David Esquivel – the firm’s pro bono member – was honored in the Distinguished Leader category by ALM’s 2023 Southeastern Legal Awards. The Distinguished Leader award recognizes lawyers who achieved impressive results in 2022 and demonstrated clear leadership skills that helped them achieve those results.

The awards will be presented at a gala on June 22 in Atlanta. To read the full list of winners, click here. David’s profile was published on June 19 and is available here.

David has served as the firm’s pro bono member since 2019. In this role, he devotes half of his time to managing the program and helping Bass, Berry & Sims stay true to its commitment of pursuing systemic change to eradicate the root causes of legal, social, and economic inequalities. David has led the firm’s pro bono program to extraordinary success: in 2022 the firm recorded more than 16,000 pro bono hours, three times the number of hours in 2018. David’s success in growing the program and keeping the focus on systemic change is reflected in the fact that one-tenth of the attorneys in the firm took on more than 100 hours of pro bono in 2022.

David’s leadership is evidenced not only by numbers but also in partnerships that he has built across Tennessee and the country and in his work assembling and leading teams to tackle complex pro bono matters. Three matters completed in 2022 include:

Read more about the firm’s pro bono initiatives here.

In addition to his active pro bono work, David advises clients on investigations and litigation matters mainly in the financial services sector, with a particular emphasis on matters relating to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) and Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). He provides counsel to consumer reporting agencies, as well as furnishers and users of consumer data, on how to ensure regulatory compliance under the ever-increasing demands of federal regulatory agencies. Read more about David and his legal practice here.