Chantal Kazay’s longstanding commitment to pro bono work dates to her time in law school at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Law, where as a student member of the school’s Street Law class she visited juvenile detention centers and provided “Criminal Law 101” to detained youth and underserved communities. While in law school she volunteered with Legal Aid Chicago in their expungement and sealing clinics, a project she continued her involvement with into her legal career.
Chantal serves as a Director and Senior Counsel for Litigation in Discover’s Law Department. She has responsibility for all aspects of litigated matters and provides legal advice to the in-house advisory attorneys and compliance professionals and partners with business leaders to mitigate and prevent litigation risks. Despite a busy workload and having joined Discover only recently in 2021, Chantal is also the co-chair of Discover’s in-house pro bono program and devotes significant time to pro bono work and management of the program.
Chantal leads by example in Discover’s program, boasting an impressive number of pro bono hours ranging from advocacy for the elderly and disabled, to criminal record expungement, to immigration. At Aon, Chantal was an active leader and participant in pro bono through her work with Cabrini Green Legal Aid’s criminal records help desk at the Daley Center. In addition, in partnership with the National Immigrant Justice Center, she represented a labor trafficking survivor and her daughter to help them successfully obtain legal status in the United States. Currently, Chantal volunteers monthly with Communities Partnering 4 Peace, a community-based initiative convened by Metropolitan Family Services that provides a comprehensive long-term approach to reducing gun violence and gang activity among the individuals and communities it serves.
In the words of one of her admirers, “Chantal fundamentally believes that in-house counsel have a duty to give back to the community and actively demonstrates those values daily as a role model to her in-house peers.”