Legal Aid DC 2026 Servants of Justice Award Grace Speights

At the 2026 Servant of Justice Awards Dinner, Legal Aid DC honored Morgan Lewis Partner Grace Speights with the Servant of Justice Award in recognition of her career and longstanding commitment to pro bono work. Ms. Speights, the first Black woman named partner at Morgan Lewis in 1991, is a nationally respected champion for inclusion in the legal profession and a deeply influential mentor to young attorneys. She is widely known for guiding major institutions through sensitive culture reviews and misconduct investigations, and is regarded as a driving force in the #MeToo and Social Justice movements for her work helping organizations address workplace harm with accountability, fairness, safety, and lasting reform. Beyond her professional impact, she fought for decades to save the life of Lester Bower—maintaining his innocence on Texas’s death row—and represented him pro bono, alongside a team of Morgan Lewis lawyers, from 1989 until his execution in 2015. We were honored to celebrate her at the Awards ceremony.