This article is the second in a three-part special guest series by Tom Dunn, Clifford Chance’s Pro Bono Director. Clifford Chance is a multinational law firm that has a substantial pro bono practice in multiple jurisdictions – in 2013, 33 of the firm’s offices were recording pro bono time. Since 2008/09, the firm has invested 323,000 hours in pro bono and volunteering work.
Tom Dunn himself has a background in access to justice issues – for ten years he was a housing legal aid lawyer.
This is the first of two Q&A articles about pro bono trends and practical issues.
What practical steps do lawyers and law firms need to make to unlock fee-earners’ capacity to do pro bono work?
You need to make sure your pro bono work is conflict checked and insured. You should also ensure that all pro bono work is time recorded. The cliché that you need senior management and partner buy-in is true, and even more than that you want partners doing pro bono work and acting as role models. You want to try and foster a culture in which doing pro bono work is identified with being successful in the firm. This year at Clifford Chance we produced a booklet for internal circulation profiling 10 partners who are strongly engaged in pro bono work where they spoke about what they do and why they do it. In our appraisal system pro bono performance is taken into account, and I think that is also important.
Other key things are to bring in opportunities that capture the imagination of your lawyers and then to make it easy for the lawyers to access them. Here lawyers' imaginations tend to be captured in a number of ways including that the work contains particularly interesting challenges, that it is in area of law that interests the lawyer but in which they do not usually get the opportunity to practice (e.g. human rights) or that it will contribute to a cause (e.g. widening access to justice) that resonates with the lawyer. It is important to give the lawyer a sense of the context within which the piece of work sits and of the contribution it will make to a particular person, organisation or cause. Making it easy for the lawyer to get involved is every bit as important. You don't want your lawyers to feel there is any hassle involved in taking on a piece of pro bono work.
Do you think law firms have to have a dedicated pro bono partner/staff member?
I think it depends on the size of the firm. In big firms I certainly think it is very helpful if there is dedicated resource managing the programme. I don't think it is impossible in smaller firms for a pro bono culture to be driven by a partner or group of lawyers adding that to their existing responsibilities but they need to be committed and focused. In some of our local offices programmes are delivered in this way very effectively.
What do you think the trends are for UK-based pro bono?
I think we are still wrestling with the effects of Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) and will be for some time to come. I think there needs to be a sense of realism about what can be achieved to plug the access to justice deficits that LASPO has created, not least because most lawyers doing pro bono work here are not expert in the areas of law in which the needs have arisen. That issue can be overcome but it requires care. One approach is for a firm to develop a relatively narrow expertise and really embed that. We have done that at Clifford Chance through our partnership with the National Autistic Society. Over the last 12 years we have represented parents of autistic children appealing to the Special Educational Needs Tribunal about the level of additional education services being provided by local authorities. It would be great if there could somehow be a co-ordinated approach, with firms each taking a different narrow specialism within those areas of social welfare law that have fallen outside the scope of legal aid and developing proper expertise in that. They could then be at the forefront of training and supervising volunteers in that area.
Most pro bono work takes place in London and is not at the moment reaching into the "advice deserts" affecting large parts of the country. So there is interesting and important work to be done on remote delivery of advice. I'd like to see that being undertaken in a considered way, based on serious and well-resourced analysis of need across the country.
Right now I'm aware of a number of interesting programmes being developed which will see law students being trained to do pro bono work in the areas of need thrown up by LASPO and I'm hopeful that the training, supervision and quality issues will be overcome and we'll see students making a serious contribution in the years ahead. A good consequence of the shrinking of the legal aid system would be if there was a real growth in the pro bono ethos within the legal profession here (although as I say that I also want to say it would be even better if the legal aid system hadn't been shrunk).
All of that said, so far as the large commercial firms like Clifford Chance are concerned, we want to harness our particular strengths and expertise on behalf of our pro bono clients which means we'll be looking to do more cross-border work for our global pro bono clients and to work in some of the areas that play to our strengths like microfinance, governance and corporate structure.
What are CC’s goals for the delivery and development of pro bono services in the next 5 years within the UK and internationally?
Our strategic objective up to 2018 is to do more pro bono and community outreach work and to increase the impact of that work. We want to increase the proportion of partners and associates doing pro bono work. We want a larger proportion of our work to be for our global strategic pro bono and community outreach clients.
If you’d like to find out more about Clifford Chance’s Corporate Social Responsibility and Pro Bono Work, click here.
PILA runs a professional Pro Bono Referral Scheme that matches NGOs’ legal needs with lawyers. If you’d like to find out more or get involved, please email info@pila.ie
PILA is a project of the Free Legal Advice Centres, which operates 72 Legal Advice Centres throughout Ireland. If you are a lawyer and would like to volunteer your time to one of the Centres, email volunteers@flac.ie.