K&L Gates Partner Elisa D’Amico To Receive The Florida Bar President’s Pro Bono Service Award for Eleventh Judicial Circuit

MIAMI – Elisa D’Amico, a partner in the Miami office of the global firm K&L Gates LLP and co-founder of the firm’s Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project, has been named as a recipient of The Florida Bar President’s Pro Bono Service Award for 2019. The Florida Bar President, Michelle Suskauer, will present the award to her on February 7, 2019 at the Florida Supreme Court. 

Each year, the Florida Supreme Court and The Florida Bar give special recognition to lawyers, groups and a member of the judiciary who have freely given their time and expertise in making legal services available to the poor. D’Amico will be recognized for her work founding and managing the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project, in addition to her significant pro bono contributions across the state and throughout the United States.

D’Amico focuses her litigation practice on Digital Crisis Planning & Response, counseling corporations,educational institutions, and high-profile individuals in proactively planning for and effectively managing digital crisis situations, including university scandals, corporate imposter accounts and websites, and leaked confidential and proprietary information. In this role, she also fights internet-based abuse such as invasions of privacy, cyber harassment, fraud, and unfair and deceptive acts and practices. D’Amico regularly writes and lectures about internet privacy, cyber civil rights, and computer forensics. She frequently is consulted by various media outlets, including The New York Times, The WallStreet Journal, CNN, MSNBC, and Broadly/VICE on those topics. She has authored several articles about digital abuse that have been published by the ABA’sHuman Rights Magazine, National Law Journal, Miami Herald and Daily Business Review, among others.

Among her many accolades, in 2015, D’Amico was named “Attorney of the Year” by the ALM/Daily Business Review; in 2016, she was awarded The Florida Bar Young Lawyers Division Pro Bono Service Award, and in 2017 she was named as On the Rise – Top 40 Young Lawyers by the ABA Young Lawyers Division.

 In late 2014, she co-founded the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project after realizing that there was a void that needed to be filled: victims who had been exposed online did not have the knowledge or the resources to help them remove the offensive content, identifywho was responsible for distribution of the material, and/or reclaim their online identities and their lives. D’Amico, then an associate, founded the pro bono project with her law partner David Bateman, on the principle that people have a right of privacy when it comes to their intimate photographs and videos,and that public dissemination of that material without consent is an invasion of privacy that amounts to a “cyber civil rights” violation. Since its inception, D’Amico has managed the pro bono project and its volunteer K&L Gates lawyers, and has worked toward recognition of the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project as a leading legal resource to protect the rights of revenge porn victims worldwide.

D’Amico currently serves as President-Elect for the Miami-Dade Chapter of the Florida Association for Women Lawyers. She also co-chairs the ABA Forum on Communications Digital Communications Committee and sits on The Florida Bar’s Media &Communications Law Committee.

D’Amico earned her J.D. from Fordham Law School. There, she served as an editor for The Fordham Journal of Corporate and Financial Law. She is admitted to practice law in both Florida and New York.

K&L Gates is a fully integrated global law firm with lawyers located across five continents. The firm represents leading multinational corporations, growth and middle-market companies, capital markets participants and entrepreneurs in every major industry group as well as public sector entities, educational institutions, philanthropic organizations and individuals. For more information about K&L Gates or its locations, practices and registrations, visit klgates.com

K&L Gates has offices in: Austin, Beijing, Berlin, Boston, Brisbane, Brussels, Charleston,Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Doha, Dubai, Fort Worth, Frankfurt, Harrisburg,Hong Kong, Houston, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Miami, Milan, Munich,Newark, New York, Orange County, Palo Alto, Paris, Perth, Pittsburgh, Portland, Raleigh, Research Triangle Park, San Francisco, São Paulo, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Tokyo, Warsaw, Washington, D.C., and Wilmington. 

Robert Friedman