• 16
  • February
    2012

California Lawyer magazine is announcing that San Jose child molestation victims' rights attorney Robert Allard has been selected to receive one of its coveted CLAY Awards. The CLAY Awards are given to California attorneys whose achievements had a significant impact on social good over the past year, or whose work is expected to have such an effect in the coming years.

Long before Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno, and Penn State highlighted the issue of childhood molestation in sports, sexual molestation lawsuits against USA Swimming (filed by Allard's legal team, which included attorneys Lynn Johnson, John Parisi, Daniel Singer and Rex Sharp of Kansas City, Missouri and Jonathan Little of Indianapolis, Indiana, forced the organization that oversees competitive swimming in the US and selects our US Olympic team to make the protection of young athletes a top priority. At the same time, the United States Olympic Committee was pressured by work of the legal team, called Lawyers Against Sex Abuse of Children ("LASAC"), into centralizing and standardizing background checks across all Olympic sports, thereby affecting approximately one million athletes.

Allard actively campaigns for the use of law as a positive means of obtaining justice for his clients and in creating a safer community for all. With the victims that he represents, Allard's legal team is also working with California state legislators to craft new laws that will expand and strengthen the reporting of childhood sexual molestation.