Our firm is committed to serving our community. We volunteer our services as attorneys without pay in many situations, and our lawyers also perform other community service. Here are some examples:

• To help families of our military in Iraq and Afghanistan, we started a volunteer lawyer program to provide free legal assistance to military families in Georgia.
• We have represented widows and families of slain law enforcement officers, to help the families obtain benefits and provide for their future, at no charge to the families.
• We are “on call” with ministers to discuss the legal problems of their church members, at no charge to them.
• Our attorneys also provide pro bono legal services to various homeless shelters and other non-profit organizations in our community.
• We help educate and train new lawyers in the community through speaking and writing articles for Continuing Legal Education programs, including programs on Ethics and Professionalism.
• Our lawyers regularly serve as board members for community organizations.
• Our lawyers perform volunteer work for community service groups such as Habitat for Humanity, the Young Adult Guidance Center, Hands on Atlanta, and other service organizations.
• Our firm has also developed a free public education program on preventing fraud against the elderly. This program came about through our experience in representing elderly persons who were being defrauded without their knowledge.

Finally, we want to share with you the thoughts of Professor John Horgan about the legal system, because it captures many of the reasons of why we do what we do:

“Did you ever consider why we now have safer workplaces? What about standard seatbelts in all of our automobiles, as well as airbags and other life-saving safety features? Why are our schools, hotels, restrooms, and drinking fountains no longer segregated? Why are the toys our children play with so much safer now, and why does the paint in our children's nurseries, daycares, and schools no longer contain toxic amounts of lead? Why do our buildings no longer contain asbestos? Why is it that tobacco companies have stopped telling us that doctors recommend their cigarettes when they have known for decades that tobacco kills people?

The answer to these questions might surprise you. Trial lawyers, injured plaintiffs, and our beleaguered justice system made each of these changes happen, oftentimes at enormous personal financial, psychological, physical, and emotional expense. At each step, the plaintiffs and their lawyers were challenged by the defendants and their lawyers, who also worked tirelessly and at great cost to prevent the wrong from being corrected.

The automobile industry fought the mandatory inclusion of seatbelts with all the substantial resources at their disposal. The tobacco industry waged full-scale legal warfare on the consumers and lawyers who fought so tirelessly for warnings that our children now take for granted.

For every "frivolous" lawsuit reported by the media, most of which turn out to be another untrue urban legend, there are dozens of plaintiffs who took on big industry and, with the help of our peers on the jury, wise and seasoned judges on the trial and appellate benches, and public-minded advocates in the courtrooms, effected positive changes for our society. Changes so indisputably positive that even the most cynical critics of the justice system cannot deny the social good that resulted from the actions of ordinary citizens in the only forum in which such changes could be effected, a courtroom. For only in a courtroom do the rules declare unapologetically that all persons stand as equals before the court and jury.

It was also lawyers who won the infamous ruling from the United States Supreme Court that a slave named Dred Scott was property, not a person with legal rights; that "separate but equal" accommodations for the races was acceptable; and that the federal government may round up and hold citizens indefinitely without providing them with a lawyer or even a statement of the charges against them. Lawyers for the tobacco industry argued for decades that tobacco does not cause cancer.

Lawyers definitely do not always get it right. Some are in the profession only for the money. Many, however, dedicate their lives to trying to correct social wrongs. These same points can be made about all professionals and many occupations.

As a society, we must look beyond the "news" and the media anecdotes that too often are all we have to rely upon when we form our opinions about the legal system. For every O.J. Simpson case, there are thousands of cases being decided across the country where justice is served in cases involving honorable plaintiffs, ethical defendants, hard-working judges, and conscientious juries. Unfortunately, because we only hear about O.J.'s acquittal, the natural reaction is to assume the entire system is broken.

Maybe the news reporting is broken because it only focuses on O.J. Maybe we are broken because as citizens in a democratic republic we fail to take the time to inform ourselves as we should or because we jump to easy conclusions spoon-fed to us by the media rather than investing any effort in our opinions. Maybe we need to hold ourselves and our beliefs up to a harsher light so as to make sure that before we decide we know all the answers, we consider whether we have asked the right questions.

Lawyers are peculiarly suited to help us ask the right questions, but they are not the only ones either. Teachers, doctors, accountants, businesspeople, police officers, bus drivers - we all must work on spotting the questions and then thinking through the solutions. Then the media can report the truth that results.”

(John Horgan is an Assistant Professor of History at Concordia University-Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has kindly permitted us to reproduce his comments from a discussion of the legal system.)