Professional Directory

Kathleen DiPaola focuses her practice in all areas of adoption law. She has experience representing birth and adoptive parents in private adoptions, voluntary agency adoptions, foster care adoptions, and step/second parent adoptions. Kathleen also has experience representing adoption agencies and handling adoption subsidy fair hearings. Kathleen also practices in the related areas of assisted reproductive technology law (egg/sperm/embryo donation and surrogacy/gestational carrier agreements) and kinship guardianship (KinGAP).

Kathleen is currently the President of New York Attorneys for Adoption & Family Formation and a Fellow of the Academy of Adoption & Assisted Reproduction Attorneys. She has taken an active role in advocating for legislation that will improve the lives of her clients in the realms of adoption and assisted reproduction. Specifically, she was a tireless advocate for the Child Parent Security Act, which was passed in April 2020 and now permits compensated surrogacy in New York, allows for a parentage proceeding in lieu of a step-parent adoption for same-sex female couples and provides various other protections for families created through assisted reproduction. Kathleen is also the founder of New York Surrogacy Center, the first surrogacy matching program to be licensed by the New York State Department of Health.