Foley's Tampa Office Nominated for Pro Bono Service Award

Foley’s Tampa office has been nominated for the 2019 Florida Chief Justice’s Law Firm Commendation Pro Bono Service Award.

The award recognizes a firm that has made a significant contribution in the provision of pro bono legal services to individuals or groups that cannot otherwise afford those services. Consideration is not limited to the immediate past year. A firm’s overall or cumulative pro bono service record and public service activities are taken into account.

The Tampa office was nominated for the award by Jena Hudson, pro bono manager of the Bay Area Legal Services’ Volunteer Lawyers Program. In her nominating papers, Hudson cited Foley’s longstanding commitment to pro bono and its attorneys’ contribution of nearly 5,600 hours of pro bono work to various clients and projects in the past three years alone. She also cited the attorneys’ service on a number of community boards and committees for a variety of charitable, civic, religious, educational and service organizations.

Hudson also singled out the efforts of 10 of the firm’s attorneys as a sampling of the kind of “tireless work” being done on behalf of her program and other area individuals and organizations, including the Tampa Bay Foundation for Mental Health, the MAVEN Project, which offers free expert medical consults via telemedicine to low-income patients at community health clinics, a plaintiff’s civil rights police brutality case, and a transgendered student’s lawsuit challenging a school board’s policy prohibiting transgendered students from using the restroom corresponding to their gender identity.