The Benefits of Professionalizing Pro Bono

Episode Notes

Transcript

Sandhya Kidd:

Now what we’re seeing is a more kind of focus on pro bono as a service delivery model. And because of that, that there is a need for staff, full-time staff with a specific skillset that is required to administer and practice pro bono.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice and An LSC Podcast will explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Lee Rawles:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Lee Rawles, assistant managing editor at the A BA Journal and your host for this episode. Pro bono work is often thought of as a side project that lawyers perform. The American Bar Association encourages every lawyer to devote at least 50 hours to pro bono every year. But legal aid organizations that can rely on full-time staff have increased opportunities to expand services and provide more intensive client service. There’s a growing number of people and firms who are making pro bono their full-time occupations and bringing professionalism to this area of legal practice. Joining us today will be one of those people, Kathryn Eidmann, president and CEO of Public Counsel. Public Counsel is a nonprofit public interest law firm founded on a pro bono legal service model. We are also joined by Sandhya Kidd Program counsel with the Legal Services Corp, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the country. Sandhya and Kathryn will be sharing their insights on this trend towards the professionalism of pro bono and the opportunities it presents for clients, practitioners, and advocates. Thank you both so much for joining us.

Kathryn Eidmann :

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Lee Rawles:

So Kathryn, let’s start off with you because I think some people may hear nonprofit law firm and say what, could you talk a little bit about public council and its mission and how it functions financially?

Kathryn Eidmann :

Absolutely. And thank you so much for convening this really fascinating conversation. So Public Council is a nonprofit public interest law firm dedicated to advancing civil rights and racial and economic justice. And we’re really founded on a model of pro bono service. We were formed in 1970 as the pro bono arm of the Beverly Hills Bar Association. So pro bono is really central to our model and our identity. We currently have about 170 full-time staff, 80 of whom are attorneys, and we provide services across wide range of substantive areas. And as you were referring to, some of our attorneys provide 100% of their time work on direct services supporting individual clients. We do impact litigation and policy advocacy to address the systemic roots of the issues that our clients are facing. And a critical part of our work is really engaging the pro bono bar to create partnerships between the nonprofit legal services world and the private bar.

Lee Rawles:

And how did you come to this position?

Kathryn Eidmann :

So I am actually a long-term attorney at Public Counsel. I started in a private law firm. I worked at Munger Tolls and Olson as a litigation associate. And while that was a really incredible opportunity to really get trained and learn about litigation, one thing that I knew that I wanted out of my career was public service and to be working directly with low income clients and advancing justice. So I joined Public counsel as an impact litigation attorney and spent about a decade doing complex civil right litigation on issues like education, equity, immigration rights, gender justice, child welfare, and ultimately became the litigation director of the organization, oversaw our programmatic work and then just recently stepped into this role over the summer. And it’s really been an incredible opportunity to build on the unique vision of public counsel. This combination of direct legal services, meeting the individual needs of clients on the ground with the broader system change work to address the roots of the injustices causing the legal issues that we’re seeing on the ground.

Lee Rawles:

And you are a nonprofit law firm, but how do you have the funds to function? What does the financial backing for the firm?

Kathryn Eidmann :

So we rely on a mix of private and government funding. We rely on significant government funding, for example, housing and immigration work from the California State bar and also from federal sources as well as private funding through private foundations. Our incredibly supported board of directors who are made up of prominent lawyers, primarily from many of the law firms in Los Angeles. And we also rely on private donations from theBar who are incredibly supportive partners of this work. We have large scale fundraising events annually that all of the major law firms attend and contribute to. And because we also do fee generating litigation work, we rely on attorney’s fees and donated attorney’s fees in cases where we’ve partnered with private law firms and recovered fees and litigation expenses.

Lee Rawles:

So Santa, I’d love to hear from you about this. You work for Legal Services Corporation nationally. Are you seeing a trend where there are more firms like public counsel or efforts like this to professionalize pro bono?

Sandhya Kidd:

I do see trends towards professionalizing pro bono. I can’t speak specifically to the model that public counsel is, but I do know in LSC funded organizations in terms of the legal aid LSC funded organizations, we’re seeing a lot more focus on pro bono. And I want to take a minute to kind of explain what I mean by professionalization of pro bono, specifically in the LSC funded legal aid context, there was always pro bono, right? They’re always doing pro bono, but now what we’re seeing is a more kind of focus on pro bono as a service delivery model. And because of that, that there is a need for staff, full-time staff with a specific skillset that is required to administer and practice pro bono. And so when we’re talking about professionalization, in my mind what I’m talking about is seeing a trend towards seeing more legal A that are hiring full-time staff that are committed to pro bono directors of pro bono managing attorneys of pro bono, along with supporting staff on that, which allows a kind of more focused approach to pro bono.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and I’d love to expand a little bit about something you just said, which is that the needs of pro bono, it’s a specialization. Could you go into that a little bit more? What makes pro bono a little bit different from perhaps the other work that a firm may be doing?

Sandhya Kidd:

Sure. And Kathryn, please jump in because I’d love to hear it from your perspective as a nonprofit law firm. Just to give you guys a little bit of background, I started my career at Morgan Lewis and Baia as a pro bono. So I was a practicing attorney, but a pro bono volunteer. And then a few years after leaving Morgan Lewis, I was not a pro bono coordinator at a small veterans nonprofit. So I was on the LSO side, and then I came to the Legal Services corporation. So I’ve seen pro bono from a few different angles. I think what makes pro bono a little bit different than just direct legal service delivery is that you are serving kind of three types of clients. There is the client, the actual client, then advocacy staff or the other staff at your organization are also clients because serving some of their needs. And then you’re serving the needs of your volunteers, the interests of your volunteers. And so there is a bit of a balancing act between those three. And there’s also different skillsets in terms of communication, in terms of how you package things, how you look at the legal work, what you’re looking at in terms appropriate for a volunteer and what is appropriate for clients to be experiencing with a volunteer. It’s a slightly different skillset than just direct legal services.

Lee Rawles:

And Kathryn, can you speak to that?

Kathryn Eidmann :

Absolutely, yeah. First I wanted to respond to something that Cynthia said earlier about the professionalization of pro bono services and the increasing trend towards defined roles like pro bono directors. We have pro bono coordinators on our staff, and I think that that is a trend both at legal service organizations, nonprofits, as well as at law firms themselves in terms of having pro bono coordinators or pro bono partners or pro bono attorneys on staff that are really rooted in the community and can create those connections between the nonprofit organizations and the attorneys at their firm. And I see that as a really beneficial partnership between sort of the differently situated entities that you’re describing. And in addition to multiple client sets, there’s different types of work and I guess models of service delivery between direct services and work and models that are really appropriate for pro bono.

I think that the nonprofit sector and law firms absolutely need each other so much in terms of scale and volume and the number of clients that we can serve together. But the one difference between direct service delivery and using a pro bono model is that many volunteers that are coming to this work are coming to it for the first time. So there’s the need for really high quality training and introduction to the work and assisting who might be new pro bono volunteers in developing relationships and a working rapport with potential clients. And that all requires a very specific kind of programming and service delivery That is a skill that requires professionalization and some types of legal work that’s taken on by nonprofit organizations may be more appropriate to a pro bono model. So for example, we have very successful long-standing programming in the adoptions context where pro bono volunteers take on an adoption and represent a family, adopting a child out of foster care, sort of from the beginning of the process to the ultimate conclusion of the hearing in children’s court where the adoption is finalized. And that’s the kind of discreet project that has been really, really successful both in providing the high quality training necessary to provide the best quality of representation as well as a really meaningful experience, a client experience, and a really fulfilling experience that makes people want to keep coming back and engaging in this work that is really an ideal candidate for a pro bono partnership.

Lee Rawles:

And let’s talk about the client in earlier conversations. Sandhya, you brought up that a client centered approach to pro bono kind of differs from older models. Could you explain how this professionalism trend can benefit the client or changes what the client’s experience is?

Sandhya Kidd:

Sure. I do want to put a little bit of context on that. We talk about a client-centered approach. I want to be clear that I think most legal service organizations and all staff advocates have always been client-centered. I think sometimes the older models of pro bono have not been as client-centered. And so when you start bringing in staff that has these specialized skill sets, it’s really thinking through how the client is impacted. I think you’re getting much more focused client-centered approaches. And when I say that, I mean focused on the outcomes for the client. I think there are some older models that were more focused on making sure volunteers were having an experience, and so we’re shifting the focus to the client and then making sure whatever we’re doing has very clear outcomes for the client.

Kathryn Eidmann :

I think that’s such a good point, and it’s something that we have really been upholding as at the center of our model, which is that the client and the community needs needs to drive the programming, not the interest of the pro bono community. From the outset, successful programming is a match between clients and community need and interest and skills and capacity of the pro bono community. But I think you’re absolutely right that there’s this sort of outdated model that the purpose of pro bono programming is to provide a good experience for the pro bono community or to make sure that there are opportunities for the pro bono community to give back, but really putting the need and the experience of the client at the center is where we always need to start. And then it’s a successful match between the client need and the pro bono need that creates the really successful programming.

Sandhya Kidd:

Absolutely, a hundred percent. And I think that that’s because when you are putting the clients at the center of what you’re doing pro bono wise, what you’re doing is really making sure that the volunteers that are coming in to do this work are seeing what the need actually is and experiencing. I think what it does, there’s obviously a benefit to the client when we’re creating these pro bono opportunities. We’re always looking at what is a client getting, but there’s also some ancillary benefits to doing that. I think one of the things that you’re going to start seeing is volunteers are going to start being more culturally competent, being more trauma-informed, but also understanding what is happening in their communities because we’re focused on what is happening with the clients and the communities. And so it’s a much more direct tie that the volunteers are experiencing rather than in older models where we were creating opportunities because volunteers were interested in doing a certain type of work that may or may not have matched with the client need.

Kathryn Eidmann :

And I think the additional benefit between this move towards trauma-informed lawyering and really centering needs and experience of the client and making that transparent to the pro bonos and the pro bono community is that as the pro bono community grows closer to the client community and becomes more aware of the client’s needs and the challenges the clients and the client’s community are facing, that’s going to encourage more pro bono, that’s going to encourage more demand and more desire to really deeply get involved in these issues. And that’s ultimately all of our goal. Absolutely.

Lee Rawles:

If we have any listeners to Talk Justice right now who may be law firm leaders, much like you, I’ve heard of some big law firms that have directors of pro bono that really are moving more in this direction of professionalization. But let’s say that you are someone whose firm wants to be doing more in the pro bono area, but you haven’t really started and you’re finding this to be a compelling message if you want to create a more robust and professionalized pro bono department. Do either of you have any suggestions? And Sandhya, I’ll start with you first.

Sandhya Kidd:

I think staffing is always where the most practical start to this, right? If you want to do pro bono, whether you’re at a firm, whether you’re at an LSO, it always helps to have someone managing, organizing, doing the legwork on those things. So I think staff is the starting point for a lot of this. And then I think looking at the policies and procedures that you have at your law firm to kind of make sure that your commitment to pro bono, your commitment to being client-centered is all the way through, right? It is kind of like bone deep. So you have staff that’s going to organize, that’s going to work with legal service organizations that’s going to find these client centered opportunities. But then you want to make sure that your associates know that pro bono is something that you want to encourage, that you have policies that foster that, that you have procedures that make sure that volunteers know that fees can be paid or medical examinations can be paid. So to me, those are two of the things that firms can do. I dunno. Kathryn, do you have more to add or do you agree?

Kathryn Eidmann :

I completely agree, and I think building on your second point, I think the most critical thing is really demonstrating commitment and ownership of this work at a leadership level so that the senior leadership of the firm is expressing with actions and not just words that this work is really valued and critical to the firm. And that means leadership engaging in their senior partners at the firm, engaging in pro bono themselves, and truly protecting the time of attorneys to be able to meaningfully engage in pro bono work and valuing those hours the same way that hours for paid clients are valued. One other just idea that I would put forth is what we’ve increasingly seen as really successful pro bono commitments at firm have often involved an investment in a particular area which has led to deeper and more extensive involvement among multiple members of the firm.

And I think better outcomes for clients and more successful leveraging of resources. So for example, a law firm decides that they want to engage in unlawful detainer work, which is great trial training, potential deposition training for young attorneys, and agrees not to just take on one unlawful detainer action, but that this is going to be a commitment for the firm and they’re going to take on six to eight course cases over the course of a year. Then it really makes sense to deeply invest in training in peer support among the firm. And I think that becomes a really great opportunity for not just the clients who benefit from the work, from the LSO, who then can more efficiently devote resources to training and support, and also for the attorneys who can assist one another and co-counsel fill in when somebody becomes busy on another trial. So that I think is a really successful model to consider going forward.

Lee Rawles:

And let’s get more into the training portion of it. Obviously experienced attorneys training other experienced attorneys, fantastic. But is there a space for law schools and legal educators to do more to foster young people entering pro bono with this idea of it as a specialization, as a niche? Do you see any law schools doing that or do you think that there is a space for that?

Kathryn Eidmann :

I can start. I think that like law firms, the most critical thing that law schools can do is show that pro bono work is as valued as any other type of legal work that their students might be interested in engaging in and really expressing and demonstrating the values of pro bono service and pro bono commitment and valuing that from the start because this is the first exposure that many young lawyers are getting to this field of work. I think that one of the sort of incredible advances in legal education over the past decade or more has been really the expansion and deepening of clinical work and law school clinics that serve low income clients, I think has been a training ground for many legal services attorneys, many pro bono attorneys, and can really provide initial training, but also the spark of interest for young attorneys to want to get involved in this work and make it a career long commitment for themselves.

Sandhya Kidd:

I could not agree more. I think clinics are key. I also think that there could be a lot more in terms of fellowship opportunities, really kind of digging into what fellowship opportunities are available and making sure students know about these kind of across the board. There are a lot of fellowship opportunities in public interest law and those who want to know about ’em, but making sure that your entire student population I think knows would be helpful. But I couldn’t agree more that clinics I think are the start of forming relationships. A lot of students, if they start doing a clinic with a legal aid or LSO organization, we often end up practicing in the areas that we went to law school, like geographic areas. And so that is a partnership that can continue through their legal career as long as they’re still in that same geography.

Kathryn Eidmann :

I’ll say for myself that I participated in an asylum law clinic as a law student and it completely changed my life and the trajectory of my career, the lessons that I learned from my clinical professor about client service and trauma-informed advocacy and professional responsibility are things that I still think about every day. And I hope that every law student has the opportunity to have that kind of training and formative experience early in their career.

Lee Rawles:

And for a law student or a young lawyer just starting out who maybe had one of these transformative experiences, I’d like to open the floor, Kathryn, start out with you to address them. If they’re thinking, is there a place for me in this community? Is there a way I can make this kind of pro bono work my career? What would be your advice for them?

Kathryn Eidmann :

I think that being a pro bono attorney, a legal services attorney is one of the most meaningful and fulfilling and interesting and intellectually challenging career paths a person could possibly consider. There’s such a tremendous amount of need out there among our client communities, but it’s something speaking as a long-term legal services attorney, civil rights attorney, I can’t imagine a different path. And I wake up every single day excited about the change I get to make in the world and the clients, the community organization, the partners that I get to work with. And I just invite every student who might be interested in this work to at least try it, whether it’s through a summer opportunity, a fellowship opportunity, a pro bono experience while at a law firm, and really consider this as a long-term career path for themselves.

Lee Rawles:

Sandhya, anything to add?

Sandhya Kidd:

First? I agree with everything Kathryn said a hundred percent, but I also, I would like to add that if you don’t start there, you can still get there. So it’s always a yes. It’s just where it fits. I did not start in public interest. I started at a private law firm and I did a lot of pro bono at that law firm and understood the importance of it. And then when I became a pro bono coordinator, I was not an attorney. I was not practicing as an attorney, but I was part of the scheme of pro bono. And in my current role, again, I’m not a practicing attorney, and what I do is have the privilege of working with legal aids across the country in strengthening their pro bono programs. So there’s so many different roles in this that we’re talking about. There’s such a broad spectrum of things that I think the answer is yes at very many different points, but that wherever you end up, I think there is always at the beginning, you need to focus on learning to lawyer and be an attorney in a compassionate trauma-informed way, whether you are at a firm or whether you are at public interest.

And for that reason, I think pro bono is always good to do

Lee Rawles:

Well. I want to go back to something that you just said, which is that there is space, not just for attorneys, but there are many roles that need to be taken up in order to have this more professionalized pro bono sphere. Is there a place for non-lawyers and in the legal community, can we be making more opportunities for people without law degrees to be helping with this work?

Sandhya Kidd:

Absolutely. I am very excited about the role of non-attorneys in pro bono. I think it is a huge untapped resource. And we were talking earlier about being client centered, and I think there’s a lot of ways in which adding non-attorneys to pro bono volunteers makes so much sense. In Michigan advocacy project, there is a program in which they’re using non-attorneys as legal navigators for expungement. In an expungement. There’s a lot of little pieces that clients have to do fingerprinting, they have to get their wrap sheets. There’s a whole bunch of different tasks that need to be done, and those can sometimes be difficult for clients, but having someone help them through that process allows for better results, make sure that the clients don’t drop off, and then ultimately get some more information prepared for a pro bono volunteer to move forward with an attorney. So it’s a very client-centered approach. If we think about all the different things that happen in the course of a pro bono experience and who is the best person to do that job, it’s not always an attorney. And so involving non-attorneys is I think, really critical to making sure we stay super client centered.

Kathryn Eidmann :

I completely agree and am likewise just so excited about the expanding role that non-attorneys can play in this work. One place we’ve really been focusing on is the integration of social work into legal work. And of course, many organizations across the country have been deeply integrating social workers to help meet the needs of clients outside of the sort of direct legal needs. But one area where we have tried to create sort of a new model is in adding social workers even to our technical assistance teams in cases that are placed with an external pro bono. So in an asylum place, for example, we may have a case placed with a law firm, but part of our technical assistance team that law firm can rely on is a social worker who can meet the case management mental health and other needs of the client’s in furtherance of the legal work.

And we’re really excited about the sort piloting and expansion of that model even into other issue areas. In addition, we recently created a manager of volunteer programs to think about other innovative ways that we can bring non-attorney volunteers into the work. So thinking about using volunteer or pro bono external interpreters in supporting our external pro bono placements, paralegals and other administrative staff that may want to volunteer and give back. And then I think this is similar to the Michigan model that Sandhya mentioned, but using non-attorney volunteers to assist in staffing self-help clinics where there’s not an attorney-client relationship formed, but a non-attorney volunteer could provide peer support and information to clients seeking legal information.

Sandhya Kidd:

I think that there’s so many possibilities here. Inland County’s legal Services actually has created this really cool project. They were finding that their staff attorneys were doing SSI cases and really were looking, it came up in a conversation or they were talking that it’d be so much better if we had a doctor to help us look through all these voluminous medical records. And the pro bono director there said, Hey, I think that’s a good idea. And actually, they have a team of medical students that go through their medical records and kind of help them tease out what would be supportive and helpful in the SSI case. And so these are the ways when you have staff, when you have full-time, pro bono staff looking at this. And even as Kathryn mentioned, I think you said, is the manager of volunteer.

Kathryn Eidmann :

Yeah, the manager of volunteer programs.

Sandhya Kidd:

Yeah. I mean, when you have people committed to this, they can get in there and look at that and think, Hey, what could we do here to make this better? And if you do that, the possibilities are really endless.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Sandhya, Kathryn, thank you both so much for joining us today, and thank you to the Talk Justice listeners. To find out more about Public council, visit public counsel.org. And to learn more about the Legal Services Corporation and its mission, go to lsc.gov. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Talk Justice on your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe to it so you never miss an episode.

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