Education advocates have told Geri Palast that she should throw her lawsuit a bar mitzvah party. Instead, the new executive director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the group fighting Albany for billions of extra dollars for city schools, is hoping she will soon be throwing a victory party for the lawsuit, 13 years after it started.

Unpacking cardboard boxes at the organization’s Midtown office, Ms. Palast, who served as assistant secretary of labor under President Clinton, is making her way through more than a decade of court papers to prepare for battle.

She got a taste of the fight last week when the Republican majority leader of the state Senate, Joseph Bruno, said the judge must have been suffering from “lunacy” when he ruled that Albany should funnel an additional $7 billion a year to city schools.

“Where the hell is the money going to come from?” Mr. Bruno said in a speech to the New York Conference of Mayors.

Ms. Palast fired back, saying in a statement: “Bruno has launched a frontal attack on our constitution and on the system of checks and balances upon which our democracy rests.”

The two have yet to meet face to face, but Ms. Palast said a meeting with Mr. Bruno is near the top of her to-do list. She is also busy studying a seven-page glossary of education acronyms and organizations put together by her staff.

“We’ve taken this a long way in the courts, but in the end it does take a political solution,” Ms. Palast said during an interview at her office last week. Framed newspaper articles about the case, yellowed from time, dot the office walls.

Ms. Palast took over the reins just over a month ago. She succeeds Michael Rebell, the attorney who led CFE’s litigation and appeals against the state.

“It will still be a partnership with the Legislature that gets this done,” she said. Ms. Palast holds a law degree, but will not act as an attorney for the group.

Anticipating a “regime change” in Albany this year, Ms. Palast is reaching out to all the gubernatorial candidates to ensure their support of additional funding for city schools.

Ms. Palast might be stepping into the fray just as a resolution seems to be on the horizon, but she is no stranger to long political fights. She spent nine years working to enact the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees parents a 12-week unpaid leave of absence from work after having a child.

She also spent 12 years as the political and legislative director of the Service Employees International Union in addition to working for the National Treasury Employees Union and AFSCME.

“She’s trying to set the future direction for CFE,” the chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Education, Robert Jackson, said. He is also a founding member and lead plaintiff in the CFE lawsuit.

“The primary goal from the beginning was to deal with the lawsuit, and now that the lawsuit is coming to an end, now we have to determine what is the future direction of CFE,” Mr. Jackson said. “Once she gets the feel of the water in New York City, we’re looking for her to spread her wings.”

The Campaign for Fiscal Equity was formed in 1993 to ensure adequate state funding for the city’s schools. It sued the state, claiming the city’s public schools were not giving children the “sound basic education” they are guaranteed under the state constitution.

Last year, a state Supreme Court judge ordered Governor Pataki and the state Legislature to make available an additional $5.6 billion a year in operating costs and another one-time payout of $9 billion for capital projects over five years.

Mr. Pataki is appealing that decision; the case is now in the appellate division in Manhattan.

After several decades in Washington, D.C., Ms. Palast, 55, a California native, said she’s excited about her return to New York City, where she spent several years during law school at New York University. Her brother is Greg Palast, a well-known journalist and author who also lives in the city. While she has no children of her own, Ms Palast said she is invested in the future of her 9-year-old niece and nephew, who attend public school in Manhattan.

Ms. Palast is an amateur jazz singer, but these days finds little time to squeeze it all in. Most recently, she worked for a securities class action firm, Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman.

“The stars are aligning for us,” Ms. Palast said about the lawsuit, which will likely next move on to the Court of Appeals. “I have a strong feeling that now is the time.”