Anne Geraghty Helms, Pro Bono Counsel for the Chicago office, assists the pro bono team with its programs and oversees the operations of those programs in Chicago as well as in firm offices in Texas, Seattle, Phoenix and Minneapolis.

Ms. Helms concentrates her own practice on juvenile and criminal justice issues and, since joining DLA Piper in 2006, has helped to develop, and has herself worked on, a number of initiatives in this area. Through the Chicago office's signature Juvenile Justice Project, she successfully defended a 15-year-old girl who had been charged with attempted murder. Ms. Helms also recently helped to secure an evidentiary hearing on behalf of a young man who received a lengthy prison sentence in adult court when he was only 15 years-old. She coordinates a firmwide project on behalf of the Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions, through which firm lawyers are drafting entries for the soon-to-be-published Encyclopedia of Wrongful Convictions in the United States, and she contributed to, and is helping to implement the findings of, From Juvenile Court to the Classroom: The Need for Effective Child Advocacy, a report which examines the issues children face when they are transferred from detention back into the school system. Ms. Helms also serves as a member of the Advisory Committee Human Rights Watch's Children's Rights Division.

For the past two years, Ms. Helms has been a leader in a firmwide effort to end the practice of sentencing individuals to life without the possibility of parole for crimes committed while they were juveniles. She serves as a member of the Illinois Coalition for the Fair Sentencing of Children, an organization devoted to ending this practice, and was the principal author of a report released by the Coalition in February 2008, Categorically Less Culpable: Children Sentenced to Life Without Possibility of Parole in Illinois. The report, which received national media attention, generated significant dialogue in Illinois on the issue of juvenile life without parole.

Although principally focused on juvenile and criminal justice issues, Ms. Helms also has worked on a range of other projects since joining DLA Piper. For example, she successfully obtained T-visa relief for a client who forced by her employer into domestic servitude, assisted International Justice Mission in its efforts to develop a land registration system in Rwanda and co-taught a short course on pro bono at two law schools in Mexico City as part of the firm's New Perimeter program in partnership with Mexico Appleseed that focuses on helping to strengthen pro bono culture in Mexico City.

Most recently, Ms. Helms has helped develop a firmwide signature project focused on education. As part of that initiative, she serves as outside counsel to Woodlawn Children’s Promise Community, an organization devoted to improving the trajectory of children’s lives through education, and has helped set up and operate a new legal clinic in Chicago’s Woodlawn community.

Ms. Helms has been profoundly committed to pro bono work throughout her legal career. She comes to DLA Piper from Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where she was a litigation associate in that firm's Washington, DC office. While at WilmerHale, Ms. Helms was active in the firm's pro bono program. In 2004, she helped represent a young Iraq war veteran suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder who was charged in federal court with second-degree murder. Ms. Helms also was part of a federal trial team that challenged Maryland's lethal injection procedures as cruel and unusual, and she co-authored a brief for the Maryland Supreme Court which argued that the state’s lethal injection procedures violated the Administrative Procedures Act – an argument that ultimately was successful in bringing Maryland's capital punishment system to a halt.