America’s largest voluntary legal network does more than convene lawyers. It trains them, connects them, helps set their ethical baseline and quietly builds parts of the justice system’s operating manual.
Victor Boutros is the CEO and co-founder of the Human Trafficking Institute, a Dallas- and Washington-based nonprofit that embeds investigators and lawyers inside the criminal justice systems of developing countries to help them dismantle trafficking networks at the source. A former U.S. Department of Justice federal prosecutor who tried human trafficking cases of national significance, he co-wrote the Washington Post bestseller The Locust Effect with Gary Haugen, work that earned the 2016 Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Improving World Order. He left a stable government career with no safety net in 2016 to build an organization that has helped Uganda prosecute traffickers at nearly ten times the global average.