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Harold Rubestein began his legal career as an attorney with the New Jersey Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), the state agency responsible for the operation of the court system and the broader legal framework in New Jersey. He worked in the area of professional responsibility, investigating and arguing disciplinary cases against lawyers and judges for violations of their respective codes of conduct. In one notable case, In the Matter of Lennox S. Hinds, 90 N.J. 604 (1982), the legal brief he authored for the New Jersey Supreme Court was also submitted by the New Jersey Attorney General to the U.S. Supreme Court as part of the record in Garden State Bar Association v. Middlesex County Ethics Committee, 457 U.S. 423 (1982).

Within the AOC, Rubestein later served as Special Assistant to the Administrative Director of the Courts and, on an interim basis, as Special Assistant to the Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. In both roles, he was involved in administrative and policy-related responsibilities. He also held a grant from the State Justice Institute and collaborated with Professors Milton Heumann (Political Science), Jonathan Hyman (Law–Newark), and Kenneth Dautrich (then a graduate student in political science) on an empirical study of the civil settlement process in the New Jersey court system.
Rubestein left the AOC to become Executive Director of the New Jersey State Bar Association (NJSBA), the largest organization of lawyers in the state. He was serving as Executive Director on September 11, 2001, and subsequently helped lead the NJSBA’s statewide pro bono initiative to provide free legal assistance to survivors and families of victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Following his tenure at the NJSBA, Rubestein served as a vice president at Legal Services of New Jersey (LSNJ), a major public interest law firm offering free civil legal aid to individuals with limited financial means. Among his responsibilities, he continued his work in legal ethics as one of LSNJ’s in-house ethics counsel and also taught the mandatory continuing legal education (CLE) course on professional responsibility to Legal Services attorneys. He is now retired from the practice of law.