Pro Bono Institute (PBI) is honored to present Susan Hackett, CEO of Legal Executive Leadership, LLC (retired), with the 2026 President’s Award at the PBI 2026 Annual Conference. The award recognizes Susan’s outstanding contributions to PBI, including playing a vital part in establishing the Corporate Pro Bono (CPBO) project with PBI.
Susan spent 22 years of her working career at the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) as the organization’s general counsel and intrapreneur. When she left in 2011 to form her own consulting practice, Legal Executive Leadership, LLC (LEL), her goal was to specialize in helping legal departments — and the law firms and other legal service providers who support them — re-think and re-engineer the way they work.
While at both ACC and LEL, Susan guided hundreds of corporate law departments through strategic change processes, encouraging them to explore how they could provide greater value to their clients and their communities. By helping her clients leverage leadership, operations, data, and technology, Susan enabled corporate legal executives to deliver measurable results, improve collaboration, and better serve both their stakeholders, their professional responsibilities, and the justice system.
Often referred to as “the voice of the in-house bar,” Susan is known for her staunch advocacy to protect legal professional privilege, promote in-house ethics standards, and allow for multi-jurisdictional and multi-disciplinary practice reforms. Her expertise included strategic planning, establishing metrics and continuous improvement processes, benchmarking leading knowledge practices, assessing in-house workflow and staffing options, improving the value outside counsel deliver, evaluating technology and data options, re-engineering legal operations and service delivery, and more.
Susan also played a vital role in launching the CPBO project with PBI in 2000 to develop and transform in-house pro bono. Her leadership and trusted, longstanding connections with legal teams and general counsel helped to inform in-house leaders about the business benefits of pro bono, such as enhancing job fulfillment, bringing teams together, boosting morale, and offering professional development experiences that cannot be replicated in day-to-day work. Susan successfully delivered the message that pro bono participation also elevates companies’ profiles, strengthens community relationships, and reinforces corporate commitments to social responsibility and ethical leadership.
The foundation laid by Susan, PBI, and other leaders has resulted in more than 1,000 legal departments receiving expert services from the CPBO project to develop and enhance in-house pro bono programs and the establishment of the CPBO Challenge® initiative, which has become the standard benchmark for in-house pro bono and has fostered tremendous growth in pro bono among in-house counsel. The CPBO project also has led initiatives and provided guidance and resources to overcome barriers to increasing in-house pro bono to address the access to justice crisis, such as reforming multijurisdictional practice restrictions that prohibited in-house pro bono engagement.
With more than two decades of the CPBO project and as the CPBO Challenge celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2026, in-house pro bono is at an inflection point that will determine where its initiatives and impact will head for the next decade. And the stakes have never been higher. Susan sees a strong connection between the future of the combined power of in-house corporate and law firm pro bono initiatives, and the legal services community which will need to harness their leadership, commitment, technological and operational savvy, and the financial resources necessary to make a meaningful strides toward ensuring access for justice for all.
In addition to her contribution to PBI and the CPBO project’s efforts, Susan is a proud leader and former board member of Equal Justice Works and Street Law, where she also led their campaigns to develop and deliver greater corporate legal engagement in their important work.
