Longtime trial attorney Ellen V. Leonida went to law school because she wanted to be a public defender.
"It was really important to me that indigent criminal defendants get the best defense they could," Leonida said, "that nobody went to jail for being poor and not being able to afford a lawyer."
After graduating from UC Berkeley School of Law in 1996, Leonida went to work for the Contra Costa County Public Defender's Office, where she contested more than 40 jury trials in nearly 10 years. She later moved on to the Northern District's Federal Public Defender office, where she tried cases for another 10 years.
"I was a public defender for 20 years, and I loved it. I was happy," she said. "But then this opportunity came along that just wasn't like anything I'd ever heard of before."
In January 2021, Leonida joined BraunHagey & Borden LLP to lead the San Francisco headquartered firm's impact litigation practice. It's not standard pro bono work, she insisted.
"It's really a chance to lead a group of people that are dedicated to having an impact on underserved populations and social justice in a way I don't think I've heard of any other firms doing," she explained.
Tackling matters ranging from civil rights to elder law, environmental and refugee cases -- the impact practice consists of one dedicated partner and two dedicated associates. But the focus dates back to the firm's launch in 2009, according to co-founder and Managing Partner Noah Hagey, who said all of the firm's 45 attorneys work on impact cases in some way.
"Sometimes that can be a smaller research role or client investigation role," Hagey explained. "Sometimes it's a role appearing in court and arguing motions, being more on the tip of the spear. It's a part of the firm culture, and there's a general expectation that folks are going to be involved."
Focusing predominantly on a mix of commercial litigation and corporate venture work, BraunHagey & Borden doesn't operate with a vertical practice group model, an approach Hagey said teaches young lawyers that "hyper-specializing" is the way to succeed.
"I think there's something corrosive and really bad about that," Hagey said. "Diversity is good, including practice diversity and bringing different types of lawyers in our profession into all kinds of different matters and, in particular, stuff that might have an impact."
Hagey said most attorneys don't go to law school looking to become narrowly focused profit maximizers.
"A lot of lawyers go to law school with an idea towards being involved in bigger questions of the day and being able to help out their communities," he explained. "We understood early there was a real need in the market for folks that had deep, strong commercial litigation experience to put those tools to use for other clients and to try to do good in other areas, which weren't conventional in nature. And we jumped right in and did that."
In 2020, BraunHagey & Borden attorneys joined forces with the ACLU on a case in which journalists alleged their First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated by U.S. Marshals and Department of Homeland Security officers during Black Lives Matter protests and riots in Portland, Oregon. The firm's impact practice helped secure a temporary restraining order prohibiting federal agents from arresting, assaulting or intimidating journalists and legal observers. Index Newspapers LLC et al. v. United States Marshals Service, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 3:20-cv-01035-SI (9th Cir., filed June 28, 2020).
"Regardless of what side of those issues you are on, you do not want journalists being thrown into unmarked vehicles and beaten up," Hagey said. "That's just a terrible, terrible precedent, and the fact that this was happening at the behest of the federal government, and sometimes with some wayward state officials, is precisely the kind of fight we want to be fighting."
More recently, Leonida and other members of the firm's impact practice group have been representing a citizens group in Llano, Texas in a First Amendment lawsuit over the removal of thousands of digital and physical books from the county's public libraries. The complaint alleges Llano County officials employed a censorship campaign to remove books covering critical race theory and LGBTQ+ equality. Leila Green Little et al. v. Llano County et al., 5:22-cv-00400 (W.D. Texas, filed Apr. 25, 2022).
"We have asked for a preliminary injunction to stop the censorship and get the books put back on the shelves," Leonida said, noting the Texas attorney generally initially moved to intervene in the case. "Once all of the briefing was done on the preliminary injunction and the motion to dismiss, they withdrew through their motion to intervene. They didn't say why. But I can only assume it was because they know it's a losing position. As the government, they should actually be fighting censorship instead of trying to engage in it."
Leonida said she's hopeful a hearing on the preliminary injunction will happen early this October, and she noted this case has special meaning for her. She and her mother fled to New York from the Soviet Union when she was 6, but Leonida's father, who worked as a journalist, was unable to join them.
"I didn't see him for the next 30 years, and that was largely because he was a journalist, who was kept from telling the truth to people by the Soviet government," Leonida said. "So the censorship cases we do, and particularly this case where people are trying to keep information from citizens who want to read it, are really close to my heart."
Both Leonida and Hagey noted, meanwhile, that the firm's impact litigation practice has been a self-sustaining component of the firm's overall business, thanks to attorney fees and damages wins in many of the cases the group tackles.
"We're not shy about ensuring that folks doing bad things out in the world have to pay for the pleasure of being shown the light," Hagey said, adding that the impact group will always be critical for the firm whether it's making money or not.
"In virtually all of our [impact] cases, whether we're up against the federal government or a state or a very large institution, we'll be outnumbered 2 or 3 to 1," Hagey continued. "You want to make sure you can bring the right resources to bear in all of those cases, and to do so you've got to have some sense of the economics. But so far, I think [the impact group] has really always been self-sustaining. It's not a way to make a lot of money, but it certainly is a way to do good."