May 11, 2026
Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP Receives 2026 Organizational Pro Bono Award
The VSB Access to Legal Services Committee has awarded Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP (Hunton) the 2026 Frankie Muse Freeman Organizational Pro Bono Award, which recognizes a Virginia organization that provides exemplary pro bono legal services to underserved Virginians. The award is named for legal trailblazer Frankie Muse Freeman of Danville, who was the first woman to be appointed to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
For 125 years, Hunton Andrews Kurth has served clients worldwide with a collaborative, purposeful approach. With offices strategically located in the United States and around the world, the firm is known for its strength in the energy, financial services, real estate, retail and consumer products, and technology industries, as well as its considerable depth across numerous practice areas.
For the past 17 years, 100 percent of Hunton's full-time US lawyers have dedicated time to a pro bono client during each year, maximizing the legal services they are providing to those who would not have otherwise received them. At the end of its last fiscal year, lawyers and staff had donated more than 42,000 pro bono hours globally, marking 33 continuous years of meeting or exceeding the Pro Bono Institute’s Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge of donating at least 3 percent of the firm’s annual billable hours to pro bono service. The firm’s pro bono service spans a variety of areas, including housing, voting rights, immigration, criminal justice reform and prisoners’ rights, family law, and veterans.
The George Hettrick Community Law Center in the Church Hill neighborhood, which opened over 30 years ago after Hettrick recognized the increased cost of legal services and the decreased funding to legal aid, remains an innovative approach to serving persons of limited means in its community. The office dedicates 100 percent of its resources to pro bono clients and supports overflow from local legal aid organizations. Hunton donates more than 3,000 hours to Church Hill clients each year, supporting the office with a full-time pro bono lawyer, a part-time pro bono associate, and an office manager.
An equally important tenet of Hunton’s pro bono program is its innovative fellowship program, established in 1996 to address funding cuts to legal aid. The program seeks lawyers who desire to further their career in public interest law, employing three fully integrated firm attorneys for a two-year pro bono fellowship. Unlike other programs across the country, it is not an associate deferment program or an external placement program based on funding. The fellowships are intended to serve as a launch pad for mission-driven lawyers and to provide substantial support to overloaded legal aid organizations by leveraging the benefits of a private law firm. The fellows’ legal work is performed for outside legal aid organizations, focusing on many different areas of law. The Richmond pro bono fellowship supports clients through the firm’s Church Hill pro bono office and the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society (CVLAS). Previous fellows have gone on to show exemplary service and leadership in the pro bono community, including founding and leading legal aid organizations, directing and developing clinics at law schools, and serving as dedicated pro bono leaders at large law firms. The fellowship program has grown and evolved since its inception to meet the ever-changing needs of the communities we serve.
Year after year, Hunton's pro bono neighborhood office and fellows are dedicated to the impactful work of providing legal services to underserved segments of the population. Hunton also leverages the expertise and leadership of the fellowship program to broaden the impact of our pro bono work, maximizing services to those most in need. Fellows’ insight and involvement in the firm’s internal pro bono programs have enabled Hunton to direct its community focus toward the greatest need, with firm lawyers dedicating thousands of hours to pro bono clients over the past three decades.
In addition, the firm has many long-standing relationships with legal services organizations, to whom we donate hundreds of hours of pro bono work annually, including screening and direct representation of clients through the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (MAIP), which works to prevent and correct the conviction of innocent people in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. The firm also partners with the National Veterans Legal Services Program (NVLSP). Hunton attorneys perform over 3,000 hours of veterans-related pro bono work across more than 100 matters every year. Their veterans matters focus primarily on CRSC (combat-related special compensation), discharge upgrades, MST (military sexual trauma), military medical retirements, and petitions under the Traumatic Servicemembers Group Life Insurance (TSGLI) program. Since 2021, the firm has been in partnership with Human Rights First’s Project Afghan Legal Assistance to help those who fled Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover with immigration relief. In 2025, the firm dedicated over 650 pro bono hours to support this project, including 54 direct representation matters. Since the start of our partnership, nine families have been granted asylum, and the teams stayed on to help with reunification efforts. Hunton also routinely assists non-profit organizations through the Greater Richmond Bar Foundation’s Clearinghouse program with corporate governance issues.
Hunton will receive its award at the VSB's Annual Meeting in Virginia Beach.