Nate Juster

NATE is a career law clerk for Hon. Victoria Calvert of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta. He previously clerked for Hon. Amy Totenberg in the same district and Hon. Mary Grace Diehl of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Between his clerkships, he primarily practiced bankruptcy law, representing debtors in cases under chapters 7, 11 and 13, both in private practice at Jones & Walden LLC and as a senior staff attorney with Atlanta Legal Aid Society. He is a co-author on the recently released Bankruptcy Basics, 3d Edition, published by the National Consumer Law Center in 2023 to help legal aid and pro bono attorneys handle their first bankruptcy cases. He also is a contributing author to Collier on Bankruptcy and the Collier Bankruptcy Practice Guide, and he has published articles in the ABI Journal and in Pratt’s Journal of Bankruptcy Law.

Early in Nate’s career, he joined the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, eventually becoming Eleventh Circuit leader, for which he was responsible for summarizing recent decisions from courts in the circuit and presenting a CLE program on the decisions at NACBA’s national conference. In 2018, he joined his local Bankruptcy Court Bench and Bar Committee, through which he helped draft new local rules and led an effort to research how other districts conduct loan-modification mediations. In 2021, he became a member at large on the Atlanta Bar Association’s Board, serving on the Community Service Committee, which organizes community service events for members. In 2022, he served as secretary of the Metropolitan Atlanta Consumer Bankruptcy Attorney Group, helping to maintain its membership list and organizing CLE programs, including one of the first in the city to cover the Department of Justice’s new student loan procedures, which featured a DOJ trial attorney. He received the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA)’s K. Colleen Nunnelly Award in 2019, and in 2017 he received NACBA’s Henry J. Sommer Legal Aid Scholarship.

Nate’s first legal experience was working with a public defender’s office, where he was assigned to work in a low-level misdemeanor and traffic court and observed that probationers who were primarily in default on fines or probation fees often left in handcuffs. He left that experience knowing that he wanted to help people struggling with money avoid getting into such a situation in the first place. He started down that path by clerking for Bankruptcy Judge Mary Grace Diehl, afterward becoming one of the leading bankruptcy attorneys at Atlanta Legal Aid Society, where he fought for the interests of homeowners and low-income consumers in bankruptcy court. One of his cases involved an undue hardship proceeding in which more than $200,000 in student loans were discharged. To that end, he has spoken to area high school students on credit via the Credit Abuse Resistance Education program. He also speaks basic Japanese, having passed a language proficiency test in 2021.