Describe your firm’s philosophy on pro bono service.  Mayer Brown has long deployed its resources to confront systemic problems around the world where it can have a major impact. In addition to supporting large-scale projects, including the firm’s most recent work challenging the administration’s immigration policies, the firm also encourages lawyers to pursue individual cases and issues of importance to them. These cases can change people’s lives and have a ripple effect that allows individuals, families and communities to thrive and succeed. —Marcia Maack

What are the two biggest cases your firm worked on in 2019? Tell us more about those cases and how you reached the outcome.   1) We won freedom for a client who had served 23 years of a life sentence for joyriding based on California’s three strikes law. Ken Oliver had been forced to serve eight years in solitary confinement—simply for reading a classic novel wrongly deemed “gang material.” Working with Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes Project, we won [Oliver’s] release from prison in June 2019 and a hefty settlement from California’s Department of Corrections. —Ward Johnson