Dyan Gershman, founder and principal partner at New York City-based Gershman Law, PLLC, has over 25 years of experience handling mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and other complex corporate and commercial legal matters. Her early service handling M&A, board governance, and cross-border corporate transactions with Jones Day led to in-house executive counsel roles with Bristol-Myers Squibb and General Electric. A long-time member of the New York City Bar Association, Dyan Gershman also supports the organization’s Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice.
In addition to its focus on promoting civil society and economic rights, particularly in the developing world, the Vance Center has developed several specifically justice-centered initiatives. Among these is Lawyers for Reporters, dedicated to offering pro bono help to independent journalism organizations (and their employees and freelancers) that hold governments and corporations to account.
Partnering with the Press Freedom Defense Fund, Lawyers for Reporters has aided numerous journalists, photographers, documentarians, and public interest news companies with matters ranging from corporate governance and taxation issues to countering copyright and libel threats. All clients are either solo journalists or very small newsrooms struggling to balance doing the hard job of reporting with the challenges of running a news business.
Lawyers for Reporters’ client LION (Local Independent Online News Publishers) offers an example. LION’s executive director has praised the multiple types of pro bono help the organization and its members received since the start of the COVID pandemic: Lawyers for Reporters helped LION exit an untenable contract, provided individual journalists with a webinar outlining for-profit and nonprofit tax structures, and facilitated the creation of a new entrepreneurial news collaboration.
Dyan Gershman 
You must be logged in to post a comment.