New Pro Bono Project Highlights

• A group of San Francisco Bay Area law firms and legal services providers recently launched the Bay Area Rural Justice Collaborative, dedicated to expanding access to legal services in rural and/or isolated communities throughout the Bay Area. This project is the first of the Association of Pro Bono Counsel's (APBCo) IMPACT Projects to launch. The IMPACT Projects are being created in response to a meeting held in Washington, D.C., in 2012 by Vice President Joe Biden, APBCo board members (including me) and senior management of the board members' firms. Several of the New York projects will be launching this fall.
• Several large law firms have filed the first human trafficking suits in federal court as part of a large pro bono effort in conjunction with the Southern Poverty Law Center. These suits are the first in a series of federal lawsuits to prosecute multiple human trafficking and racketeering allegations against a Gulf Coast marine services company and its network of recruiters and labor brokers.