Twenty-five years ago today, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 attacks. First responders, survivors, and families have carried the weight of that morning every day since.
In the aftermath, the country searched for ways to respond. Congress created the September 11 Victim's Compensation Fund to provide relief to victims and their families. But navigating that fund was its own undertaking, and the families who had already lost so much needed advocates to stand with them through it.
They found those advocates in Trial Lawyers Care, a volunteer legal organization formed within days of the attacks, and co-founded by our own Larry Stewart. Over more than a decade, its 1,100 attorneys represented more than 1,700 claimants entirely pro bono, donating an estimated $300 million in legal services and securing more than $2.2 billion in compensation. It remains the largest pro bono legal effort in U.S. history.
A new Daily Business Review article revisits that work on its 25th anniversary, with reflections from Larry and co-founder Leo Boyle. Among the piece's most resonant details is a principle Larry instilled in every volunteer attorney: that each victim deserved to be represented as a full person, and never reduced, as Boyle put it, to "a line item on a spreadsheet."
In the DBR piece, Larry recalls the question that drove the response: "Everybody wanted to do something. The entire nation wanted to do something about it. Well, what could trial lawyers do? Trial lawyers could step up to help these victims get some sort of justice for what had happened to them, what had happened to their families."
That instinct, to convert grief into action, and action into justice, is what built Trial Lawyers Care from nothing in a matter of days. Today, on the 25th anniversary, we remember the victims. We remember the families who are still carrying the loss. And we're proud that our founder helped make sure so many of them had someone in their corner when it mattered most.