Pursuing Racial Justice Through Law Firm Pro Bono Practice

INTERVIEWER: All right. So we are going to go ahead and get started. Welcome, everyone. Excited to see you all here. And I do want to make a note that we are recording the event, but we will have remarks from our panelists and then do Q&A. But first, I just want to welcome you to pursuing racial justice through law firm pro Bono practice. The vision for the panel really was that so many of you came into law school at a time when our nation was really having an awakening about issues of racial justice.

And we also know that for UVA, about 75% of the class goes on immediately to work at a law firm. And then the 15% that go on to clerkships, often then go on to law firms. And so, if you look at the class of 2023, about 88.5% goes on to big law firms that are 500 or more attorneys. And so, I wanted to provide an opportunity for students to understand that making a difference on these issues of racial justice is very possible as you serve as an attorney within a law firm.

And so we have an amazing panel of attorneys who are going to share with you their path to doing pro Bono work focused on racial justice issues with their law firm, as well as give you some advice if you're thinking about following in some of their footsteps. So I'm just going to briefly introduce each of them. If we did full bios, I would just keep standing here for a long time.

So these are really condensed bios, but I just want to make sure, you know, the amazing people that you're hearing from today. So immediately to my right, I have Paul Lee. He's the pro Bono partner at Steptoe, which is based in Washington, and he's based in Washington, DC. He previously coordinated pro Bono at another global law firm. And at an immigration nonprofit for unaccompanied children called Kids in Need of Defense.

He's a graduate of Georgetown Law and the University of North Carolina undergraduate. Seated beside him is Tiffany Graves. She is the pro Bono counsel at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP, which is based in Jackson, Mississippi. She is also an adjunct professor at the law school where she's been teaching a spring course that is titled advancing the commitment to service through law firm pro Bono.

So you can see why I naturally thought she would be a perfect fit for the panel. She's been teaching that since 2000-- 2021. Before joining Bradley, Tiffany held executive director positions at the Mississippi volunteer lawyers project. And the Mississippi access to Justice Commission. She graduated from UVA Law in 2006, and she attended Hollins University. Beside her is Kathleen, also known as Kitty Hawk.

She is the pro Bono counsel for Miller Chevalier at Washington, DC law firm. She previously serves as a staff attorney in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and at legal aid, DC. She is a graduate of Georgetown Law School and College of the Holy Cross. Kitty is one of the original members of the Association of pro Bono counsel, and a board member of the law firm antiracism alliance.

And last but not least, is Ted Howers. He is the full time Pro Bono partner at Wiley Rein LLP, a 250 lawyer regulatory and litigation firm with its sole office in Washington, DC. There he coordinates the firm's relationship with legal services organizations with which it partners and also maintains his own active caseload of pro bono matters, large and small. Ted sits on the board of several prominent racial justice organizations, such as legal aid justice center, which is here in charlottesville, where he is now the chair as of our vote just last night.

He is also on the board for the Washington Lawyers Committee for civil rights and urban affairs. He's one of the founders of the law firm racism alliance, which you will definitely hear about today. And he serves as co vice president of that board. He's a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, and Harvard Law School. So with that, if you could please join me in welcoming our distinguished panelists.

Our panelists are each going to have 12 minutes to just give you a sense of their pro Bono practice, what they do. And then after that, we're going to have Q and A. I will have some questions, but I definitely welcome questions from the audience. So we're going to go in alphabetical order. So we're going to start with Tiffany.

TIFFANY GRAVES: OK. All right. I'm very excited to be here. I appreciate the invitation, Kimberly. I was just here in February to teach my short course, so I'm excited to be back so soon here at the law school. As Kimberly mentioned, pro Bono counsel at Bradley, our law firm is about 650 lawyers. We have offices spread about the Southeast. We started in Birmingham, Alabama, and we have three Alabama offices.

And I'm based in our Jackson, Mississippi, office. And I've been pro Bono counsel at Bradley for about six years. I'm going to focus on three of our projects that are in the racial justice space. And one of the things you'll hear me say a few times, the unique and sometimes challenging position about being at a firm in the South is that there are lots of ways for us to get involved in racial justice, pro Bono work, for better or worse sometimes.

So there's no shortage. And I'm fortunate to work at a firm that is very supportive of us getting involved in those opportunities as they reach us. I'm going to start by talking about the legal clinics that we have to support black, small business owners and black nonprofit leaders. And I'm going to start with some statistics. Some of these you all may be aware of. More than half of the companies with black owners are turned down for loans, a rate that is twice as high as white business owners.

Even when Black business owners get approved for bank loans, their rate of failure to receive full financing is highest. Is the highest among all categories of business owners by more than 10%. In May of 2020, at the peak of the coronavirus epidemic, less than one half of 1% of Black business owners reported receiving government benefits for businesses affected by the pandemic, compared by to about 9% of non-black business owners.

20% of small businesses fail after the first year. 30% by the second, 50% by the fifth. Black-- by the 10th year, a staggering 70% of businesses have shut off their lights. So pretty dismal statistics. For business owners of color, the numbers can be even more daunting. 8 out of 10. 8 out of 10 of businesses that are owned by Black owners fail within the first 18 months.

Racism, discrimination, predatory lending, a significant absence of economic and business resources in the Black community, a lack of awareness about how to properly start and maintain businesses are among the key reasons why Black businesses do not survive. And black entrepreneurs often find themselves with no alternatives but to pull the plug on their businesses.

And for those businesses that do survive, they rarely grow as quickly. And are not nearly as prosperous as businesses owned by other ethnic groups. And as Kimberly mentioned, on the heels of some of the racial unrest that was elevated and amplified in our country in 2020, I received a call one day from a Bradley associate in our Nashville office, and she was frustrated and angry and wanted to channel those feelings into something positive and into action and quickly.

She is a six year associate in our health care department. And our health care practice group, and she had not done much pro Bono, so she's not someone I'd spoken with a whole lot in the firm, something she admitted on our first call. But she felt very compelled to do something. Transactional lawyer, and she said, I want to do some pro bono, but I want to do it in my wheelhouse.

I don't want to go to court. I don't do that in my billable work. I'm not interested in doing that in my pro bono practice. But I want to do something to help the Black community in Nashville. And several calls later, and bringing in another good friend of hers in the Nashville office who was a litigation associate. We decided that we wanted to develop a monthly legal clinic to support Black small business owners across Nashville.

And these would be folks who would come to us just with an idea for their business and needed to know how to start, as well as people who are more established and needed contracts reviewed or intellectual property assistance, or any range of corporate advice that they could potentially get from lawyers who had an expertise in working with businesses. And that felt comfortable for her.

And it also was something that she was able to get others on board in the Nashville office to be a part of. So what we did is we developed a proposal, and presented it to our firm leadership. Because a project like this would be new for Bradley, something that was really focused on helping one category of business owners. So we knew we needed to get firm approval. And fortunately, that was something that happened very quickly.

Rachel is her name. Rachel Byrd and her friend Junaid Davis put together a memo with my assistance. We presented that to the Pro Bono committee, then presented it to our firm leadership, and it was unanimously, approved by both groups at our firm. And we launched the Black owned small business and profit clinic at Bradley in January of 2021. We had our very first clinic on Martin Luther King day, January 15th, 2021.

And I don't need to explain how that held significance for us. We had 25 business owners that we met with at that very first clinic. And again, all sorts of ranges of needs. People who just had an idea and needed to know how to bring it to fruition, as well as people, again, who were more established and had contracts that they want us to look at. Or, you know, we're thinking of bringing on employees and wanted to figure out should they be independent contractors, should they be full employees?

And what does that mean for us from a tax standpoint? And just simple business operations. We were excited. And several years later, now that clinic is still going strong. It has had a tremendous impact on the business community in Nashville. And it would not have happened, but for the desire of this associate to do something, but also relationships that we have been able to build in the Nashville community with organizations that are already working with the entrepreneur community.

People may be a little intimidated by Bradley promoting this opportunity, and we may not have any clients. Quite frankly, this is worked because we have connected with non-profit organizations that already have the trust of people who are trying to maintain and start businesses. They send US clients. They trust us to help guide these people with the information that they need to run and maintain successful businesses.

And because of the successful launch of that effort in Nashville, we now have a clinic in Birmingham. As well, Birmingham, as I mentioned, is our largest office. It made sense for us to let that be the next place that we took this clinic. It also happens every month. It is modeled exactly like the Nashville clinic. And we work with another legal aid partner and other community partners to bring US clients to that clinic.

Both have been successful, and they also led us to get involved in a project in our Charlotte office. The Charlotte initiative to mobilize businesses is focused on providing legal support to minority business owners. So we do that in Charlotte and I am currently in discussions with people in our Dallas and Atlanta offices about bringing clinics to those offices as well. The nice thing is when we started this effort, what I was told by our firm leadership is, this is a project that we want throughout Bradley.

And we understand that it's going to take some time for that to evolve. And we want you to take the time you need to make sure these efforts are successful. And we're not just saying we're doing this work, but really not making the investment into them as a firm that we need to. So you can imagine my joy when I get calls from people in other offices that say it's not fair that we're doing these in Nashville. And Birmingham and not my office.

And it has been a really great way to engage our corporate attorneys. Pro Bono, I think we would all agree can lean litigation and a lot of people can easily think of ways to get involved in pro Bono on the litigation side. But we can't forget about our transactional corporate lawyers who also want to get involved and need to sometimes figure out how to do that. These clinics have made it very easy for me to plug-in our corporate associates.

And they are getting tremendous professional development experience from these clinics. They are working one on one with these individuals and helping them, you know, build and shape their businesses. So on many levels, it's been a win win, win, win. Win for our clients who trust us to provide them with the guidance they need to build and maintain successful businesses. Certainly a win for Bradley, because we do feel like we are having an impact in those communities where we live and work in the small business community, and also for our attorneys just to gain those experiences.

And then for our community partners, they didn't have a legal outlet to send people who need legal advice and legal guidance for their businesses. And now they do. So they've been tremendous efforts for us, and it's been wonderful to get to know our clients and to watch their businesses evolve. So it's a project we're really proud of. To date, we've helped about 300 people since the launch of both the Nashville, Birmingham and the Charlotte efforts.

And I'm looking forward to growing it even more. It's really been a joy of my career to be involved in this work. In addition to that work. Thank you. In addition to that work, Bradley for a long time has been involved in innocence and exonerations work. And if you're familiar with death penalty policies at all, you know that many people of color are impacted by the death penalty. And just the criminal legal system in general.

Alabama, still sentences more people to death per capita than any other state. And I mentioned, that we are, in Alabama, we're actually the largest law firm in the state of Alabama. And one of the things that really makes me proud is how long we've been involved in death penalty work in the state. We do our death penalty work in partnership with equal justice initiative, an organization many of you have probably heard about, founded by Bryan Stevenson.

They do tremendous work. And we are we're proud of that partnership. 80% of the people currently on Alabama's death row did not receive unanimous jury verdicts for death. And many of them are Black and Brown. So part of the reason why we ground ourself in that work in Alabama in particular is because there are many, many challenges in that state with respect to the criminal legal system.

We have currently 18 death penalty cases throughout Bradley. 14 of them are in Alabama. And I think we'll always continue to get involved in that work. Again, pleased to be involved, and excited to have a number of our-- because when we staffed these cases, there are big cases. There are cases that go on for decades. And I know some of us do them. And so we have a ton of attorneys on each of these cases.

And they're very dedicated to righting the wrongs of systems of racial discrimination and racial bias within the criminal legal system. In terms of some of the stuff. OK. OK. I'll just mention very, very quickly, we've got some other racial justice, pro Bono opportunities on deck that we'll look at the juvenile legal system and the challenges there. And another project that we are hoping to get started up through the-- get started on through the law firm anti-racism alliance with the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project.

They are looking at how to pardon black Americans who were executed based on racially motivated prosecutions and convictions. They've identified some clients, many of whom lived and died in the deep South. So it's a project that Bradley needs to be a part of, and I'm excited that their support for us to do it. Thank you. Thank you.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you very much. All right. Next up, we have Ted.

TED HOWERS: Hi, folks. Thanks for coming. Thank you for the invitation, Kimberly. I'm going to spend just a minute or two on the founding and establishment of the LFA. And then I'm going to try to race through some examples of actual work that LFA is doing, which hopefully will illustrate the fact that we're not just talking about it, we're doing it. And we're doing it as a group of law firms, which is very exciting.

Not surprisingly, in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, a number of pro bono counsel had some long into the night phone calls with one another about how we are all feeling, how we were dealing with the things that were happening in the country. And frankly, wrestling with the fact that although, one could easily characterize the pro bono work that we've been used to doing, landlord tenant work and public benefits work with primarily clients of color could be characterized as racial justice work.

That none of us really felt like we were fully immersed and invested in the work that we felt all felt needed to be done in order for real change to come about. And so, we wanted to make sure that without taking away from any of the existing pro Bono work that all of our firms did, we created something additional and extra that would focus in particular on systemic institutional racism and how to try to address it.

I don't know that any of us thought that when we had those initial conversations that we would have more than 300 firms nationwide that have signed on to participate in LFAA. Firms large and small. And I don't know that we would have thought, some four years into it that we would actually be accomplishing some of the things that we're accomplishing.

We had a board retreat in February in New York, which was the first time some of us had ever seen each other in person since the organization started. And it was not self-congratulatory in the sense of aren't we wonderful. But it was-- there was a lot of positive enthusiasm in the room about the fact that we're not only still here, we're actually doing things that are making a difference, and we have the opportunity to continue.

So with that as background, I want to talk about just five hopefully quick examples to indicate some of the things that we've done and are doing. The first matter I want to talk about is the amicus brief that LFAA filed, really its first official act as an organization in the state versus Reddick case in Louisiana. As some of you may know, in 2020, in Ramos versus Louisiana, the US Supreme Court determined that the Sixth Amendment prohibits a felony conviction by a non-unanimous jury.

That was overruling an earlier decision Apodaca versus Oregon, which had held that it's unconstitutional in federal court, but not necessarily in state court for someone to be convicted of a serious crime by a non-unanimous jury. And Louisiana and Oregon were the only two states in which that practice continued after Apodaca.

So in Edwards versus Noy 2021, the US Supreme Court revisited the Ramos decision and determined that pursuant to the highly convoluted manner in which the court addresses whether or not new rules can be applied retroactively, the court determined that the Ramos decision was not entitled to retroactive effect. So what followed was state versus reddick, a case in Louisiana in which the court considered whether under Louisiana's state constitution, the Ramos rule should be retroactively applied.

Regrettably, the court held ultimately that it should not. But LFAA, they submitted an amicus brief in support of the respondent prisoners in that case without casting any aspersions, Louisiana is not a state in which the large law firms have traditionally had a great reputation for being immersed in meaningful, pro Bono work. So it was a challenge to find a firm that would serve as local counsel and sign on to that brief.

And I think that without the existence of LFAA, it might have been more challenging to find a firm that would do so. Fortunately, for us, the Simone Perugini firm in New Orleans, which not coincidentally happens to be the firm where Judy Perry Martinez, who was the ABA president at the time, and David Bienvenu, who was the chair of the ABA standing committee on public service and pro bono, both practice.

Their firm, signed on to that brief, along with the firm from Chicago, Neil Gerber and Eisenberg. The second matter I want to talk about is LFAA's collaboration with the truth, hope and justice initiative. An organization that was created to advocate and support-- to support and advocate on behalf of Black mothers who have lost a child to police violence.

LFAA in the summer of 2022, commenced work on a project in which more than 20 alliance firms participated, locating, analyzing and summarizing the case files from wrongful death cases in which the city of Chicago has paid a judgment or a settlement on the basis of police liability to establish a concrete database to serve as a foundation for public advocacy with regard to different and better police training.

As well as to serve as a foundation for expert opinion, testimony in pattern and practice cases involving police misconduct. And now that Chicago database has been completed, we've moved on to Philadelphia. So that's ongoing work. LFAA also filed an amicus brief on behalf of the legal industry in SFA versus UMC and Harvard, providing the law firm perspective on why diversity in law schools is a critical pipeline issue for the legal profession.

The posthumous pardon project, which Tiffany made reference to, is being worked on in collaboration with Professor Margaret Burnham, center for civil rights and restorative justice at Northeastern law school. Professor Burnham was one of our speakers at our annual summit two years ago, and they are focused on Black defendants who were convicted and/or-- and either executed or lynched.

And who, you know, on the basis of reconstructed historical evidence can be shown we're not guilty of what it was that they were charged with and convicted with and sentenced on the basis of if they even got that far. And in the States in which the law allows, those victims should be publicly exonerated and pardoned. This work is unbelievably important to the families of those individuals, even though retrospective.

And as a result, that work is just getting started and will be a major project of LFAA. And lastly, I just wanted to mention that the LFAA education working group, which benefits from having Professor Robinson as a consultant in collaboration with the National Education association, researched, wrote and published a paper entitled, quote, the very foundation of good citizenship, the legal and pedagogical case for culturally responsive and racially inclusive public education, which shines a light on and illuminates the problematic nature of the, quote, anti critical race theory, unquote, legislative efforts undertaken in many of the blue states in the country.

Those are examples of the kinds of work that alliance firms are engaged in. If you guys are first or second years and will be spending time at a law firm this summer, if your firm is an alliance firm, you will have the opportunity to work on projects supplied by LFAA. If you're going to a firm that is not an alliance firm, make sure that you change that before the summer ends.

And in any event, you know, these are the projects that will make a difference, we believe, over time. We didn't enter into this enterprise with the idea that it was a short term thing. You know, we talked about what will be happening at LFAA 30, 50, 100 years from now. And we hope that it will-- but something, you know, needed and needs to be done to make this world better, and to make this country better in terms of racial relations. And that's what we're about.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you very much. Ted. Yeah. So I think what's excited me about the law firm anti-racism alliance is, you know, Ted casually mentions that there are 300 firms involved, but that doesn't even account for the numbers of attorneys that are involved. And so when they reach out to me, I was like, you guys are a small army. We need to deploy you in ways that are strategic. And that is exactly what they're doing.

And so I think what's exciting about that is so many students, I think, you know, I'm at a law firm. And so I'm not able to pursue some of the things that really first drove me to law school right now. And it really helps to dispel that myth that you can do both. So I hope students really, really take that to heart. All right. So next, we have Paul Lee.

PAUL LEE: Thank you, professor Robinson, for your invitation and for being an ally to the LFAA. And thank you guys all for coming. I know this is finals time, so I hate to even bring that up, but this is time well spent. This is time well spent. And I'm really appreciative of you guys coming here. And going to firms eventually to do pro bono work focused on racial justice work. We were talking before the session, and Katie asked, you know, what is the purpose of this session?

And Professor Robinson said something that kind of resonated. She basically said, this is the first class that came into law school post the Black Lives Matter movement starting and George Floyd, which I was like, wow, that's incredible. So I have to imagine that some of you, maybe all of you were inspired by what happened in the summer of 2020. And of course, for years before that as well.

But maybe that's what drove you to come to law school. And so this is something that is new. This is something that we haven't had in the centuries of our country. And this law school being in existence. So that's exciting to me. That we have this whole cadre of lawyers that are going to be out there in the force that have that background in their brains, that have gone through law school with that in their brains and are now ready to actually practice like that.

So I'm excited about that. She did say that there was like 80% going to firms. So for the 7% of you that are going to public interest are probably not even in this room, but stick with it. I think many of us came from public interest backgrounds and there's a lot of great work that can be done in the community and we need great lawyers in those spaces as well. So I'm rooting for you as well.

You know, we talk about the law firm anti-racism alliance started in 2020, 2021. But we know that this problem has been in America since it started basically. For 400 years plus for Black Americans here. And for Indigenous people since white people stepped on this soil. It's always been an issue. And so this work has been going on for decades, centuries. And our civil rights colleagues have been fighting this fight for a very long time.

So we are just stepping in midstream into this fight, probably later than we should have. But we certainly are rolling up our sleeves now. So I want to take a minute just to talk about what it's going to look like when you get to your firms, because it's probably not really intuitive. Firms are weird places. I will be honest. I worked in public interest quite a bit. And so when I got to a law firm, I was like, this is a strange ecosystem.

So I think navigating it, you know, when you get there, you probably maybe summered already somewhere or you will be doing this summer. So, you know, getting to do pro bono work is not always apparent. I think most firms have great pro bono programs. All of our firms do. I will say that. But it's a tough sell, if you want to jump into pro bono work. I mean, you've got billable pressures, you've got a lot of things working against you.

So I think raising your hand to do pro Bono work takes a step of initiative. It takes a step of bravery, but it's definitely worth it. I mean, we can go into that in some other panel about why pro Bono work is great. But then beyond that, doing anti racist, pro bono work, those are words that are not commonly spoken in law firms at least before 2020. And maybe not even since then.

And so we are working to change that. And I think having the law firm anti-racism alliance, just those words together, is a radical idea. Because let's face it, the legal industry itself is not the most anti-racist place, in fact, possibly one of the most racist places. I'm probably going to get cussed for saying this on the recording. But you know, it's an industry that has a lot of things to fix internally and externally in what we're doing.

And so I think the four of us, where we come in, and I think, the sharpest tool that we can use is in our pro bono work. It's the way that we can make a difference. And so it's one step in the right direction. There are many other things that the legal industry is working on, you know, diversity issues, inclusion, our recruitment, the way we select our clients. I think there's a lot we can do.

But for us, pro bono work is the path forward. I also want to just address, you know, when we talk about anti-racism. Maybe this is very obvious to all of you who have come to school now, but for us, we at the LFA, we talked about this in our board meeting that Ted mentioned. Who is our community? Who are we. Who are we serving here? And we very intentionally focus on the BIPOC community. Black Indigenous people of color.

And that terminology is important to us too. We want to put Black people first, because we recognize that the harms that they suffered were different, and unique, and more extreme than many other races that have been in the United States. Indigenous people as well. They have suffered so much. And the system is created against them. And so we are working against systemic change, people of color as well. So we want to name everybody in that group.

But we also want to be very intentional in the way we approach this work. So just a little level setting before I jump into a few projects that we work on. So I have my notes on my phone. I'm not just looking at my phone, so a few projects that we've worked on that have come up recently. One is our second chance and compassionate release work in prisons. So these are two projects that have come up recently for different reasons.

So I'll start with compassionate release. This was a project that came up out of the COVID pandemic, 2020, busy year 2020. So we were finding that prisoners were dying in prisons, because they were not able to social distance. There were no masking, vaccines, were very late to get into prisons. And so what was a short term sentence, or even a pre detention hold could turn into a death sentence.

And people were dying because of the COVID pandemic. And so a lot of jurisdictions created policies where they would allow for release of certain prisoners that could demonstrate health issues, who are vulnerable, who had demonstrated good behavior within their sentence and had a plan outside of prison, that they could go somewhere and live with somebody or go into a program.

And so we took advantage of this. We recognized that this was not only a way to protect people during the pandemic, but as we bet on as we were working on these cases, that once they were out of prison, they did really well. These were excellent model prisoners, however you want to define that term. And once they got into the community, they were stellar. They didn't do anything wrong.

And so they're still outside of prison. They've served the rest of their terms outside of prison. And so that was something that we took control of during the pandemic. We recognized that the vast majority of at least in DC, are prison structure is Black and Brown inmates. And so for us, this was an economic issue. It was a race issue, and it was a health issue. Similarly, the second look act is something that has been passed in various jurisdictions that looks at criminal sentences that were placed when individuals were juveniles.

So they committed a crime maybe 16 to 18 years old, way back in the day. There are a lot of jurisdictions, DC included, where you can be charged as an adult, even though you're under 18. Certain crimes, serious crimes. And so now, with the science that has come out, that basically shows that your brain is not fully formed until you're in your 20s. And that you don't make the best decisions.

And that you're coming against a lot of socioeconomic barriers against you. We should reassess those sentences. And so again, recognizing that a lot of those that segment were Black and Brown inmates, we treated this as a racial justice issue. We wanted to demonstrate that inmates who were convicted at these early ages, who had then our clients served 25 years after he was, I think, 1817, when he committed his crime.

So now, well into his 40s, never had an infraction at all in prison, which is nearly impossible to do. You get infractions for anything in prison. But he was a model prisoner. And we were able to take advantage of that to get him out. And so just another way to show that there are systemic issues that are played out through individual cases. And so we took on his case and we've taken on a few more.

Since then, really to show that, you know, we cannot and should not be sentencing juveniles with adult sentences, because their brains are not fully formed. So that's an example from the criminal justice side. One issue that we took on the Civil side, which actually stemmed from a criminal issue, we were looking at police brutality cases. There was a case that came up at the DC metro, actually in Maryland, in Prince George's county.

And it involved there was a traffic altercation at the metro and the good samaritan came over to help the person who was hit by a car. This person didn't speak English, as a Spanish speaker, monolingual, Spanish speaker. Tried to flag down police officers who mistook him for the assailant, and he couldn't explain to the officers that he was just trying to help. The officers didn't speak Spanish.

And they assaulted him, they basically, like pushed him to the ground. He was trying to explain and they injured him pretty severely. And so we brought a lawsuit against the Metro Police and also the new Carrollton police department. And basically, we were successful. We got a pretty good settlement for our client. He was really wronged and really traumatized by the experiences you can imagine.

But more importantly, equally as important, we also got systemic change for the police departments. They now have language training and community based trainings as well. And they recognize that in this area, which has a heavy Spanish speaking population, you have to have that training. You have to be able to deal with individuals in their language or at least be able to understand what they're saying. So you could get the right officer to help.

And so that's just another way that we're hoping to build systemic change through the individual impact litigation that we're taking. Steptoe is a litigation heavy firm. We don't shy away from getting into court. We love going to the court. And so we relish those chances to jump into that work. Do I have one more time. One more time. I'm a fast talker, so I will say thank you.

Just a couple of other things. We had mentioned, if you go to an FLAA firm this summer, you'll have a chance to work on summer associate projects. We're also creating two resources for firms and lawyers to take advantage of. One is our cultural awareness resource exchange, CARE. It is going to be a hub of training materials, videos, PDFS, anything that you can get your hands on to learn the background of these systemic issues that come into place.

We recognize, maybe less so now, than before. But, you know, a lot of the lawyers who are jumping into this work, they don't really know the background of how this all came to be. And frankly, I don't either. And so there's a lot of education we can all do. And so we want to prepare people to do this work. Why is it important to represent an inmate with COVID? What is the racial justice implication of that?

And connect those dots a little bit better. Even, taking those cases that we do all the time, you know, helping a tenant avoid eviction? How is that a racial justice issue? How is that stemming from centuries of redlining and taking away property? And, you know, estate planning and things like that have created this situation. And what is the impact of the work that you're going to do? How is that work going to change generations after and help move the needle on racial justice work?

And then the other resource that we're creating is the language access principles. This is something that we're encouraging law firms to adopt, to say that we as pro-bono firms are not going to be turning away pro Bono clients because of their inability to speak English. And so we recognize that there's a lot of great pro Bono work out there on behalf of individuals who don't speak English, or don't speak English well.

And so we should be providing those resources to help balance those scales. We can provide interpretation. We can provide support to staff within our firms who speak foreign languages, help them engage with our clients, and just develop techniques and better ways to engage with non-English speaking individuals. And then the last thing I'll just mention is pro Bono work is great.

It certainly makes a dent, but we also have to back it up with funding. There is just so much need out there for these organizations that are on the front lines. And they are-- a lot of them are working on shoestrings. They really have bare budgets. And so one thing Steptoe did was to create a racial Justice Fund in 2021 to back up the Pro Bono work that we're doing.

And so we're putting an investment in there. We've given out about $2 million. So far since 2021 towards racial justice organizations. Many of them are very small in communities throughout the south, throughout the West that we probably wouldn't have encountered otherwise. But we put out this call, and now, we're developing Bono projects out of them as well. So just a way to back it up that we need to invest in for this endeavor to go, you know, decades longer. Thank you.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you so much, Paul. All right. Last but not least, Kathleen.

SUBJECT: Thank you. I have an enviable.

INTERVIEWER: You got to push your button.

SUBJECT: Thanks. I feel fortunate, because much of the important things have been said. So I can try to fill in a little bit of the gaps and also give you my perspective, and the perspective of my firm. First of all, personally, when I was attending law school, which was multiple decades ago, there was what appeared to me at the time a severe breach between people that were interested in public interest law and people that were going to law firms.

In my law school, we were it was almost like, you know, the Sharks and the Jets. And I really never thought that you could do much good in a private law firm. But I have learned otherwise. I began my career as a public interest lawyer. I worked for the Legal Aid Society first. I worked for Neighborhood Legal services in DC. And then for the Legal Aid Society for many years. And then I did a stint in government in the court.

But was recruited, because 25 years ago, the American Bar Association adjusted the ethics rules for lawyers. And they suggested that jurisdictions adopt a Model Rule that called on lawyers in private practice to provide pro Bono work. Some firms, but very few, already had somebody in their firm who was overseeing the pro Bono ethical obligations of the lawyers in that practice.

But many other firms began to take this role seriously after the ethics rules were changed to encourage it. And my firm among them was. So I work now. And I have worked since then for a fairly small Washington, DC firm. We have only the one office. We have about 80 to 90 lawyers. It's a firm that was primarily a tax firm founded over 100 years ago. They took this change in the rules fairly seriously, and decided they needed to hire somebody who could help the lawyers in that firm not commit malpractice when they did pro bono work.

So someone with a legal aid background was who they were looking for. So my eyes were opened to the fact that you can do a lot of good, even as a law firm lawyer through an active, pro bono practice. And in our firm, we do encourage everyone to do all their pro bono-- the DC-- the DC rules of professional responsibility ask for each lawyer to do at least 50 hours a year of pro bono work.

So we expect our lawyers to do 50 hours a year. Many of them do more. Some of them don't even meet the 50. But that's our firm culture. And that keeps me engaged because I'm not supposed to do the pro bono work myself. Unlike some of my colleagues here, I'm supposed to second chair and supervise and organize the work that the lawyers do. I hope that you can find a program in-- if you end up at a private law firm.

I hope that you can find a firm that also takes your ethical responsibilities seriously enough. Of course, we've been doing pro Bono work for a long time and because we are a DC firm where most of the poor people that live in DC are black, most of our pro Bono clients have always been Black in the areas of housing, family law and public benefits, which are our primary areas, like everyone else, our eyes were opened in a tragic way when George Floyd was murdered, and in 2020.

We began looking for other opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be able to join the board of the nascent law firm anti-racism alliance, which has been a wonderful experience for me. And our firm, we don't have the numbers. And numbers of lawyers that many of the firms that are represented here. We are small. I like to think of us as a surgical instrument. We can go in and do specific things.

We still have a very strong tax department. We also have a lot of lawyers who have been public defenders and have moved over. And now we have a white collar defense practice. So I will highlight two projects that we have worked on in the anti-racism sphere that are playing to our strengths. You may or may not know. The law firm anti-racism alliance has 19 or maybe we've changed now. Maybe we only have 17 working groups that are organized around subject matters.

And they address the idea of each working group is to look at how to promote anti-racism in that specific field. There's an education working group that Professor Robinson has been very helpful with and other topics. There's a tax working group to look at how the tax code has promoted and extended racist structures in its existence. There's lots to be said about that. And our tax lawyers are on to that.

So we have a group of tax lawyers that are working with the LFAA tax working group. And have been addressing some of these issues. Earlier this year, they submitted a proposal to the IRS. All these things sound very dull, perhaps to somebody who's not interested in tax, but they really have an impact. The LFAA tax working group submitted a proposal to the IRS about tax treatment of certain benefits that are given by municipalities, and counties, and cities, and states.

Many of these benefits were given during COVID. They were cash benefits or other kinds of benefits. And many of them, I think are going to be more and more rolled out as different areas wrestle with the idea of fair reparations, anti-racist reparations programs. There are certain places that have already done that. There's some famous ones in Illinois. This is going to become more of an issue.

And the tax working group of the LFAA wants to get ahead of it in terms of how the federal government will address the tax consequences of these programs. So the proposal was submitted, and it's been posted on tax notes, which I understand is a big thing. People are encouraged to send in responses and feedback. We don't know what the IRS will do, but we've started a discussion and I think that's part of the mission of the LFA to get ahead of these different issues or at least to try to impact them as much as possible.

The other project that we've been working on, we've done some compassionate release, we've done some incarceration Reduction Act. The IRA, the incarceration Reduction Act Amendment is a local DC rule that does what, as Paul was discussing, for individuals who committed a crime when they were young and have served a lengthy sentence and have not a bad disciplinary record, they can get relief from the courts.

We've done several of those. And actually just yesterday, under the wire, we filed a notice of Appeal to the DC Court of Appeals because we got an adverse decision in one of ours. And that-- we're going to take that to the Court of Appeals. And I don't think we'll win, but we're going to make a very strong due process argument because this is a segue I hadn't intended to talk about, but it's so important I wanted to say it briefly.

In that case, our client was arrested in 2011. Served a short sentence, and since then has never had any other convictions. And he's worked. He's an electrician. He's raised-- he's risen through the ranks. He's now a master electrician. There's an additional rank that he can't reach because he has a criminal record. He was sentenced under the youth records act, which is another DC law.

He was eligible to have his record expunged under the IRA, but his original lawyer didn't put the paperwork in. So we're trying to help him get that original record expunged so that he can move on professionally. He has, however, been arrested eight times since 2011. None of those arrests have resulted in any convictions. In fact, none of them have ever gone to trial. In the judge in denying the motion for youth Records Act expungement, referenced the fact that he's been arrested eight times.

And drew conclusions from that as to this person's continuing engagement in criminal activities. In fact, there's language in the ruling, saying that. We believe that conclusion is completely misplaced. It is-- there are plenty of reasons why a Black man living in DC would be arrested multiple times. That have nothing to do with that person being violent or engaging in criminal activity.

So we're taking it to the Court of Appeals. And we will see what the court rules. Again, I don't hold much hope, because judges have a ton of discretion in these matters, but that's the anti-racist action that is taken on behalf of an individual but hopefully can have some positive impact for a larger group. The case that I wanted to talk about was a specific project that we've been working on.

I feel very proud of it too. As I said, many of the lawyers in our firm are former attorneys with the DC public defender service. The DC PDS is world renowned, I believe, for-- I may be biased, but I think you can back me up. I think they are--

TED HOWERS: They're excellent.

SUBJECT: They're very good. Yes, they're world renowned for excellence. And it's a wonderful group of attorneys. And they stay connected. The former director of the PDS is a professor at American University law school, Angela Davis. Early on, I think within the first six weeks after George Floyd's murder, we had a meeting as a firm. And we-- because we all wanted to try to do something to address structural racism in our country.

We invited Angela Davis to come and talk, because she's a friend of the firm. She knows many of the people there. She is also an expert in prosecutorial discretion. She has written books about it. And this has been this has been her field for a long time. What she suggested to us is that we work on assisting prosecutors who are trying to pursue a criminal justice reform agenda and are facing pushback.

I was not really aware this was going on, but the discussion about criminal justice reform, of course, was starting to occur even before the George Floyd murder. And in several municipalities that have an elected prosecutor system. People had been running and occasionally winning elective office on a platform that was based on things like a different approach to juvenile justice, or lower incarceration rates for nonviolent offenses. And eliminating the cash bail system.

This is something I think is extremely important. If you-- you all may have been quite young at the time, but in 2015, the Department of Justice issued a ruling about-- it was looking into the Michael Brown event in Missouri, and uncovered a terrible system of fines and fees that had been operating in that jurisdiction. In fact, the police department in that town in Missouri was funded largely by the fines and fees paid by the Black members of Ferguson, Missouri.

So we have been working with prosecutors in various jurisdictions who are facing pushback. And it's been very eye opening to me. The case that we've been most recently involved with and is still ongoing is Monique Worrel I'm speaking openly because this case is a matter of public record and all the pleadings are available. Ms Worrell was an attorney, is an attorney in Florida who as a private citizen, was on a commission that was looking into conviction integrity.

Many jurisdictions have opened commissions looking into Conviction Integrity. She did good work there. Then she ran in 2021 for the prosecutor position of the Ninth Judicial Circuit in Florida. She was elected by a wide margin. She got 66% of the vote, whereas her competitor, most successful competitor got 34%. In 2023, the governor of Florida, by executive order, suspended Ms Worrel from her elected position.

In the suspension order, which he's allowed to do under the Florida Constitution. The Florida Constitution says you can do-- you can suspend a person who's been elected for-- if they're incompetent or abuse, neglect of duty. These are the things he cited in the executive order that was suspending Ms. Worrell. There were no facts to back up, that there was no-- what he cited was the fact that there were reduced juvenile incarceration rates in her jurisdiction since she became prosecutor.

That there were that there were other programs that eliminated or lifted relieved people from cash bail systems. These were what were cited in the governor's executive order. Ms Worrel had some options after being suspended. Of course, she didn't have any salary. She's a black woman, by the way, which I don't think is a coincidence. She was removed from her job and she-- she had-- her options were to appeal to the Maryland-- I'm sorry, the Florida Supreme Court.

So we represented her in oral argument before the Florida Supreme Court in December. We have not yet had a ruling. If she-- if the suspension is upheld, which we suspect it probably will be, her next option is to appear before the Florida senate. And that will be something akin to an impeachment trial. We will represent her in that case as well. That's it.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you so much.