Social Responsibility
Community Service
Our attorneys and staff, sometimes joined by clients, participate in various public service projects:
New York Cares
We participated in New York Cares projects in Prospect Park, where we helped paint benches, fences and playground equipment.
PS 36K
We went to PS 36K (The Pacific School), where we helped paint classrooms and wall murals, assisted with the reorganization of the school library and helped get their garden in order.
The Bowery Mission
Several times each year, the firm sponsors dinners at The Bowery Mission, where our volunteers serve meals to about 300 people on each occasion.
Story Pirates
Our firm has hosted several Story Love events in our office run by the Story Pirates, a nonprofit organization that partners with schools across the country to promote creative writing and confident self-expression in kids. During this event, we read original short stories, many of which are hilarious, written by elementary school students to whom we provide personalized and positive feedback.
Individual Activities
Our attorneys and staff individually participate in various walking, running and biking events to raise funds for charitable organizations, which have included the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the New York Roadrunners Team for Kids.
Environmental Sustainability
Our firm has taken various steps to reduce our environmental footprint. These include:
- Equipping our office with LED lighting
- Adopting a new computer record-keeping system to reduce, and eventually eliminate, paper files
- Distributing to all personnel, reusable hot cups and cold cups with permanent straws to eliminate our use of disposable cups and straws
- Purchasing stainless steel utensils to reduce our use of disposable plastic utensils.
Direct Philanthropy
From time-to-time, we undertake projects that result in contributions to worthy nonprofit entities.
CLE4GOOD ®
Through our CLE4GOOD initiative, we use our firm’s continuing legal education programs to support charitable organizations. Our firm donates an amount to a charitable organization for each attendee to our CLE program. For example, as a result of our program entitled “Key Legal Ethics Concepts Illustrated in Song,” we gave funds to the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation’s TeachRock, which provides multimedia educational materials to teachers and students everywhere cost free.
Pizza for Puerto Rico
We organized a “Pizza for Puerto Rico” fundraiser luncheon as an opportunity for our attorneys and staff to help those suffering from the devastation of Hurricane Maria. The firm made a matching contribution, and we donated the funds to Direct Relief and GlobalGiving for this purpose.
Operation Gratitude
Each year, CLL personnel donate their extra Halloween candy to Operation Gratitude to help them fill Care Packages for our troops, veterans and first responders and their families.
Covid-19 Children’s Aid
In 2020, in lieu of sending holiday cards, the firm donated to several New York City-based charities that are helping children get through the Covid-19 pandemic: (1) The New Settlement College Access Center, a Bronx-based charity that each year counsels students from low income families, many of whom are recent immigrants, with college awareness workshops and career exploration, (2) BioBus, which helps minority, female, and low-income K-12 and college students in New York City discover, explore, and pursue science; and (3) Steven Van Zandt's TeachRock Foundation event #StandWithTeachers12/21/20, to honor teachers who have kept children learning throughout the pandemic, and to support the open-source online curriculum and distance learning resources for K-12 students.