Each year, Missouri Lawyers Media accepts nominations from around the state for attorneys who have not just won cases, but whose actions prove to be impactful in their profession. One such lawyer on the Missouri Lawyers Awards list of 2025 honorees is Mexico’s own Dave Roland.

Roland is the co-founder and director of litigation for the Freedom Center; he was recognized as one of Missouri’s most influential Appellate Attorney at an awards ceremony in St. Louis, which took place Thursday, Feb.13.

The Freedom Center is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that was founded in 2010 by Dave and his wife Jenifer Zeigler Roland, who serves as executive director.

Today, the Freedom Center invests a lot of their time in research and public interest litigation regarding government transparency.

“Our original mission was focused exclusively on constitutional issues,” Roland explains. “After several years of focusing exclusively on constitutional issues, we realized that government transparency is a huge component in the constitutional system that we are living under.”

The mission was expanded around 2014 and the first official government transparency case was filed in 2015.

“Our first big win came from suing the multi-jurisdictional drug task force that operates out of Audrain County,” says Roland. “That was part of our first set of transparency lawsuits.”

A second big win came a couple of years later, in 2018, when the mother of a deceased Audrain County narcotics officer was awarded the rights to a 27-page report and several audio recordings which had previously been withheld.

“We are supposed to be a self-governing society and in order for our citizens to play their proper role in our constitutional system, they have to understand what the government is doing with the authority and the taxpayer resources that the people have provided,” says Roland. “Because so many citizens were hitting brick walls when they were trying to understand what the government was doing with this authority and these taxpayer funds, we felt like it was important to expand the Freedom Center's mission to include government transparency to equip people to make the decisions that would let them play their proper role in our self-governing society.”

Those cases laid the groundwork for the Freedom Center’s current path and their most recent case, Gross vs. The State of Missouri, appealing the redaction legislation enacted by Senate Bill 103.

“We have always been a David, out there, fighting Goliath,” says Roland.

For Roland and his organization, this recognition is “a vindication” of all the sacrifices and efforts made by him and his organization.

“It is so nice to be able to achieve recognition like this from Mexico,” says Roland. “Most of the people that win these awards are in the big cities. It is not common for attorneys that live in rural communities to get this kind of recognition because a lot of people don't know the attorneys that are working in rural communities.”

One such sacrifice is that cushy paycheck most often associated with lawyers. Roland, his wife and three kids all live with his in-laws here in Mexico working out of their shared home, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“One of the things I am proudest of is there are organizations like ours in most states and almost all of them have budgets in excess of a million dollars,” says Roland. “We are able to fight multiple, really important cases at a time on a tiny budget. Being here, and having the low overhead of this community is what allows us to do this kind of work.”