amNewYork34%
Untangling people’s lives after death while breathing fresh air into the Brooklyn Bar: Daniel Antonelli takes reins as legal association’s president 6%
By Isabella Gallo7%
7/31/2026, 2:00:11 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 21 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Biased Writer Voice, and Appeal to Emotion, with Self-Serving Bias as the most egregious example at 10.7% saturation with 157 hits. Analysis detected 1,102 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,472 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 19.5% and a BS Rank of 6% (22,521 of 23,964 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 94.00% of the article peer group.
Trust and probate lawyer Daniel Antonelli spends his days helping people navigate life after loved ones die — untangling both the legal and emotional issues that come with death, inheritance and complex family relationships that arise as people grieve their losses.
Now, as he takes the reins as the Brooklyn Bar Association ’s president this year, he’s stepping into a bit of an inverse, yet ironically fitting, role: Charting a new life for the legal association during a time of great transition.
The Brooklyn Bar, which has called a historic brownstone on Remsen Street home since 1918, is selling the building to a developer for $12 million this fall and moving into a coworking space down the block.
The bar will channel the sale proceeds into restabilizing the association after the COVID-19 pandemic and establishing a wide array of community and career-building opportunities for the borough’s legal community.
“I want to continue to educate our attorneys,” Antonelli said in an interview with amNewYork Law.
“I want to continue to support the judiciary, and I want attorneys to feel like the Brooklyn Bar is a place where they could come to and grow, where they could accelerate their career, where they could find mentors, where they can accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish, where they could find the tools for that.”
Beyond maintaining and increasing the bar’s cultural and community networking events, he is seeking to add more programming for early-career attorneys (such has how to land a first job or pivot to a different field of law), general career-building events for lawyers of all ages, and workshops to build pathways to the judiciary.
Even though it’s a bit of a chaotic time for the association, Antonelli said he wouldn’t give up the opportunity to lead it for anything: It’s a position he’s sought for years.
“I always knew I wanted to not just play a leadership role, but to actually be the president, because I fell in love with the bar association,” he said.
“I'm in the position I always wanted to be in, and that position is in a much more difficult environment, because we are going through a huge transition … It's an amazing opportunity because we're getting to reset, we're getting to rebuild.
I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, but it happens to be me this year.”
The effort to coordinate everything has been a big one, Antonelli said.
But, as someone who deals with delicate emotional matters in his legal practice every day, it seems like he’s well-equipped to navigate the challenge.
“One thing that I feel like I’ve learned and continue to learn is human psychology,” Antonelli said.
“Over the course of my career, I think I've learned that the best way to accomplish anything, your own goals and other people's goals, whether they're clients or adversaries, is to try to figure out what people need.”
He said he’s learned the key to finding common ground and getting somebody with an opposing view to understand his perspective is to first try to understand theirs.
In his legal practice, that can involve long, emotional conversations and digging into years of finances.
“Then you wind up going one of two directions: you either understand where they're coming from, and then you change your mind or … your mind didn't change, but their mind did because they understood that you're really trying to help them,” Antonelli said.
It’s those intricate interpersonal issues and delicately high tensions that flare after the stress and grief of death that make Antonelli love this practice area.
“It's really interesting work because you're learning about people's lives after they passed away,” Antonelli said.
“You're learning so much about their family and their finances and all the drama that's involved: the kid that nobody knew about, or the spouse that nobody knew about.”
While he loves working on cases that deal with large amounts of money — they’re stimulating because of their high-stakes nature, he said — the ones that create the best stories have nothing to do with net worth and everything to do with family networks.
Let’s say, he said, a man who remarried later in life passes away.
What of the relationship between his biological kids, step kids and new partner?
“Sometimes there’s a beautiful dynamic, and other times, it’s war,” Antonelli said with a small laugh.
“It's not as simple as just labeling it money or greed.
It runs way deeper than that.”
“We also do kinship work,” he added.
“Tracing all the way back to grandparents and great grandparents, and you're learning where people came from … It's just fascinating.
It makes for really good stories, and that to me, that's all life’s about.”
Antonelli began working as an estate litigator for trust and probate matters just under 20 years ago.
He jumped into the field, and his own firm, right after passing the bar exam in 2007.
He partnered with his father, Richard Antonelli, a tax attorney who is still a partner at his firm, Antonelli & Antonelli , but now works in a more advisory role as he nears retirement.
His dad helped inspire him to become a lawyer, he said, a career path he chose - for its well-paying salary, yes - but because he fell in love with its challenging nature and the fact he could leverage his degree to help others.
“I always wanted to be an attorney because my dad was an attorney,” he said, but admitted that he wavered in his commitment to the profession through college until a mentor told him it was in his blood.
“Then, in my first year of law school, I realized, ‘This is perfect for me,” Antonelli said.
“I was like, it's prestigious, it is challenging, it is potentially lucrative, and it helps people.
Those were all the things that I wanted to do.
So, it just kind of worked out.”
Antonelli likes having his own firm because it lets him take on pro-bono cases (or nearly pro-bono cases where he barely makes a profit) “probably too much,” allowing him to support the Brooklyn community he grew up in wherever he sees fit.
“I'm always looking for ways to give back, and I always feel like I don't do it enough.
So when these situations arise, I just tell myself, "This is what you were looking for,’” he said.
“It winds up balancing out.
I'm able to run a profitable business, and I feel like I'm doing something for my community.”
With a laugh, he added he also knew he’d need to start his own firm because he likes being in control of things.
“I don't think I could work for someone.
I just have what I like to call an independent streak, as opposed to being a control freak, but it is about control,” Antonelli said.
“I want to be in the driver's seat … I get to create everything in my image.”
But, with the way he talks about bringing about a new era at the Brooklyn Bar Association, he might be more collaborative than he thinks.
“The last five years have been a period of tumult.
We've had several changes in staff.
We've struggled to find a long-term executive director.
We've struggled to formulate a vision of what we want the bar association to be,” Antonelli said.
“I see my job as coalescing around a common vision, and it's actually a little easier than I thought.”
“We all want support for the legal system, support for attorneys,” he continued.
“We want to support our judiciary.
We all want to create a community that continues to be effective in terms of administering justice, to be vibrant in terms of bringing attorneys to Brooklyn to practice here who are doing great things.”
What’s next for Antonelli after his year as president, amNewYork Law asked.
Is he a prospective attendee to the career-accelerator or building-a-path-to-the-bench seminars he’s planning to kick off?
“It's been tough for the firm because of the time that I've been committing here,” Antonelli said.
“I want to move my focus back to my firm and and and and grow it because of all the time I've been putting towards the bar association, I've slowed the growth of my firm.
I want to turn back to it and give it the time that it deserves.”
But he sees helping build the Brooklyn Bar as a lifelong project.
“After my year’s up, I'm not going anywhere,” Antonelli said.
“In fact, I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I just let everything that I built just kind of run on its own and maybe succeed or maybe fail.”
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.