Reed Smith is pleased to announce that Bloomberg Law featured the firm among its top 10 Pro Bono Innovators for 2024.
Reed Smith was among only 10 organizations honored by Bloomberg Law in its third annual Pro Bono Innovators 2024 special report, which highlights “successful and impactful legal work across the globe.”
“Each year, Pro Bono Innovators honors a selection of law firms and other legal service providers that go above and beyond in delivering pro bono legal services,” Bloomberg Law stated.
In our 2024 edition of Pro Bono Innovators, Bloomberg Law honors Reed Smith for its success securing a nearly $1 million settlement for journalists from the city of Minneapolis over alleged police attacks during the 2020 protests of the murder of George Floyd; Pennsylvania court wins securing the rights of transgender individuals to change their names; and other matters.
The 2024 report featured an in-depth Q&A with Washington, D.C.- and New York-based partner Ed Schwartz, who has over three decades of experience defending clients in antitrust, consumer protection and other commercial litigation. Schwartz detailed his work with the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota (ACLU-MN) on the Goyette v. Minneapolis case of police brutality against journalists.
The report also featured a Q&A with M. Patrick Yingling, a Chicago-based partner in the firm’s Appellate group. Yingling and Pittsburgh-based associate Zack Roman led a Reed Smith team that worked with the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) on three key cases that successfully challenged Pennsylvania’s rule barring felons from changing their names.
Settlement for journalists in Goyette v. Minneapolis
In Feb. 2024, Schwartz led a Reed Smith pro bono team that partnered with ACLU-MN and other Minneapolis-based co-counsel to win a nearly $1 million settlement from the city of Minneapolis over police attacks on reporters during the George Floyd protests of 2020.
The case dates to June 2020, when the team helped journalists sue Minneapolis, Minneapolis Police Department officials, Minnesota State Patrol leaders, and other law enforcement officials seeking damages and injunctive relief arising from the systematic violation of their constitutional rights under the First, Fourth, and 14th Amendments, and for conspiring to violate those rights.
The successful complaint detailed how, during protests of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis city police on May 25, 2020, and again during the Daunte Wright protests in of 2021, law enforcement officers tear-gassed, arrested, pepper-sprayed and shot media members in the face with less-than-lethal munitions (including hard foam bullets), often without warning.
Journalists also were arrested without cause and threatened at gunpoint, even though they were clearly identified as “PRESS.” These reporters, who covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said they’d never before faced such abuse.
The team’s strategy focused on presenting detailed evidence of how plaintiffs were threatened, subject to unlawful arrests and assaulted (in direct violation of specific constitutional guarantees for their safety and freedom of the press), and of the MPD’s history of assaulting journalists.
For this work, and other pro bono projects, The National Law Journal honored Reed Smith as a finalist for its Community Impact Leader Award at the 2024 NLJ Legal Awards on Oct. 24 in Washington, D.C.
Hilliard name change petition
In August 2023, a Reed Smith team led by Yingling and Roman teamed with co-counsel Gabriel Arkles and Sydney Duncan of TLDEF to obtain an important court ruling affirming the rights of transgender individuals to change their names.
In this win, a judge of the Butler County Court of Common Pleas overrode the Pennsylvania felony bar to grant a name change for Jordan Xzavier Hilliard, a transgender man. As written, Pennsylvania’s felony bar prevents individuals with felony convictions from obtaining a name change until two years after the completion of their sentence. However, the team successfully argued that this statute is based on improper presumptions that violate constitutional rights.
This win solidifies Reed Smith’s earlier successes from December 2021, when the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas granted a name change for a transgender petitioner over the felony bar and, one week later, the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas did the same and expressly declared the felony bar to be “unconstitutional.”
For this cutting-edge work, TLDEF named Reed Smith its 2023 Pro Bono Partner of the Year.
Original source can be found here.