New York City Pro Bono Training Calendar
New York State Pro Bono Opportunities Guide

Lawyers Respond to Human Rights and Nature's Challenges

New York Lawyer
January 6, 2006

By Michael Moline
The National Law Journal

The legal profession had cause for pride, but not complacency, in its dedication to pro bono service in 2005.

The pride comes from attorneys like those we honor with our 2005 Pro Bono Awards: practitioners who rushed to help people rebuild lives and communities wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, persuaded the Supreme Court to ban the execution of juveniles, defended the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers and fought racial profiling in upstate New York.

These efforts evidence a genuine commitment-at least within certain precincts of the profession-to assisting those who otherwise could not afford to assert their legal rights.

Interest within the profession in pro bono service is keen-we received scores of nominations for these awards highlighting a wide range of civil, criminal and transactional projects. This commitment is driven by idealism, to be sure, but also, it would appear, by bottom-line business considerations.

Objective measurements of this commitment are tricky. Among the attorneys in the country's 200 largest law firms, 36% performed at least 20 hours of legal work for people who otherwise couldn't afford it during the 2004 fiscal year, which was up from 34% in fiscal 2003, according to a September story in The American Lawyer, an NLJ sister publication.

In a survey of 1,100 lawyers of all sorts, the American Bar Association found that 46% of the profession reported donating an average of 150 hours of free time during the 12 months ending in November 2004. That would be three times the minimum number of volunteer hours that the ABA suggests.

Critics including Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Rhode contend that's nowhere near good enough. Author of the recent book, Access to Justice: Pro Bono in Principle and Practice, Rhode says that less than 1% of the nation's spending on legal services goes for civil legal assistance for the poor-about $2.25 per capita. That doesn't include the criminal justice system, which by Rhode's account affords indigent defendants one-eighth of the resources available to prosecutors.

"I think there's a huge amount of complacency out there," Rhode said in a telephone interview. Positive reinforcement for attorneys to donate their time and skills is fine, she said, but "a little bit of shaming would be a good thing, too."

That said, the profession demonstrated its capacity to mobilize in an emergency following hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Elsewhere, attorneys demonstrated their commitment to standing up for the despised, rejected and misunderstood.

And in a still unsettled security climate, Esther Lardent, president of the Georgetown University Law Center's Pro Bono Institute, sees a growing commitment within the profession to hold the government to the rule of law. She cited the habeas corpus litigation involving detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Initially reluctant to get involved, attorneys more recently have "flocked" to represent these people, according to Lardent.

"There's a general sense that it's not just about doing more pro bono, but also about our obligation to do pro bono that's edgier," Lardent said. "A sense that these are very difficult times and there's a number of issues at stake, and people need to weigh in and take these on."

Far from being put off by the trend, clients expect law firms to be engaged in pro bono work-even risky work, according to Lardent and attorneys working in firms and corporate law departments.

Not that everyone understands. As recently as November, the New York Post used Shearman & Sterling partner Thomas B. Wilner's mug to illustrate an attack on "Lawyers for Terror," also singling out major clients of his firm and others representing Guantánamo Bay detainees.

Still, "people have realized that the government is not infallible," said Wilner, who helped secure the 2004 Supreme Court ruling that the detainees had the right to challenge their detention in court. His corporate clients figure that Shearman will bring the same tenacity to their own legal matters, he said. "They liked the idea that lawyers would stick up for them and defend them against government accusations."

A pro bono commitment "says something about the character of the organization," Lardent said. "They don't want law firms that are cut off from the communities in which they exist . . . .You don't want a lawyer who is absolutely brilliant but doesn't fathom the real world."

In-house participation

In-house counsel increasingly are volunteering for pro bono work, according to Lardent. Microsoft Corp., for example, has teamed up with the ABA and local law firms to help newcomers in Washington state navigate the immigration process.

"Although pro bono work has not been a formal criterion for firm selection, the participation by our existing outside counsel in Microsoft's [pro bono] project has served to deepen the relationships we have with outside counsel that has participated in our program," Deputy General Counsel Kevin Harrang said in an e-mailed response to questions.

Meanwhile, growth into international markets has provided new forums for pro bono work. In January, for example, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary launched its New Perimeters project, pledging 14,000 hours to overseas legal work, including laying the ground for a new legal system in Kosovo. That particular project leveraged contributions from DLA Piper attorneys in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Madrid, Spain.

"When you're involved in global pro bono matters, there's enormous value in having colleagues in our European and Asian offices working in tandem with us," said Sheldon Krantz, a DLA Piper partner leading the initiative from Washington.

"A lot of pro bono work deals with the needs of individuals with nowhere else to turn. The firm will continue to work on those matters," he said. "But we also think we have the capacity to take on much broader work."

It's the work, after all-and the commitment to pro bono as a professional obligation-that drives many attorneys. Stephen Hanlon, head of Holland & Knight's community service team, is deeply mistrustful of any business case for pro bono.

"You're setting yourself up for somebody coming in and doing a real hard analysis and saying it's silly to spend that kind of money and that kind of time if the goal is to maximize profit," Hanlon said in a telephone interview.

The expectation that attorneys owe a duty to people who cannot afford to pay is as old as the profession itself, he said.

"This goes with the territory of being a professional-to the 1495 statute in England, where the court has the power to direct, not ask, lawyers to represent the poor," Hanlon said. "That's the justification for this work-not this business case that's being articulated."

Link to: The story & the awards
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