Feingold and Dardarian Receive California Lawyer Attorney of the Year Award

Posted on Updated on October 3, 2020

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This post announces that Lainey Feingold has received an award.  The award is known as the California Lawyer of the Year Award.  It is also called the CLAY award.  This year, 57 California lawyers received the award.  Lainey received the CLAY award for disability rights with Linda Dardarian.  Lainey and Linda work with the blind community.  They help make websites and mobile applications more usable by everyone.  They also work for braille and other formats blind people can read. Instead of filing lawsuits, they work with public and private institutions to improve services, information and technology for blind people. The process they use is called Structured Negotiations.  They got the CLAY award for working with Bank of America, Walmart, Weight Watchers and Safeway.

The Law Office of Lainey Feingold is honored to announce that Lainey has received a 2014 California Lawyer of the Year Award (CLAY award) for her work in 2013. One of 57 lawyers receiving the award this year, she shares the CLAY award for Disability Rights with Linda Dardarian of the Oakland California civil rights firm Goldstein, Borgen, Dardarian & Ho. While maintaining their own law firms, Linda and Lainey have worked as partners in the truest sense of the word since 1994.

Lainey also received a CLAY award in 2000.

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Lainey and Linda are receiving the award for their recent work with the blind community which includes settlement agreements they negotiated with Walmart (Talking pill bottles), Safeway (accessible online grocery delivery), Bank of America (accessible security features for web and mobile applications) and Weight Watchers (accessible web, mobile apps and print information). The magazine wrote the following about these cases in the March, 2014 article honoring all CLAY award recipients:

In four groundbreaking settlements that advance the interests of blind people, Dardarian and Feingold demonstrated what can be accomplished through structured negotiations without ever filing a lawsuit. In March 2013, the lawyers got Bank of America to agree to upgrade its online and mobile security features, making them more accessible to people with visual impairments. The year before, the lawyers negotiated a first-of-its-kind deal with Walmart Stores Inc. in which the national retailer agreed to distribute prescription containers equipped with audio chips starting in 2013. The new containers provide blind pharmacy customers with critical information about the medications, including dosages, warnings, and expiration dates. And in June, Dardarian and Feingold announced a settlement with Weight Watchers International that gives its visually impaired members better access to the company’s website and mobile applications. (Weight Watchers also agreed to strengthen its system for providing information in braille, large print, and audio formats.) Finally, in December the attorneys reached a settlement with the Safeway grocery chain to make its website easier for shoppers with visual impairments to use.California Lawyer Magazine, March 2014

All of the agreements mentioned in the magazine were reached through the collaborative dispute resolution process known as Structured Negotiations. No lawsuit was needed or filed. Read summaries of these agreements, with links to the full documents.

The CLAY Awards are issued by the California Lawyer magazine. According to the magazine’s press release issued on February 19,

California Lawyer magazine has named 57 attorneys around the state to receive the 18th annual California Lawyer Attorneys of the Year Awards. Their achievements had a significant impact in 2013. The awards recognize 26 accomplishments in 19 areas of legal practice. The honored attorneys include prosecutors, public-interest lawyers, and attorneys from regional and international law firms.

This is the second time that Lainey has received a CLAY award. She and Linda were honored in December 2000 with an award for their Structured Negotiations work on Talking ATMs and accessible banking. Read the post about the 2000 CLAY Award. At the time of the 2000 award Lainey and Linda had negotiated three agreements without litigation. Today close to fifty settlements have been reached using Structured Negotiations instead of filing a lawsuit. Visit the Structured Negotiations page of this website.