeks notice.”

Seney said that before news of the closure was announced, the labor union representing workers at the firm — Legal Workers for Immigration Solidarity (LWIS) — voted for a strike authorization, although there had been no active plans to issue a strike. Issues staff members have had with the firm include low wages, high turnover rates and lack of proper training, said Seney, who is a member of the union’s bargaining committee.

“We would make moves … given verbal promises and then they would do nothing and stay exactly where they were,” Seney said. “This just feels like an extension of that, being constantly told one thing and then turned around and blindsided with other information.”

Berger declined to comment on the issues surrounding the union negotiations, saying that talks were ongoing and that a federal mediator was involved.

He said the firm would work to help staff find new positions elsewhere.

“I think the experience they have is good,” he said. “We’ve had quite a few law firms reach out to us to see about our staff.”

Sarah Brown-Anson, an immigration specialist at the firm who is also on the union’s bargaining committee, said that she felt that they were closing in on negotiations for a first contract with management when they got the news of the closure. Negotiations had been mainly with Kludt, the firm’s managing partner, but Brown-Anson said the work had also been delegated to other office managers, including those who will now also be affected by the layoffs.

“We had made a lot of progress with the goal to make these positions high-quality jobs where someone could have a career,” Brown-Anson said. “The fact they’re laying us off shows they didn’t share that goal.”

Kludt, who Berger said was out of the area to attend a meeting, did not immediately return requests for comment regarding the closure.

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.