Posted in: Lawyers › None, Diversity Committee Spotlight
In honor of Women’s History Month, the SC Bar Diversity Committee is pleased to present a spotlight series on female Palmetto State lawyers and members of the judiciary that made and continue to make an impact on our state and profession. The spotlights will be shared throughout March on the SC Bar’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and website. Catch up on the social media features including South Carolina Supreme Court Justice Kaye Hearn, environmental lawyer Stinson Ferguson and Spartanburg County Clerk of Court Amy W. Cox on social media.
Today we are featuring Adair Ford Boroughs, who chaired the SC Bar’s Diversity Committee during its inaugural year.
Boroughs, a Williston native who now practices in Columbia, helped launch and led Charleston Legal Access, South Carolina’s first nonprofit, sliding-scale law firm serving clients that do not qualify for free legal aid but who cannot afford private lawyers.
“We’re very focused on the impact of our work and how much we’re able to help families with financial stability and healthy living and those kinds of things,” Boroughs said in a 2018 interview with the Charleston Regional Business Journal, when she was serving as executive director of Charleston Legal Access.
Boroughs began her legal career at the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. where she handled complex civil ligation across the country and received awards for her trial work. While there she served on the Assistant Attorney General’s Diversity Advisory Committee and led successful efforts to reform the division’s hiring practices.
In 2013, she moved back to South Carolina and clerked for United States District Judge Richard Gergel. She then helped launch and lead Charleston Legal Access until 2019, when she announced a run for U.S. Congress. In 2020, she was the Democratic nominee for South Carolina’s Second Congressional District seat.
Boroughs is a graduate of Furman University and Stanford Law School, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Stanford Law and Policy Review and president of the Stanford Public Interest Law Foundation.
She has been actively involved in the Bar and the community since returning to South Carolina. She is a current member of the South Carolina Bar’s Diversity Committee and is a 2015 Riley Fellow with the Riley Institute at Furman. As a 2001 Truman Scholar, she actively serves on the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation’s selection panel and Truman Council.
Of her work at Charleston Legal Access, Boroughs offered the following, “Building CLA with the late Sally Newman will always be one of the greatest honors of my life. We set out to prove that attorney access at critical moments in people’s lives could preserve wealth in modest-income communities and prevent the fall into poverty. With over $2 million in assets preserved to date, CLA and its four incredible attorneys are proving it every day.”