Pro bono highlights in the U.S. for 2011 include:
- In partnership with General Electric Company, we created teams of lawyers that provided legal assistance to disabled athletes of the Special Olympics in Connecticut and Arizona.
- National Law Journal honored our firm in by bestowing on us one of its six annual pro bono awards. The award recognized us for our ongoing representation of victims of sexual violence in Haiti.
- We provided wide-ranging legal assistance to Big Brothers Big Sisters and its local chapters, receiving its Common Good Award.
- We won damages from a federal jury in Pittsburgh compensating a state prisoner for brutal and unjustified treatment by prison guards.
- By succeeding in two insurance recovery cases, we saved the YMCA of Germantown (in Philadelphia), enabling it to reopen its doors and resume operations.
- We won humanitarian parole for four female victims of sexual violence in Haitian tent camps, and then resettled them and their seven children in safe homes in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Oakland.
- In partnership with GlaxoSmithKline, we sent volunteers to clinics for seniors in the Pittsburgh area, assisting with wills, advance directives, and other estate planning matters.
- We regularly sent volunteers from our NY office to the City Bar’s homeless and senior law clinics.
- We carried our fight for a client’s privacy rights to the United States Supreme Court, where the head of our appellate group presented oral argument having won in the courts below.
- We won a Beacon of Justice Award from the National Legal Aid & Defender Association in Washington, DC. These awards were presented to firms that had demonstrated “their extraordinary commitment to pro bono appellate representation.”
- We won asylum for eight clients from such diverse countries as Togo, Honduras, Liberia, Morocco and Guatemala.
- In partnership with Thompson Reuters Foundation and three other law firms, we helped produce an authoritative report proposing revisions to the laws of Haiti to help Haitian victims of rape. The Report is based on a comparative review of such laws in other countries around the world.
- We continued representing two detainees in Guantanamo Bay, having already seen four of our other detainee clients released.
- We provided representation to eight men sentenced to death, six in Alabama, one in Illinois, and one in Pennsylvania.
- We ran pro bono partnerships with student-run legal clinics at two leading law schools – University of Pennsylvania and University of California at Berkeley.
- The Legal Clinic for the Disabled in Philadelphia chose us as the winner of its 2011 White Hat Award. The award is given annually to the firm providing the most outstanding legal assistance to the Clinic’s disabled clients.