Duane F. Sigelko (left), a partner at Reed Smith LLP, volunteers by helping asylum-seekers prepare for interviews at a refugee camp in Greece. 
Duane F. Sigelko (left), a partner at Reed Smith LLP, volunteers by helping asylum-seekers prepare for interviews at a refugee camp in Greece.  — Photo courtesy of Duane Sigelko.

Last December, Duane F. Sigelko had clients offer him tea.

He was in Amman, Jordan, on his third pro bono trip of the year helping refugees seeking asylum. So his clients’ generosity, despite their desperate circumstances, stuck with him.

Sigelko, a partner, is one of Reed Smith LLP’s top volunteers in its human rights project in the Middle East. In 2016, he attended and led volunteer trips to refugee camps in the Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios, where he helped refugees prepare for asylum interviews and, in Amman, where he checked on refugees’ new living conditions.

He said work like this helps raise the esteem the general public has for lawyers.

“I think it’s important as lawyers that we do that,” he said. “We always say that it’s not just about making money. We’re trying to make our society better, make our legal system better, contribute to the community.”

Last year’s three trips were just the latest project in Sigelko’s career-long commitment to pro bono asylum work.

He worked with an LAF immigration project’s asylum cases in law school and has done pro bono asylum cases with the National Immigrant Justice Center and its predecessor organizations for the 30 years of his practice.

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and a subsequent epidemic of rape, Reed Smith began a humanitarian parole program. Sigelko and other volunteers helped 65 women and children gain entry to Canada and the United States for medical and psychological care.

One of his most notable pro bono cases is that of a woman and child from Honduras.

In May 2014, the mother and son were traveling on the top of a freight train through Mexico in an attempt to enter the United States. The mother was helping others down when the train lurched. The boy, then 2 years old, fell on the tracks and lost part of his foot. The mother’s right arm was crushed as she attempted to rescue him.

A family member of a former colleague happened to be volunteering in Mexico, heard about their case and asked Sigelko to step in. Sigelko traveled to Mexico to document that the two could not receive the medical attention they needed there and must be allowed to enter the United States.

The mother and son were placed in Chicago in December 2014. Sigelko continues to keep up with them. In fact, one morning a few days after returning from Jordan in December 2016, he walked the now 5-year-old boy to school.

“It’s a beautiful story,” said Jayne E. Fleming, Reed Smith’s pro bono counsel.

Fleming said the firm focuses on getting the highest risk individuals to security and to the medical care they need.

“I feel, as a citizen of a global community, that it’s our responsibility to care for others,” she said.

Fleming said Reed Smith is a global law firm, so it advances that value on a global level. The firm’s refugee protection program is currently active in Haiti, Lebanon, Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan and Greece.

In Greek refugee camps, individuals who Sigelko said generally spoke Arabic, Afghan, Persian and Dari, needed interpreters to help them. Reed Smith’s pro bono arm got involved to give legal advice to these people hoping to either be processed and allowed into Turkey or start the asylum process in Greece.

Sigelko was part of the first delegation in May 2016, spending three weeks in a Greek refugee camp to interview refugees and returned to lead another trip this summer. Fleming said the firm coordinated other teams rotating through the camps through October.

Once word got out through the camps that there were attorney volunteers there to help, Sigelko said women and other refugees started bringing them lost children and suicidal people asking them to help.

Sigelko helped interviewing refugees to prepare them for asylum and relocation interviews, which usually were conducted in English. He described this process as “catch as catch can,” as he and other volunteers generally weren’t notified as to when a certain refugee was going to be interviewed.

There were no facilities in the camps for private legal counsel. Sigelko said it was a matter of finding an open place under a tree or a bench to sit on. He said he saw between three and five refugee clients a day.

Sigelko said under normal circumstances in the United States, it can take five or six lengthy interviews to establish a client’s trust enough to discuss such a traumatic experience as what might qualify them for asylum, but he and other attorney volunteers had only an hour or two to prepare a refugee client for their interviews with Greek officials.

“You never know whether you really have totally gotten all of the information,” he said.

In his December trip to Jordan, Sigelko did home visits to make sure children and other clients’ living conditions were reasonable.

Sigelko said the refugees Reed Smith has helped in Amman are mostly Syrian and Iraqi, but also from other countries including Sudan and Somalia.

Reed Smith attorneys work with the local organizations like the Center for Victims of Torture and the Jesuit Refugee Services and focus on unaccompanied children, single women, victims of torture, the disabled, elderly and homosexuals.

At the end of this month, Sigelko said he will ship out again — this time most likely to return to Jordan. Fleming said the project has more than 30 cases involving high-risk situations like a 6-year-old with cancer and a man with hemophilia who has yet to receive treatment.

Sigelko said his clients back in the Chicago office often ask him about his pro bono work. After he was included in a Wall Street Journal article in October, he said opposing counsel in his corporate and civil litigation practice even e-mailed him to compliment him on his work.