Hitting the ball out of the park at trial may feel good for a lawyer, but ditching the adversarial approach and hashing out a settlement often reaps the biggest rewards, according to Holland & Knight partner Stephen Hanlon, who for 22 years has exclusively handled pro bono cases at the firm.
The proof is in the pudding, and Hanlon has plenty of pudding. He and a team of lawyers from the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana brought a class action on behalf of pretrial juvenile detainees held in horrific conditions at a center in New Orleans, ultimately securing better staff training, better educational opportunities for detainees and a brand-new facility. But those concessions came after hours of discussions with lawmakers and city officials and a 2009 settlement.
