The firm is committed to public interest. Two of our attorneys, John Grogan and Irv Ackelsberg, spent their formative years as lawyers in the public interest sector.  John co-founded and directed the Camden Center for Law and Social Justice, Inc., a law office dedicated to representing the working poor.  Irv spent thirty years with Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, one of the nation’s premier civil legal aid programs.  Ned Diver is a member of the board and the Legal Committee of the local chapter of the ACLU, and both Ned and John have dedicated considerable pro bono hours to the handling of complex immigration cases, in partnership with the HIAS and Council Migration Service of Philadelphia.

The firm invests substantial resources into public interest litigation. We do these cases in partnership with public interest organizations.  Among our pro bono cases are:

• Buck v. Stankovic, 485 F. Supp. 2d 576 (M.D. 2007), working with the ACLU to enjoin a Pennsylvania county from refusing to issue a marriage license to an American citizen and her undocumented immigrant fiancee;
• In re Frascella, 388 B.R. 619 (Bankr. E.D. Pa. 2008), working with Community Legal Services, to successfully prosecute, settle and then defend the settlement of a consumer class action against an illegal “payday lending” operation.

Our attorneys and the firm itself have been frequently recognized for our special commitment to the public interest.  Irv Ackelsberg was the 2005 recipient of the Vern Countryman Award, the nation’s most prestigious award for practitioners of consumer law on behalf of low-income consumers; he was the 2001 recipient of the Philadelphia Bar Association's Andrew Hamilton Award for exemplary service in the public interest.  In 2001 John Grogan received the St. Thomas More Award from the Camden Archdiocese, was honored by the University of Pennsylvania Law School as its outstanding young alumnus and was named as a fellow to the Salzburg Seminar on International Human Rights.  In 2006, the firm was honored by Community Legal Services with its Equal Justice Award.

The firm has established the Langer, Grogan & Diver Fund for Social Justice, which supports public interest law in the Delaware Valley. In 2009, the Fund established the Langer, Grogan & Diver Public Interest Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School to fund a graduating student’s first year of work in the public interest.