Reed Smith was awarded a 2024 Beacon of Justice Award from the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) for excellence in pro bono.
The firm was honored for its Lamp Lifeboat Ladder global refugee protection project, which is profiled in the NLADA 2024 Beacon of Justice Book, highlighting project leaders Jayne Fleming, Duane Sigelko, Chris Walters and Becca Naylor, along with other team members and pro bono partners.
As per NLADA, the Beacon of Justice Awards honor members of the pro bono legal community “who are tireless advocates for equal justice.” Reed Smith is among 40 law firms honored in 2024 for work on civil and human rights issues.
As highlighted by NLADA:
Lamp Lifeboat Ladder (LLL) is Reed Smith’s radical model for the successful resettlement of women refugees who are at high risk of further injury. What makes the project so innovative is that it provides survivors with end-to-end protection, from the point of flight (for example, Syria) to the point of self-reliance (Canada). No other program in the world does this.
A key partner to LLL is the Canadian Center for Victims of Torture (CCVT), the project’s operational partner in Canada under a Memorandum of Understanding with the Canadian government. Others include the Human Rights in Trauma Mental Health Laboratory at Stanford University, the World Refugee & Migration Council (WRMC), and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
The LLL team also includes Mulugeta Abai, executive director of CCVT; Hanna Gros, Canadian legal director; Kolbassia Haossou, director of Survivors Speak Out; Holly Cooper, co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic at UC Davis; Daryn Reicherter, MD, of the Human Rights Lab at Stanford; and Allan Rock, special advisor to WRMC and Canada’s former Ambassador to the United Nations.
Earlier this year, LLL received the Innovations in Pro Bono Award at the 2024 Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards; and LLL project leader Jayne Fleming was the only human rights lawyer to appear on the Forbes 2024 list of the Top 200 Lawyers in the United States.
Original source can be found here.