July 30, 2025
By Bob Glaves | CBF Executive Director
As our legal community honored seven amazing lawyers and judges in our community at last week’s annual CBA/CBF Pro Bono & Public Service Awards Luncheon, we continued a recent tradition by kicking things off with a song to help set the theme.
With 2025 already one of the wildest years of our legal lifetimes, any of the songs we have previously featured at the event* could have worked well. But this special edition of Heroes from David Bowie seemed particularly fitting right now. Wherever we are in the legal community, all of us who are lawyers, judges, and legal professionals have a unique capacity to be heroes like the unsung heroes we honored, and not just for one day but throughout the year.
As this year’s honorees have shown us firsthand, whether we are in private practice, full-time in public service, longtime pro bono champions, judges, or just getting started on this journey, we can all make a real difference as individuals. Wherever we are in the profession or justice system, we all have the power of our unique knowledge, training, and experience to help people in a way that others cannot.
I encourage you to read more about each one of these seven unsung heroes we honored, who are an inspiration for all of us.
The other reason this version of Heroes seemed especially timely now was the setting for it: the epic Live Aid concerts 40 years ago. As a new CNN series and others have been recalling of late, it was a stirring example of the power of community when the most famous rock bands and musicians of the era came together to raise awareness and the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s dollars for hunger relief in Ethiopia, which was in the midst of a famine then.
While we may lack the stardom and reach of those celebrities and concerts, when it comes to the law and justice, our legal community is second to none in our power to do great things when we come together. “Building a fairer and better justice system, together” is not just our tagline—it is what you all are doing through the CBF every day by coming together as a legal community around this common cause.
While we’ve got a lot more work to do yet, individually and collectively we all can make a real difference wherever we are in the legal community. And if we don’t take the lead on the issues as lawyers and as a legal community, who will?
We all have our own special superpower to be heroes, every day, and our honorees last week gave us a lot of inspiration to do just that.
* That special compilation post a few years ago is due for an update soon. Additional selections since then in 2022, 2023, and 2024 would be fitting now too.