Profile of Nancy Reiner
A lawyer, a legal headhunter and an environmentalist
who had an altruistic vision
By Peter Aronson
The Practical Altruism Project
Published on December 22, 2024
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Sometimes a person has a rare combination of skills, interests and experiences that lead them down an unusual path.
That’s what happened to Nancy Reiner.
For much of her life, Reiner has exhibited an activist and environmentalist streak, from protesting the Seabrook nuclear power plant in college to helping start an environmental school in Israel, to tackling environmental, social and consumer issues as a prominent lawyer.
So, it was on a day about 15 years ago at a Peet’s Coffee in Lexington, Massachusetts, when it all came together in an altruistic sense for Reiner. She was brainstorming with a lawyer friend.
Reiner had recently left her high profile career as a litigator to become a legal headhunter. At the time, she also was searching for a way to get involved in fighting global warming, something that would have an impact.
So on that day at Peet’s Coffee, she had an idea.
“Somehow, we were just talking, brainstorming about pro bono work, about how to fight climate change, and then, all of a sudden, I just said, ‘Wait, I don’t think there’s an organization that matches pro bono lawyers with climate change focused groups.’ And we talked more about it. It was within my area of speciality and in a subject I felt passionate about. I started getting more and more excited.”
Reiner said she went home and researched the issue and realized there was nothing like it in the country.
That conversation, in 2009, spawned Reiner’s creation, Green Pro Bono (GPB), a nonprofit that finds and pairs pro bono lawyers with environmental nonprofits and startups that focus on solutions to climate change and don’t have the funds to hire private lawyers.
Reiner used her rare combination of career skills and applied them as a practical altruist to start GPB.
Since 2010, Green Pro Bono has connected more than 250 pro bono attorneys with a wide variety of environmental groups, such as:
- the nonprofit Climate Access Fund, a “green bank” that provides financing for community solar developers to provide clean energy at affordable costs to lower-income households in Maryland;
- Outspoken Narrative, a student-run production studio that makes films about climate and conservation issues;
- Egg-Energy, a clean energy company that provided electricity in Tanzania;
- Fosfo, aka Citizens Market, a nonprofit that developed a green smartphone app to help companies determine its carbon footprint; and
- Pacto Medical, a company that developed a compact syringe that reduces the environmental impact of single-use syringes.
“The service they provide to the climate/environmental nonprofit community is amazing and so important for the vast majority of us who do not have the resources to hire lawyers,” said Chris Hagerbaumer, executive director of OpenAQ, an environmental tech nonprofit that makes air quality data from around the world accessible to the public.
Other nonprofits and companies with a social mission echoed the importance of Green Pro Bono, saying it was a game changer, because it allowed some organizations that would have failed without legal help to get off the ground.
Some things are not obvious
The first impression of Nancy Reiner, in her 60s, is of a soft-spoken, friendly, humble woman who often works remotely from the relaxed, semi-rural Berkshires when she is not in Boston, where she raised her children with her husband Ilan.
You would not peg Reiner for the woman she truly is: A mover and shaker in the legal world, with significant spillover and impact now into an important nonprofit sector. It’s not an overstatement to say that her work as a practical altruist has spread far and wide.
From early on, Reiner was on a mission to find a purpose in life. Being brought up in an upper-middle class home in Long Island, New York, Reiner felt grateful for her life and was always looking for ways to give something back, to make the world a better place to live.
In elementary school, Reiner recalls questioning why cigarettes were legal if they were so bad for people. Her mother told her it was an economic issue. “Then something must be wrong with our economy,” Reiner recalled saying.
In middle school, Reiner recalls regularly asking her mom about the Vietnam War protests, and the themes of “peace and love.” She said she was confused about all the criticism, because it seemed to be a nonviolent, positive approach.
“The protests opened my eyes to a broken world that needed fixing and which would give my life the purpose that I sought - to work toward a better world,” she said.
During these middle-school years, she was developing a curious, questioning, activist’s mind.
She read “Summerhill” by A.S. Neill, about a progressive school in England that opened up a new way of thinking for Reiner. Students had equal say in how and what they learned.
As she grew up, issues that occupied her thoughts ranged from divestment in South Africa and the anti-nuke movement to civil rights and women’s rights.
She said the environmental movement resonated with her the most. Reading Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” had a profound impact on Reiner and she kept reading, learning more and more “how humans negatively impacted the world around us.”
She read about how prior Jewish generations - the era of her grandparents and great grandparents from the early 20th century - had led Jewish movements for social change.
“I felt some strong bond and connection through my ancestors that I could not explain,” she said.
She jumped at the chance to join the alternative Free School within Herricks High on Long Island, joining other curious, ambitious and progressive students.
“This environment not only taught me how to think outside the box and encouraged my love of learning, but also continued my journey to question things and to want to effect change,” she said.
At Tufts University, where she would become a magna cum laude graduate, she helped start an affinity group with fellow students called Genesis, as part of the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear organization trying to shut down the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. Like many people, she was concerned about contamination from nuclear waste and the potential for nuclear power plant accidents. She also questioned why the environmental movement was mostly white and upper-middle class when the communities hardest hit by environmental issues were poor and often of color.
In college, she canvassed for Massachusetts Fair Share, advocating door to door for consumer issues, then in a first job after college, she worked for the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MASSPIRG), focusing on improving consumer, student, civil and environmental rights, including the “bottle bill,” to reduce litter and increase recycling.
She delved into the environmental field again by working in Israel with MIT professors to help found an environmental college in the Negev Desert.
While in high school, Reiner had become an avid cyclist. Over the years she would bike through much of the western United States and through New York, Canada and Europe and “was impacted by the beauty and importance of our environment.”
All of these experiences, combined with such headline events as the Love Canal toxic waste disaster, convinced her to go to law school, because she saw “law as a tool for effecting change and cleaning up the environment.”
While at Northeastern Law School in Boston she worked at the National Consumer Law Center, conducting research and drafting documents for litigation involving consumer law, energy policy, economic security and justice issues impacting lower income people.
“This work continued my journey to use law and advocacy to effect change,” she said.
Building momentum towards something big
As an attorney in Boston - an associate at Goodwin Procter and then an associate, then partner at Brown Rudnick - Reiner focused on complex environmental litigation, representing so-called “innocent landowners” against insurance companies and representing companies suing polluters for the cost of the required cleanup and other damages.
As is clear from Reiner’s trajectory, she seemed always to be looking for a way to leave her mark. In the mid-1990s, while at Brown Rudnick, Reiner saw an ad in the weekly legal newspaper placed by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, seeking law firms to represent the state in a lawsuit against the tobacco companies.
She asked her firm to get involved, the firm agreed and they were hired. She was a key attorney for the plaintiff in Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Philip Morris. The case settled after several years of litigation. The amount: $8.3 billion.
“I stood in my law firm’s conference room for the most exciting press conference I could ever imagine,” she recalled. “It was the best and most important day ever in my entire professional life - with no comparisons even close.”
Reiner also was part of other litigation against the tobacco industry, assisting other New England states, in what resulted in a $206 billion nationwide settlement and, eventually, laws restricting tobacco company advertising and marketing.
“The state tobacco cases not only changed the way society viewed cigarettes, but actually reduced the use of cigarettes in America, particularly among children,” she said. “Between 1998 and 2019, the use of cigarettes in the U.S. dropped by more than 50 percent.”
Her career is sprinkled with other legal cases representing the little guy, aka David v. Goliath, such as suing gun manufacturers for negligent distribution, suing landlords for mold contamination and suing insurance and other companies in Superfund cases. She also fought the good cause by participating in such events as Dining for Darfur and writing about sustainability and energy efficiency for legal publications.
In 2007, Reiner became the first chairperson of the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Energy and Environment Task Force.
“Today, we are faced with a rapidly growing and justified concern for climate change, yet law firms have been slow to respond,” she wrote in the Mass Bar Association Law Journal, encouraging law firms in the state to adopt sustainable green practices in their offices.
Around this time, Reiner began looking for other opportunities within the legal world. She joined a related field, opening the Boston office for a Tennessee-based legal headhunter.
But Reiner, it seemed, was always looking for something bigger, a way to give back in a significant way.
An activist’s mind, churning
Then Reiner had that fateful conversation at Peet’s coffee.
“I looked online to see if there were similar organizations and found none, except in London,” she said. “We hatched the idea and started the group.” Green Pro Bono was born.
Soon after, GPB found its first client at a conference for young socially-conscious entrepreneurs. Fosfo had developed an app that could help companies determine its carbon footprint. They needed a law firm to help them with their website messaging.
“Within minutes after we sought out pro bono attorneys to help, we found a Goodwin Procter media attorney who was delighted to provide assistance,” Reiner said.
That was 15 years ago. Although Green Pro Bono has only two part-time employees (Reiner, as always, remains unpaid and is a member of the board of directors), its impact far exceeds its size.
At any one time, it has approximately 25 active cases in which it is seeking or has obtained ongoing pro bono legal assistance for a nonprofit or startup focused on fighting climate change. For its more than 200 clients worldwide, it has obtained more than $2.3 million in free legal services, GPB said, from more than 250 lawyers and law firms in their network.
Ian Speers, CEO of Pacto Medical, the compact syringe company, said GPB has provided an essential service, connecting them with pro bono attorneys who have assisted with work related to patents, trademarks, incorporation, and more.
“It’s been absolutely central to our growth and success so far,” he said. “It’s allowed us to grow faster and more efficiently than we ever could have imagined given our very small budget.”
OpenAQ, which makes air quality data from around the world accessible to the public, needed legal advice surrounding the issue of whether charging corporate users of their data who profited from using the data would impact OpenAQ’s tax-exempt status under the IRS’s Section 501(c)(3) rules. Green Pro Bono found two different sets of pro bono attorneys for them to assist with two different legal issues, allowing OpenAQ to move forward.
This work “has been essential to help us figure out a new revenue model that will be critical for us to be able to sustain ourselves over time,” said Executive Director Hagerbaumer.
SUPER is a new nonprofit that helps businesses reduce or eliminate its use of plastic through a data-driven, cost-benefit analysis and to offer certifications to companies that succeed. GPB found them a pro bono attorney to help them revise their client contracts as they work to refine their business model.
“Yes, this work is really important,” said Tracy Wilson, SUPER’s co-founder and COO. “Competent and thorough legal counsel comes at a cost and even the most driven and innovative sustainable startup and nonprofits just don’t always have these resources. This means either going without, which comes at a risk, or using valuable resources, which can take away from the mission.”
And the mission is what nonprofits and socially-conscious startups are about - trying to make a valuable contribution to society where there’s a need, then a vision.
GPB has found pro bono attorneys for such organizations as 350.org, a well-known nonprofit fostering grassroots organizations worldwide that are fighting climate change; Freedom Cups, a feminine hygiene nonprofit, operating on a “buy one, give one” model that provides sustainable menstrual cups to underprivileged communities; Second Nature, a nonprofit dedicated to helping colleges and universities make the ideals and principles of sustainability fundamental in their schools; WeForest, an international nonprofit promoting worldwide reforestation and related projects to combat climate change; and Double Exposure, which creates museum-quality photographic pairs to illustrate environmental change on the planet above and below the water line.
For the past 13 years, Reiner’s day job has been as a partner at one of the premier legal headhunting firms in the world, Major, Lindsey & Africa (MLA). She helps companies and organizations find senior legal talent for their in-house legal departments and heads up MLA’s Boston office.
For Reiner, the practical altruistic connection between life goals, career skills and volunteer effort is undeniable.
“MLA and Green Pro Bono are both about matching attorneys with companies,” Reiner said. “I love that match at MLA, when the stellar general counsel candidate finds his or her home with the cutting edge company. I similarly love the match at GPB when a mission driven solution to climate change finds its pro bono legal representation. Matchmaking is matchmaking and the match gives me endorphins. Both change lives, both give me deep, satisfying purpose, and both resonate with my entire being.”
(To learn more about Green Pro Bono, please click here.)