MoProBono - Spring 2018 Update

8 MoProBono Spring 2018 PRO BONO NEWS BRIEFS MoFo lawyers continue to represent individuals in need of legal aid and counsel. Here are a few of the many cases that our lawyers have handled in recent months. TAX ABATEMENT A Los Angeles-based volunteer chaplain working with homeless people in the city sought assistance in challenging $7,500 in taxes that had been wrongfully assessed by the California Franchise Tax Board. Tax lawyers Clara Lim in Los Angeles and Tom Humphreys in New York won a tax abatement for our client, who praised MoFo for being the only firm out of the dozen he contacted to respond to his request for help. MEDICAL ERRORS Our Los Angeles team responded to a local court’s call to assist a veteran who had suffered lasting physical and mental health damage stemming from medical errors made by the VA. Lawyers Dave Walsh, Bita Rahebi, and Matt Cave won a settlement of $92,000, enough to vastly improve the client’s medical care and social support in the years ahead. HOLOCAUST REPARATIONS In Berlin, our team represented a Holocaust survivor’s widow who was seeking benefits from a German government program. (The survivor himself had died while a German court’s request for evidence of his persecution was pending.) Berlin lawyers Julia Schwalm, Jannis Werner, Andrea Dicke, Jakob Schellmann, and Felix Helmstädter used history to demonstrate the circumstances and duration of his persecution, convincing the court to grant his widow the maximum benefit. This case is one of several similar matters we have undertaken in Berlin through a referral program by the U.S.-based nonprofit Bet Tzedek.