Midwest Innocence Project Moves Forward for Pro Bono Services - 2011-12-12

Continuing her volunteer role with the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association in aiding the Midwest Innocence Project, Langdon & Emison attorney Phyllis Norman will be a part of the next committee meeting guiding the project’s “Freedom Friday” initiative.  The next meeting will take place December 13 in Kansas City, and will address how the group of attorneys from western Missouri can help mobilize young attorneys from throughout the region to provide pro bono legal and investigative services.

The Midwest Innocence Project has long been one of the nation’s leading nonprofit organizations dedicated to pro bono legal services to the innocent in prison.  A diverse cross-section of attorneys from a variety of firms in Missouri have been meeting for regularly scheduled work sessions dedicated to recruiting pro bono attorneys and other ways that young lawyers can work across bar associations and firms to help with the cause.  Other firms taking a lead sponsor role in this project include Davis, Bethune & Jones, Warden Grier, and Stinson Morrison Hecker.

While dedicating legal services to those wrongfully convicted, the MIP has effectively educated many in the profession about lapses in the criminal justice system.  Some of these issues have included eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, and junk science used in the courtroom by the prosecution.

Phyllis will assume the presidency of the Greater Kansas City chapter of the Association of Women Lawyers on January 1, 2012.  She is regularly a contributor to nonprofit organizations dedicated to the legal profession. Early in her career she was elected as a District 3 representative of the Missouri Bar Young Lawyers Section. Currently she is serving a 2-year term as the District 4 representative of the Missouri Bar Young Lawyers Section.  Her legal practice focuses on product liability litigation, specifically in the areas of class action suits, auto product defects and mass tort litigation. Phyllis has litigated cases at both the trial court and appellate court levels, in Federal and State Court, and before the National Association of Securities Dealers and the American Arbitration Association.