John J. Radziewicz

Personal Introduction

I deal with imperfections every day. Mistakes made, rules broken, fractures seemingly impossible to fix. He’s got a vintage 1986 Jeep CJ-7, and it definitely has some imperfections. What John loves most about New Orleans is imperfections, too. The decrepit buildings, the heat, the rain, the people. Especially the people. Even John has his own imperfections. He’s made mistakes, and he’s paid his price for them. But John knows that it’s the imperfections that make you appreciate a person, a city, or an old Jeep, and allows us to keep working towards our improvements. When John started law school in New Orleans, he expected to be defending big insurance companies when he graduated. But it didn’t take long for John — or his professors — to realize that wasn’t the type of person he wanted to be. And then, just as John was getting ready to graduate with his law degree, the economy tanked. After bouncing around between Orlando and New Orleans for a bit — and, really, thanks to a job offer that eventually fell through — John decided to try his chances and opened Crescent City Law. It was risky, and the first few years were hard. John lived in a basement apartment, taking cases he mostly didn’t feel passionate about. He took whatever came through the door, feeling uninspired by anything except his criminal defense cases. Until he met Janucz. Janucz was a Polish taxi driver who needed help with a speeding ticket. He was ecstatic to hear about John’s Polish heritage, and their connection and ensuing friendship brought cab driver after cab driver through John’s door for traffic tickets. John had never even considered traffic tickets as something to focus his law practice on, but he soon came to realize that this work helped him give New Orleans drivers — regular New Orleans people — a fresh start. John also began to shift his firm away from trial-heavy cases and towards another side of criminal defense — expungements. John’s years of experience with criminal cases gave him a unique lens to understand eligibility, and he intimately knows the incredible changes to someone’s life that can come from an expungement, too. Expunging an arrest or conviction from a record opens a person up to a better education, better jobs, or better licenses — the difference between being a cook and being a chef. But expungements also give people a clean slate, closing the chapter of a criminal arrest history and allowing them to move forward with their lives. John has become well-known in the legal community for making himself almost constantly available for his clients, answering their questions by call or even text message throughout a case. At the end of the day, John wants to be the lawyer that helps his clients move past their mistakes and their imperfections on to a better life.