Connie Rice is renowned for her unconventional approaches to tackling problems of inequity and exclusion. For example, she has teamed up with conservatives on education issues and LAPD officers to support the Watts gang truce. Rice has received more than 50 major awards for her leadership of diverse coalitions, and her non-traditional approaches to litigating major cases involving police misconduct, employment discrimination and fair public resource allocation.
 
She received the 2001 Peace Prize from the California Wellness Foundation and 2002 John Anson Ford Humanitarian Award from Los Angeles County. She successfully co-litigated class-action, civil rights cases winning more than $1.6 billion in policy changes and remedies during her nine year tenure in the Los Angeles office of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF).