Reed Smith has received awards and wide recognition for its pro bono work:
- Lowell Sachnoff, a founder of our Chicago office, has received the Edwin Rothschild Lifetime Achievement Award for Civil Rights from the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. This prestigious award has been received by only three other individuals in the 35 year history of the Committee.
- Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs selected Reed Smith to receive its 2007 Vincent E. Reed Award for our many pro bono efforts supporting the Committee’s Public Education Project.
- The Philadelphia Bar Association gave one of its coveted Chancellor's Awards to Reed Smith and to two of our Philadelphia associates in 2008, in recognition of our ongoing pro bono program clearing the residential real estate titles of indigent Philadelphians.
- In January 2008, Reed Smith Richards Butler was named in London as "Corporate Social Responsibility Firm of the Year" by Legal Business magazine, a prestigious honor received largely for our pro bono work with Advocates for International Development (A4ID).
- For her advocacy of the rights of persecuted refugees seeking asylum, and her establishment of Reed Smith's human rights pro bono team, The National Law Journal in 2007 named our Pro Bono Counsel Jayne Fleming (Oakland office) as one of the "Fifty Most Influential Women in America."
- The Pennsylvania Bar Association has selected our Pittsburgh associate Laura Maines for one of its prestigious 2007 Pro Bono Awards, honoring Laura’s tireless work as an advocate for needy children.
- Los Angeles’ Public Counsel honored our Los Angeles associate Michelle Lyu in May 2007 for her successful pro bono asylum work in cooperation with Public Counsel’s Immigration Rights Project.
- The Pro Bono Institute at Georgetown Law Center featured Reed Smith in its national newsletter for what it called Reed Smith’s “extraordinary disaster relief efforts” in placing ten lawyers on the ground in Louisiana in the weeks immediately following Hurricane Katrina. These attorneys worked with local lawyers and prison officials in spartan conditions to help 8,000 displaced prisoners be documented as to whereabouts and given fundamental due process (many were unconvicted), so that the shattered prison system there could recover. For this work, Reed Smith received the 2006 “Most Significant Pro Bono Legal Service” Award from the Allegheny County Pennsylvania Bar Association.
- The Fairfax County (VA) Bar Association awarded its 2008 James Keith Public Service Award to our Falls Church partner Michael Dingman, for his many years of distinguished pro bono service to the community.