The American Bar Association Standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service will present five awards to individual lawyers and institutions in the legal profession that have demonstrated outstanding commitment to volunteer legal services for the poor and disadvantaged.
Recipients of the 2016 Pro Bono Publico Awards are Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP of New York; John O. Goss of Goss and Fentress, Norfolk, Va.; Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP of Chicago; Renee M. Schoenberg of DLA Piper, Chicago; and Hillary Gaston Walsh of The Law Office of Hillary Gaston Walsh, South Korea. They will be honored on Aug. 6 at a luncheon during the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
U.S.-based lawyers for Cleary, which has offices throughout the world, dedicated more than 63,000 hours to pro bono matters in 2015, assisting more than 400 clients. One of its most celebrated recent efforts involved Ndume Olatushani, who was convicted of first-degree murder and had been on death row for 10 years in Tennessee when Cleary started working on his case in 1995. Following more than 15 years of litigation in state courts, Olatushani was determined to be wrongly convicted for the crime and released from prison in 2012. He now an activist, artist, husband and father.
Goss, a legal aid lawyer some 40 years ago, responded to a nationwide call to help some 1,500 Social Security disability recipients in rural Appalachian high-poverty counties in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. The recipients were in danger of losing benefits after an inspector general report found there was reasonable grounds to believe that the benefits were obtained fraudulently - in cases all handled by the same lawyer. Even though his office was in southeastern Virginia about 530 miles away from some of the clients, Goss took on 54 individual low-income clients. "You can take the lawyer out of legal aid, but you can never take legal aid out of the lawyer," he said upon learning of the award.
In 2013, the Katten firm launched the Katten Legal Clinic at José de Diego Community Academy, the first legal clinic located in a Chicago public school. It was established with the goal of providing basic legal assistance to members of the school community while supporting education, a cause the firm adopted and has long maintained. In close cooperation with what was formerly the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, the clinic is open on the third Wednesday evening of every month during the school year and addresses legal issues ranging from landlord-tenant disputes and housing matters to wills, expungements and consumer and family law. Last year alone, Katten attorneys and staff provided more than 800 hours of pro bono legal services, including extended representation of many clinic clients.
Schoenberg's representation of charitable organizations is extensive, whether directly or as a resource for other attorneys at DLA Piper in both its U.S. and its international offices. Her diverse pro bono work includes co-counsel for corporate and tax matters for a charity that promotes food-banking around the world, outside legal counsel for more than 15 years to a science education charity that works with inner-city youth in Chicago, and outside legal counsel to a U.S. wildlife conservation organization functioning as a "friends of" organization for a U.K. charity active in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
While in law school in Nevada, Walsh developed a passion for immigration clinic work and assisting with cases of undocumented noncitizens, most of whom were ensnared in the sex trafficking world of Las Vegas. As a first-year attorney practicing commercial litigation at one of Las Vegas' top law firms, she took numerous pro bono cases through the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada and the Salvation Army, representing indigent women who would ordinarily not have had access to an attorney. Some years later, she relocated to Osan Air Base in South Korea with her husband, a pilot in the U.S. Air Force. Wanting to continue her pro bono work, Walsh spent more than 1,000 hours remotely representing pro bono clients in the United States during the past 2½ years. Her pro bono practice primarily involves representing indigent asylum-seekers in their appeals to Board of Immigration Appeals and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Published: Wed, Aug 03, 2016
