Representation in Our Communities

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In our office communities, we help individuals ineligible for state-funded legal aid with issues of importance to them, including disputes over housing, government benefits, domestic violence, and financial dealings. Representation of individual military veterans has been an important facet of this practice. The firm also provides business advice to a large group of charities, non-profits, and NGOs that work in our communities to improve life for those in need.

• We are pro bono legal advisers to ParalympicsGB. We fielded a team of lawyers from our offices in London, Hong Kong and Beijing to advise during the 2008 Beijing Games, and worked on the Team Agreement for the winter Paralympics in Vancouver 2010. For London 2012, we are carrying out preparatory work that includes: 
  
  • advising on the London 2012 Qualification and Selection document, which sets out the principles to which each Paralympic sport is required to adhere in formulating its selection policy
  • advising on a project with the Combined Services Adaptive Sports Association to enable wounded service personnel to continue to play sport.
  
  
• Our Northern California offices are representing a group of tenants in challenging a corporate landlord. The landlord contends that it is not beholden to local rent control legislation because the number of its rental units is less than that required to trigger the law. During 2009, we won a preliminary injunction that prohibits any rise in rent while litigation is pending and provides for a refund to tenants of rent increases that had previously been imposed. We argued that the landlord’s network of small operations actually comprises a single, integrated entity. 
  
  
• We have represented dozens of U.S. and UK military veterans in their efforts to develop the evidence to support disability benefit claims. 
  • We set a precedent providing better compensation for UK veterans who suffer injuries sustained in the armed services. We successfully represented both a 27-year-old corporal who was shot in Iraq in 2005 and a Marine injured in training in proceedings brought by the Ministry of Defence to cut their compensation.  
  • In March 2010 we satisfied the U.S. benefits system that a veteran of the Iraq conflict is disabled by the post-traumatic stress disorder he developed in Iraq. A payment of US$70,000 in retroactive benefits arrived just in time to avert foreclosure on his home. 
  
  
• In 2009 we settled two significant housing cases in Washington, D.C.:
  • Litigating under the District of Columbia’s Right of Tenants to Organize Act, we arrived at a remedy after a landlord attempted to evict the organizers of a tenants’ association and refused to accommodate meetings and other association activities.
  • We represented 23 tenant families from a low-income apartment development in a complex series of administrative cases, winning for the tenants a correction of poor conditions and inoperable items in their apartments.