2024 Award Recipients

Fawaz Bham

I love the city of Dallas, where you can meet an array of cultures, taste cuisines from across the world and learn the stories of remarkable people. In such a diverse city, there are equally diverse areas of need. I’ve always believed that people from all walks of life are entitled to assistance and those that can assist, should do so. Throughout my college and graduate schooling in Dallas, I championed causes like building homes with Habitat for Humanity, preparing tax returns for low income taxpayers, community building, and serving on boards of community service organizations that were innovative in their community engagement.

Soon after joining the Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP’s capital finance and real estate team, I began working on different pro bono matters, including reviewing real estate cases, drafting estate documents, participating in intake clinics, volunteering at legal help lines, assisting in preparing immigration applications, forming business entities, and presenting real estate 101 seminars.

Beginning in 2014, I devoted time to working with community partners like Texas C-Bar, LiftFund’s Dallas Fort-Worth Women’s Business Center, WINGs, BCL of Texas, and the Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program (DVAP) to organize and create a clinic platform to consistently serve small businesses – an area long underserved in Dallas. These clinics allowed community members who owned a business or were interested in entrepreneurship to have a one-on-one consultation with volunteering attorneys to discuss any business issues they may be facing (e.g., considerations for hiring employees, tax structuring, intellectual property concerns, etc.) without regard to income or revenue screening requirements of the various partnering organizations. This allowed the applicants to receive professional sessions and get oriented for their next steps. Over six years, I was able to help organize and facilitate more than a dozen in-person small business clinics across Dallas with various community partners and serve almost 1,000 applicants.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, my focus changed. All in-person pro bono services and clinics were restricted or suspended, but the need among the Dallas community had never been greater. Through my work on the small business clinics and other programs, I had a strong connection to DVAP and knew that the pandemic had forced the closure of all fourteen of its monthly legal aid clinics. I wanted to make sure my community still had access to these much-needed legal resources, especially as lockdowns went into effect, unemployment numbers grew, and threats of eviction loomed.

I led the effort to establish a Virtual Clinic platform to “virtually replicate” the entire experience of an onsite, in-person legal aid intake clinic, including the application, intake and interview process, aggregating the exit notes and action items to DVAP, and maintaining access to legal resources while delivering each component in a consistent and professional manner that could be deployed across a spectrum of volunteering attorneys, law firms and organizations seamlessly. After launching and improving the Virtual Clinic platform over the first few clinics, I created marketing and education videos that exponentially increased recruiting of new volunteer attorneys from the 11,000 Dallas Bar Association members, and increased the visibility of the clinic to the Dallas community overall.

Since April 2020, we have held more than 283 virtual clinics – holding at least one virtual clinic session every week – and processed over 16,000 applications with 40 different law firms and organizations participating and addressing matters from employment, landlord/tenant, and family law to veterans’ services. I have continued to innovate and improve the virtual platform to broaden the accessibility and functionality of the platform which is accessible from any device and in multiple languages. I am immensely proud to be on the front-lines of increasing the access to legal aid and justice for the underserved communities in Dallas and providing a cogent example for the future of pro bono services. I am also incredibly thankful to all of the attorneys from all of Hunton Andrews Kurth’s Texas offices that have been involved in participating in the clinics and processing the applications. At the end of 2023, the firm had provided more than 1,000 hours of legal services to the Virtual Clinics and exclusively sponsored 30 clinics.

After devoting hundreds of hours to pro bono matters each year, in 2022 I was nominated and named chair of the firm’s pro bono committee in the Dallas office and I have used my passion for service to create an energetic culture for all of our attorneys to get involved in even more pro bono services. I am honored to receive the ABA Pro Bono Publico Award and to be recognized for my efforts among other incredible individuals and organizations. I am immensely grateful to my champions – my lovely wife, parents, children, and family – who support me so I can live out the pillars of my convictions. 

Hoover Penrod PLC

A small firm with just nine attorneys, Harrisonburg, Virginia’s Hoover Penrod PLC strives to have a vital impact on the lives of low-income households in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Hoover Penrod was founded in 1935. Today, Harrisonburg is the legal, population, and retail center of the Shenandoah Valley. Our firm maintains a civil practice representing regional corporations, family businesses and individuals from every economic segment of the population.

More than 40 years ago firm members helped establish Blue Ridge Legal Services (BRLS), and we have partnered with them ever since.

In 2000 our firm was also largely responsible for organizing an annual attorney fund-raising campaign with the local Bar Association to support BRLS financially. The campaign has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to benefit BRLS's work. The attorneys (and family members) of Hoover Penrod have themselves personally donated more than $250,000 to BRLS's fundraising campaigns.

Legal aid clients and their access to justice are not the only beneficiaries of Hoover Penrod's civic mindedness. Attorneys at the firm have taught at area universities, been involved in the leadership of more than a dozen local non-profits, and served on local government bodies.

Hoover Penrod is a preeminent leader in providing pro bono services to legal aid clients in the Shenandoah Valley. Every attorney in the firm does pro bono service. Over the years, our attorneys have handled more than 1,500 pro bono cases through BRLS, donated more than 4,000 hours of legal work and helped thousands of people in Harrisonburg, Rockingham County and the surrounding area.

The range of cases we have undertaken on a pro bono basis is substantial - bankruptcies, predatory lending, adoptions, real estate transactions, consumer cases, family law, estate work, wills and powers of attorney, and litigation and appellate representation. Moreover, our level of commitment to zealous advocacy of our pro bono clients is the same as it is for all of our clients. This does not reflect a begrudging obligation, but a steadfast commitment to obtaining justice for all our clients, even when they are not paying a dime.

Three cases exemplify the dedication of our pro bono work.·    

• A local attorney used unethical practices to obtain an undeserved fee from his client. We sued that attorney, recovered the fee, finished the representation for free, and filed an ethical complaint, which resulted in the attorney’s discipline by the State Bar. 
• Shortly after a single mother began her prison term, she delivered a child whom she placed with a community volunteer who worked at the jail. The surrogate sought to adopt the baby. One of the firm’s attorneys fought to have the child returned to her natural mother. The case was appealed from the local Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court to the local Circuit Court where the adoption was authorized. An appeal to the Virginia Court of Appeals was successful, with a unanimous verdict for the mother denying the adoption. However, the Virginia Supreme Court reversed and confirmed the adoption. A writ of certiorari to the United States Supreme Court was denied.
• Payday lending is the practice of recycling loans by using loan proceeds to immediately finance a new loan. A Blue Ridge client with only $600 a month of disposal income made 33 weekly consecutive payday loan agreements at an annual percentage interest rate of approximately 180%. One of our attorneys challenged the practice, but lost the case at trial. On appeal he successfully convinced the Virginia Supreme Court that payday lenders, who had made more than 9 million illegal loans in the previous decade, were in violation of state law. That decision helped free low-income Virginians from many of the predatory traps of payday lending.

Attorneys from Hoover Penrod also work as volunteers who serve on the HRBA’s pro bono Family Law Project telephone hotline. This project was started in 2013 to assist low-income families who were seeking advice on a family law issue. These people were otherwise being turned away by legal aid due to its lack of sufficient resources. Hoover Penrod attorneys who volunteer on the hotline have donated several hundred hours of time on these calls.

We have achieved a success rate in our litigated pro bono cases of over 85%. We have recovered more than $900,000 in awards for our pro bono clients, while defeating or avoiding more than $1,700,000 in claims and liabilities. All told, more than 4,000 low-income residents of the Shenandoah Valley have been directly impacted by our pro bono work.

All of the attorneys at Hoover Penrod PLC are especially proud of the pro bono work we do for our low-income neighbors.

We are deeply grateful for this award.

Prudential

Prudential was founded on the belief that financial security should be within reach for everyone, and that philosophy rings true with our commitment to pro bono work and providing support to historically underserved populations, especially in Newark, New Jersey, where the company has been headquartered for almost 150 years. We are not content with the status quo and our Law, Compliance, Business Ethics and External Affairs (LCBE) pro bono team is dedicated to delivering pro bono legal services to communities most in need of help. Through partnerships with various non-profit organizations in the legal services community, LCBE employees utilize their professional skills and experience to help the ever-increasing number of individuals and veterans in need of free legal support.

While New Jersey is a progressive state in many ways, it has some of the highest racial disparities in the nation. There is a staggering racial wealth gap with a median household wealth of $322,500 for white households, $26,100 for Latina/o households, and $17,700 for black households. This wealth gap is at the core of much of the pro bono work and financial giving of Prudential as we seek to close financial divides in New Jersey and around the world.

Over the past 5 years, more than 275 Prudential legal volunteers have donated their time to 8 non-profit legal services organizations, including Volunteer Lawyers for Justice (VLJ), Pro Bono Partnership, Legal Services New York City, Connecticut Statewide Legal Services, Connecticut Veteran’s Legal Center, KIND, Catholic Charities, and the Dallas Bar Association Volunteer Attorney Program. In 2023, 100 Prudential LCBE volunteers dedicated over 840 hours to pro bono legal service, including helping 167 VLJ clients, impacting 369 people when including people living in their homes. Over the past 14 years, Prudential’s LCBE employees have more than 5,000 pro bono hours with VLJ, helping 1,547 clients, and benefiting over 3,768 people.

Prudential’s pro bono program began in 2010 in response to the Great Recession and accompanying debt crisis, providing legal services to families facing crippling consumer debt through VLJ’s Debt Relief Legal Program. 14 years later, LCBE employees are still volunteering with VLJ’s Debt Relief Legal Program, but our pro bono services have expanded to other areas of high unmet legal need including, tenants’ rights, divorce assistance, criminal records expungement, asylum work for persecuted LGBTQ+ immigrants, and holistic legal services for veterans.

In the wake of COVID-19, we worked with our pro bono partners to ensure that clinics could operate virtually by helping redesign clinic operations and technology while providing greater flexibility to reflect employees’ post-pandemic lives working from home. In addition, Prudential has expanded our pro bono program to actively seek out non-attorneys to assist at many of the clinics offered, assisting with research, intake forms etc. Each month, LCBE executive assistants, paralegals, and administrative staff volunteer in a variety of ways to support their legal services partners, increasing the capacity of those non-profits to assist clients. In 2023, 37 non-attorneys volunteered over 300 hours to pro bono volunteerism.

We understand that providing pro bono services creates financial challenges with the resultant impact on staffing for our pro bono partners. We made it a priority in the post-pandemic financial environment, to look for new and innovative ways to ensure that clients continued to receive a high-quality clinic experience in addition to high quality legal services. For example, we created a pre-clinic administrative clinic for VLJ where these volunteers prepare case files in advance of client meetings so that clinic time is spent reviewing the client’s legal issues and not on administrative tasks. In addition, during clinics, our non-attorney staff provide day-of administrative support and interpretation services for non-English speakers. The vital role professional staff plays makes pro bono programming run smoothly, has led to high levels of client satisfaction, and has led to the development of innovative models of flexible volunteerism that has resulted in more services for clients.

At Prudential, pro bono volunteerism is part of our DNA and runs deep in our corporate culture, with the general counsel and senior leaders setting the tone by regularly volunteering themselves. We encourage our attorneys and non-attorneys alike to participate in pro bono work and support volunteers by sponsoring pro bono programming, recognizing pro bono service in evaluating performance, and allowing them to use Prudential time and resources for pro bono activities. Pro bono is just one way in which Prudential employees give back to our communities as Prudential employees donated over 25,000 volunteer hours across the country. Internally, we celebrate our volunteers every year at an annual department town hall, with the nomination of employees for a pro bono award that includes the right to designate a charity of each winner’s choice for a substantial cash gift. In addition, attorneys and non-attorneys “earn” $10 for each hour volunteered, to be donated to the non-profit of their choice at the end of the year.  

James L. Volling

I always wanted pro bono work to be a significant part of my law practice, but I received my impetus for it while serving as a law clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger during October Term 1980.  During that Term, I worked on the majority opinion in a Texas death penalty case, Estelle v. Smith, which held unconstitutional the State’s use of psychiatric testimony at the trial’s penalty phase on the issue of the defendant’s future dangerousness.  Many other death penalty appeals were held by the Court pending its decision in Estelle v. Smith, and I had to review the records in those cases and then recommend their disposition to the Justices.  As a young lawyer, I was shocked by the wholly inadequate and inexperienced defense in numerous cases, especially given that life or death was literally at stake, and I vowed to do something to rectify that injustice.  A few years later, while working as an associate at Faegre & Benson LLP in Minneapolis (which later became Faegre Baker Daniels LLP and is now Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP), I got that opportunity when I was asked by the Louisiana Capital Defense Project to take on a post-conviction death penalty case in Louisiana that no lawyer in that state would handle.  I secured a last-minute stay of execution for the client, and seven years later, after an evidentiary hearing in federal court, the death sentence was vacated.

Following my judicial clerkships, I joined Faegre & Benson in large part because of the firm’s commitment to pro bono and community service.  Indeed, one of the named partners, John Benson, had founded the Minneapolis Legal Aid Society based on a model he had observed in Chicago.  The firm has always given me the freedom, opportunity, and support to pursue pro bono work, for which I am extremely grateful.  Over the years, that work has focused in three areas:  post-conviction representation; children; and prisoner reentry. 

My post-conviction work continues to the present day.  I have represented clients in Louisiana, Texas, Colorado, and Mississippi in post-conviction proceedings.  I also currently Chair the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the Great North Innocence Project, which seeks to remedy and prevent wrongful criminal convictions. 

In 2017, I became lead plaintiffs’ counsel in a putative class action filed in federal court on behalf of certain minor children against Hennepin County and various government officials challenging on constitutional grounds the County’s child protection and child welfare system.  The hotly-contested litigation was ultimately resolved with a landmark settlement mandating a four-year settlement period, requiring sweeping reforms, and providing for a Settlement Subcommittee headed by an Independent Neutral (a former judge) to monitor compliance with the settlement terms.  Previously, I had worked to establish Faegre & Benson’s “JUSTice for KIDS” initiative, a program designed to assist abused and neglected children and their guardians ad litem. 

Working with the Pro Bono Institute in Washington, D.C., I helped found and serve on the Steering Committee of the Minnesota Collaborative Justice Project, which is focused on prisoner reentry.  I Chair the Access to Services Working Group and its Civil Legal Needs Initiative Subcommittee, which address needs and barriers regarding civil legal services, housing, employment, health care, transportation, etc.  I lead the Project’s efforts to provide civil legal services to participants in Reentry Court in Minnesota, to releasees in halfway houses or under supervision in Minnesota, and to certain inmates at federal and state correctional facilities in Minnesota.  I also serve on the Advisory Board of the Pro Bono Institute’s Law Firm Pro Bono Project, which administers and oversees the Pro Bono Challenge accepted by many of the nation’s 200 largest law firms. 

In addition, I have long been a volunteer lawyer at the Legal Access Point Clinic at the Hennepin County District Court in Minneapolis, which provides free legal advice and assistance to pro se litigants, many of whom are low income and/or disabled.  And I have been privileged to serve on (and in the past Chair) the Pro Bono Committee at my law firm. 

I have a passion for pro bono work on behalf of the disadvantaged and most needy in our society.  As lawyers, we have a vitally important role and responsibility (truly an imperative) to ensure access to justice for all – that is what defines and differentiates our profession as a calling and not just a business.  I am deeply honored and humbled to receive the Pro Bono Publico Award.  I certainly do not do pro bono work for recognition, but I hope this acknowledgement encourages others to engage in pro bono, which always results in a lawyer receiving much more in return than they give.  It has been and remains the most satisfying and rewarding aspect of my life as a lawyer. 

Adrian Urquhart Winder

When my colleague at Foster Garvey first asked me to help with a pro bono matter for the Family Violence Appellate Project (FVAP), I definitely hesitated. How can I be helpful when I don’t practice family law? How will I find time? What about the emotional toll of knowing a survivor of domestic violence and her child are relying on me to help them? He assured me it would all be fine – we would have a team on the case, we would be partnering with attorneys at FVAP who know this area of law, and I have experience in the Court of Appeals. I accepted, not fully knowing what I was signing up for, particularly when our opposing party was appealing an order finding him to be an abusive litigant.    

What I signed up for, it turns out, was a wonderfully gratifying experience. Not only did we successfully help our client navigate a very stressful situation with long-term impacts to her and her son, we succeeded in having the Washington Court of Appeals uphold the constitutionality of a new state law designed specifically to protect survivors of domestic violence from their abusers’ misuse of court proceedings to control, harass and intimidate them: the Abusive Litigation Act (ALA).

After years of repetitive appeals from their divorce proceedings and multiple orders of contempt, our client’s ex-husband (an attorney) filed a tort action against our client, her attorney and law firm, their child’s guardian ad litem, and even their friends, alleging multiple frivolous claims. Using the ALA, the trial court dismissed the tort case as abusive litigation and restricted the ex-husband’s ability to file motions or new cases for six years. The ex-husband appealed, alleging that the ALA was unconstitutional, violated due process, and was improperly applied to him, along with numerous other challenges. The Court of Appeals rejected all of his arguments.

While this case was my first with FVAP, it is not my last. I have been honored to work alongside FVAP for the past three years, serving as legal counsel for survivors, amicus counsel for FVAP, and as a moot court judge and sounding board for other FVAP attorneys on argument preparation and briefing. This summer I will be working on my eighth appeal with FVAP.

FVAP has been an incredible pro bono partner. They are the only nonprofit organization in Washington state and California dedicated to helping domestic violence survivors appeal dangerous court decisions that leave them and their children at risk of ongoing abuse. FVAP carefully selects cases to prioritize matters that will have a strong positive impact by creating legal precedent for all survivors. I am thrilled to be able to contribute my appellate skills to their efforts. Continuing with this work, as well as mentoring other attorneys at my firm who have taken on FVAP cases, has given my law practice additional meaning.

I am incredibly honored that FVAP nominated me for the ABA Pro Bono Publico Award and that the ABA selected me as a recipient. It has been an incredible and humbling experience. Thank you to my law firm, Foster Garvey PC, for supporting my pro bono practice. I could not do this work without their backing, and I am proud to be at a firm that lives up to its promise to serve our community through pro bono representation. I would also like to thank the wonderful colleagues who supported me on these cases, especially Ben Hodges (who connected me with FVAP), Kelly Mennemeier, Rylan Weythman, Bianca Chamusco, and Angelo Marchesini. And finally, thank you to my amazing husband and two children, who are always there for me and keep me smiling.

To Evangeline Stratton, Zyreena Choudhry, and all the staff at FVAP in Washington: this award is really for you; let’s keep making a difference together.