At Drinker Biddle & Reath, pro bono work is part of who we are and what we do, every day.

We work for clients who cannot afford lawyers, and for causes that call out for the skilled advocacy that only the best lawyers can provide. We fight for the lives of inmates on death row; enforce the constitutional rights of prisoners to freedom of worship and decent medical care; counsel small nonprofit organizations on their legal rights and responsibilities; and represent many individual clients, from tenants who are wrongly evicted and left homeless, to victims of domestic violence and child abuse, to families of limited means that are trying to adopt hard-to-place children. And we serve these pro bono clients with the same quality and resources we devote to every client.

Drinker Biddle is a charter signatory to the Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge. In 2008 the firm will have devoted nearly 23,000 hours to pro bono work, while investing thousands of dollars to cover the costs associated with our pro bono cases, and donating many thousands more to public interest legal organizations around the country.

Our lawyers participate in litigation that has a major impact not only on the lives of our clients, but also on the communities in which we live and practice. Three different teams of Drinker Biddle lawyers are fighting for death row inmates in Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. Another team of Drinker Biddle lawyers brought groundbreaking litigation in Pennsylvania to challenge state certification of electronic voting machines that do not provide a paper record for audit and recount purposes. Lawyers from our Washington office represent Native American clients who are challenging federal trademark protection for the name of a professional sports team that incorporates a term that is racist and degrading to Native Americans.

Drinker Biddle lawyers also represent many individual clients in a wide range of personal legal matters. Many of our lawyers are assisting active duty military personnel now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or their families, through bar programs that recruit lawyers to handle civil matters such as support, custody and landlord/tenant cases. Other Drinker Biddle lawyers are advocating for disabled veterans who are challenging denials or reductions of their benefits. A number of lawyers in our Philadelphia office serve as appointed child advocates for abused and neglected children under court supervision. Lawyers in our Washington office regularly represent low income artists and arts organizations in matters referred by the Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts, dealing with contracts, intellectual property issues and other subjects. These are only a few examples of the many individual clients that Drinker lawyers assist every day.

Our litigators also regularly accept appointment by the federal courts to represent prisoners who have filed pro se civil rights cases deemed potentially meritorious by the courts. Several of our prisoner cases went to jury trials in the last few years, and were ably tried by the young associates who prepared the cases, conducted the discovery and handled the motion practice leading up to those trials.

We collaborate with local and regional legal services organizations on a host of projects: representing victims of domestic violence at final hearings on protective orders; staffing and operating walk-in clinics for indigent clients; handling intake of new clients for those organizations; and training their volunteers to handle cases in areas such as immigration, asylum, elder law, domestic violence, family law and landlord/tenant disputes.

Our business lawyers also get involved in pro bono work. Many counsel small nonprofit organizations on corporate formation and governance, applications for tax-exempt status, lending, real estate, intellectual property, and employment and regulatory issues. Transactional lawyers from Drinker Biddle recently handled mergers of several nonprofit organizations with similar missions, combining the entities to maximize the impact of their resources and talent. Another group of transactional lawyers represented a Chicago-based community enterprise lender on a $5 million administrative services agreement with the City of Chicago to provide funding to local minority-owned businesses. Yet another team of business lawyers counseled a Chicago-area organization that helps disadvantaged children on the purchase of a property and financing for a community center. And business lawyers in our Philadelphia office have acted for years as the primary outside counsel for a nationwide organization of community lenders that make funds available to improve cities and towns across America.

Pro bono work brings its own rewards, in the satisfaction we earn by serving the legal needs of our communities, but Drinker Biddle lawyers also have been recognized, locally and nationally, for their pro bono work:

• Larry J. Fox, a litigation partner in our Philadelphia office, was one of just five recipients nationwide of the ABA Pro Bono Publico Awards in 2005. The award recognized Larry’s distinguished career in pro bono work including extensive advocacy for defendants on death row, and a groundbreaking victory for residents of substandard public housing units in a federal class action lawsuit in Philadelphia. 
• Alicia Hickok, a litigation associate in our Philadelphia office, was one of just three recipients statewide in 2007 of the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s prestigious Louis J. Goffman Award. The award recognized her sustained commitment to pro bono work including thousands of hours devoted to the cause of justice for defendants in capital cases.
• Lawyers in our Chicago office have earned numerous honors for their commitment to public service, at Gardner Carton & Douglas and also at Drinker Biddle after the two firms combined in 2007. Among those awards are the Chicago Volunteer Legal Services’ Distinguished Service Award in 2005; entry on the Honor Roll of Chicago’s Public Interest Law Initiative in 2005 and 2006; and the “Law Firm of the Year” award in 2005 from the Chicago-based Center for Disability and Elder Law.
• Drinker Biddle received the New Jersey State Bar Association Service to the Community Award in 2006. That same year the firm was recognized by the Board of Judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey for its outstanding pro bono efforts.

This is just a brief summary of how Drinker Biddle lawyers serve the public interest and help address the unmet legal needs of the communities in which we practice. At the bottom of this page you will find links to several of our recent pro bono reports, which describe in detail this vital and diverse part of our practice.

Download a complete copy of our 2007-2008 Pro Bono and Community Service Annual Report (approximately 2 MB in PDF format).
Download a complete copy of our 2005-2006 Pro Bono Annual Report (approximately 3 MB in PDF format).
Download a complete copy of our 2004-2005 Pro Bono Annual Report (approximately 3 MB in PDF format).