Covington Hosts Reception Honoring New NLSP Executive Director

Covington Hosts Reception Honoring New NLSP Executive Director

April 25, 2012

WASHINGTON, DC, April 25, 2012 — The Neighborhood Legal Services Program plans to honor Hannah Lieberman, its new executive director, at a May 3 reception held at Covington & Burling.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan and Peter Edelman, chair of the D.C. Access to Justice Commission, are expected to speak at the event about the importance of providing access to quality legal services in the District’s most challenged neighborhoods.

A former litigation partner at what is now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, Ms. Lieberman has spent the last two decades working to make legal services more accessible to poor people. Her legal services experience includes serving as the director of advocacy at Community Legal Services in Arizona and later as the deputy executive director of the Legal Aid Bureau in Maryland.

“NLSP is vital to the community. Our lawyers secure fundamental rights and basic necessities for clients in crisis, including retention of safe and affordable housing, preservation of family relationships, protection from domestic violence, access to critical public benefits and relief from predatory practices,” Ms. Lieberman said. “It is a privilege to advocate for our clients and to work to reduce barriers facing our low-income neighbors.”

Covington’s partnership with NLSP spans more than four decades. Since 1969, Covington has assigned two associates, a paralegal and a secretary to work in an NLSP neighborhood office on a full-time, six-month rotating basis. For the past twenty years, Covington has also provided NLSP with funding for two “Westwood Fellowships” for local law school graduates to serve for one or two years at NLSP.

NLSP has a long tradition of fighting to protect essential rights and opportunities and to achieve broad-based change for low-income residents and communities in the District of Columbia. Established in 1964, NLSP was one of the first federally-funded, civil legal services programs in the United States. Many of the nation’s landmark cases and laws regarding the rights of the poor in housing, consumer protection, government benefits, and family law began in the neighborhood offices of NLSP.

For more information, to RSVP for the reception or for interviews with Ms. Lieberman, please contact Bret Denning at bdenning@NLSP.org or 202-269-5112.