Community Service
Our firm is committed to serving our
community. We volunteer our services as attorneys
without pay in many situations, and our lawyers
also perform other community service. Here are some
examples:
- To help families of our military in Iraq and Afghanistan, we started a volunteer lawyer program to provide free legal assistance to military families in Georgia.
-
We have represented widows and families
of slain law enforcement officers, to help the
families obtain benefits and provide for their
future, at no charge to the families.
-
We are “on call” with
ministers to discuss the legal problems of their
church members, at no charge to them.
-
Our attorneys also provide pro bono legal services
to various homeless shelters and other non-profit
organizations in our community.
-
We help educate and train new lawyers in the
community through speaking and writing articles
for Continuing Legal Education programs, including
programs on Ethics and Professionalism.
-
Our lawyers regularly serve as board members
for community organizations.
-
Our lawyers perform volunteer work for community
service groups such as Habitat for Humanity,
the Young Adult Guidance Center, Hands on
Atlanta, and other service organizations.
-
Our firm has also developed a free public
education program on preventing fraud against
the elderly. This program came about through
our experience in representing elderly persons
who were being defrauded without their knowledge.
Finally, we want to share with you the
thoughts of Professor John Horgan about the legal
system, because it captures many of the
reasons of why we do what we do:
“Did you ever consider why we now have safer workplaces? What about standard
seatbelts in all of our automobiles, as well as airbags
and other life-saving safety features? Why are our schools, hotels, restrooms,
and drinking fountains no longer segregated? Why are the toys our children
play with so much safer now, and why does the paint in our children's nurseries,
daycares, and schools no longer contain toxic amounts of lead? Why do our buildings
no longer contain asbestos? Why is it that tobacco companies have stopped telling
us that doctors recommend their cigarettes when they have known for decades
that tobacco kills people?
The answer to these questions might surprise you.
Trial lawyers, injured plaintiffs, and our beleaguered
justice system made each of these changes happen,
oftentimes at enormous personal financial, psychological,
physical, and emotional expense. At each step,
the plaintiffs and their lawyers were challenged by the defendants
and their lawyers, who also worked tirelessly and at great
cost to prevent the wrong from being corrected.
The automobile industry fought the mandatory inclusion
of seatbelts with all the substantial resources
at their disposal. The tobacco industry waged
full-scale legal warfare on the consumers and
lawyers who fought so tirelessly for warnings
that our children now take for granted.
For every "frivolous" lawsuit reported by the media,
most of which turn out to be another untrue urban legend, there
are dozens of plaintiffs who took on big industry and, with
the help of our peers on the jury, wise and seasoned judges
on the trial and appellate benches, and public-minded advocates
in the courtrooms, effected positive changes for our society.
Changes so indisputably positive that even the most cynical
critics of the justice system cannot deny the social good that
resulted from the actions of ordinary citizens in the only
forum in which such changes could be effected, a courtroom.
For only in a courtroom do the rules declare unapologetically
that all persons stand as equals before the court and jury.
It was also lawyers who won the infamous ruling
from the United States Supreme Court that a
slave named Dred Scott was property, not a person
with legal rights; that "separate but equal" accommodations
for the races was acceptable; and that the federal government
may round up and hold citizens indefinitely without providing
them with a lawyer or even a statement of the charges
against them. Lawyers for the tobacco industry argued
for decades that tobacco does not cause cancer.
Lawyers definitely do not always get it right.
Some are in the profession only for the money.
Many, however, dedicate their lives to trying
to correct social wrongs. These same points
can be made about all professionals and many
occupations.
As a society, we must look beyond the "news" and
the media anecdotes that too often are all we have to
rely upon when we form our opinions about the legal system.
For every O.J. Simpson case, there are thousands of cases
being decided across the country where justice is served
in cases involving honorable plaintiffs, ethical defendants,
hard-working judges, and conscientious juries. Unfortunately,
because we only hear about O.J.'s acquittal, the natural
reaction is to assume the entire system is broken.
Maybe the news reporting is broken because
it only focuses on O.J. Maybe we are
broken because as citizens in a democratic republic
we fail to take the time to inform ourselves
as we should or because we jump to easy
conclusions spoon-fed to us by the media
rather than investing any effort in our
opinions. Maybe we need to hold ourselves
and our beliefs up to a harsher light
so as to make sure that before we decide we
know all the answers, we consider whether
we have asked the right questions.
Lawyers are peculiarly suited to help
us ask the right questions, but they
are not the only ones either. Teachers,
doctors, accountants, businesspeople,
police officers, bus drivers - we all
must work on spotting the questions
and then thinking through the solutions.
Then the media can report the truth
that results.”
(John Horgan is an Assistant Professor of History
at Concordia University-Wisconsin in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. He has kindly permitted us to reproduce
his comments from a discussion of the legal system.)
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