Pro Bono – Colby Anne Kingsbury Advocates for the Needs of Immigrants, Prisoners and Youth

Many Baker & Daniels professionals are dedicated to making a difference in their communities through pro bono legal work. Colby Anne Kingsbury is a partner practicing commercial, employment and intellectual property litigation from our Chicago office. A skilled and experienced attorney, Colby also gives back to her community and profession in many ways.  She currently serves as a delegate for the Coalition of Women's Initiatives in Law Firms, on the Chicago Bar Association's Alliance for Women Committee, and on the Women's Forum Steering Committee and Diversity Committee at Baker & Daniels.

Throughout her career, Colby has used her legal skills to seek justice for the mistreated and underserved. Her efforts have earned her multiple pro bono awards. Highlights of her pro bono work include:

• Immigration: Colby represents an immigrant in a long and complex withholding of removal case that includes collaborating with and speaking on behalf of detained immigrants for the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC). She now serves on the litigation steering committee for NIJC. While an attorney at another firm, Colby and a co-worker created a formal, internal resource for fellow attorneys working on pro bono immigration cases. Attorneys shared case information so they could benefit from those who had done work before them and received training to improve their knowledge of immigration law.
• Prisoners' Rights: Colby serves as co-counsel with the ACLU in seeking to improve conditions at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. She also represented a prison inmate in an excessive force case and has been appointed to other cases involving prisoners' rights.
• Youth Services: Colby serves as board president for the James B. Moran Center for Youth Advocacy, an organization in Evanston, Ill., that provides legal and social services for youth. The Moran Center attorneys offer their services, in place of public defenders, to help troubled youth in legal proceedings. The Moran Center also provides social services that examine the source of the youths' problems, helping to set them on the right path and improve their family lives as they work through their legal issues.
• Legal Clinic: In partnership with the Moran Center, Colby and other Chicago attorneys have developed a legal help desk, where they provide simple legal services to underprivileged people in the area.

Here are Colby's thoughts on the legal profession and her pro bono work:

• Favorite thing about practicing law? I like when the pieces come together and you can see that the client is pleased. In some respects, you're an interpreter and a mouthpiece for your client. That can be frustrating to the client because no one understands their business as well as they do. When you demonstrate that you understand their business and they are pleased by that, it can be very satisfying.
• First pro bono experience? When I was a summer associate, I started working on a case I'm still working on today to improve conditions at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.
• Why pro bono? My pro bono experience as a summer associate gave me a real eye into doing work that is so incredibly meaningful for people who need an advocate but can't access representation. I'm so happy to have had that early experience because it meant that pro bono was already a part of my legal practice from the very beginning.
• Most meaningful pro bono project? I represent a gentleman from Yemen who just received withholding of removal for immigration purposes. This is incredibly meaningful to me because I saw it as a life or death situation for him if he were forced to return to Yemen; my client needed to be able to stay here. This was also the first pro bono case I worked on where I was the lead attorney. I became very close to the client, and when his family came to visit him in the U.S., they had dinner at my house, brought us Yemeni food and even gave gifts to my children.
• Proudest pro bono moment? When finally, after six years of working with the Yemeni gentleman, we had a victory in his case with the Board of Immigration Appeals this past spring. This case had been up to the Seventh Circuit and back to the Immigration Court and then back up to the Board of Immigration Appeals. It has been a long journey for my client, and I am so proud that we have finally had success.
• Effect that pro bono has had on your legal career? It's been an amazing experience for me. I've had two Seventh Circuit arguments and a trial because of pro bono work. It has allowed me to sharpen my legal skills and helped put things in perspective. When you are a commercial litigator, you deal with companies, and it's easy to not get too emotionally involved. It's harder to remain emotionally uninvolved with pro bono cases, which is a good thing. It's good to understand that this is all about people, and even companies are made up of people. It helps you recognize that you really have to be that interpreter, understand the client and have compassion for them whether they are paying clients or not.
• Pro bono role model? Lawyers at the pro bono organizations I've worked with, including the National Immigrant Justice Center and the American Civil Liberties Union. These are people who do pro bono full-time for a much smaller salary, and I'm frankly in awe of them. They are incredibly smart attorneys who could have easily chosen to take a different path for the money but instead were driven to make a significant difference in the lives of people who need it most.