Advancing Justice: The Power of Pro Bono Partnerships in Large Law Firms

Last Updated on March 24, 2024 by Ranking

Law firm pro bono work provides access to justice to low-income people and other vulnerable populations. The status of lawyers who are also managers of probono programs influences both their identities and the management and provision of legal services and advocacy. This article attempts to reconcile the literature on intra-professional status, gender inequality in the legal profession, and intra-organizational status.

A study showed some relationship between hiring a lawyer to manage a pro bono program and increasing American Lawyer rankings. Scott Cummings and Deborah Rhode (2010)’s study looked at a fifteen-year period and found that firms that hired full-time lawyers saw their pro-bono scores improve after two years.

scholarship on law firms’ motivations for expending resources on pro bono work. Research indicates that large firms sought to increase their public image for the benefit of recruiting and retaining lawyers. Organizations such as the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) and media outlets, such as American Lawyer and the National Law Journal, began ranking law firms based on their probono performance. There has been limited research on the professionals that manage pro bonos in law firms.

The client-type theory posits that a professional’s status is influenced by the status of the entities with whom the professional affiliates. Lawyers who represent corporate clients are ascribed higher status in the profession than lawyers who represent individuals in legal matters such as evictions, immigration, or divorces. Practice settings that are more likely to be motivated by altruism rather than profit tend to be more prestigious.

Intra-organizational status is the ordering of individuals within an organization. In organizations like large law firms, achieving partnership is often an indicator of high performance and status. Equity partners have high status, earn the highest compensation in firms, enjoy some job security, and participate in governance and decision-making.

Women are significantly more likely to be interested in, enter, and remain in the public interest law sector, endorse the value of doing pro bono work, and engage in more hours of probono work than men. The problem is not limited to the large law firm. Even for women in tenure and tenure-track positions, gender inequality persists in a variety of forms (Winslow and Davis 2016).

My interview sample represents 44 percent of the larger population of law firms that have hired lawyers to manage their pro bono programs. Thirteen of the thirty-nine lawyers in the interview sample are partners. The participants were located in the Northeast (20), Midwest (10), South (5), and West (4)

In this article, a pro bono partner or counsel is a lawyer in charge of the fulltime management of a top 100 law firm in the United States ranked by American Lawyer. Pro bono partners and counsels are authorized to practice law by their state bars, and most of them practice law. Those who currently practice law focus on a variety of substantive areas.

The law firm pro bono partner and counsel position emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Proposals to create these positions varied widely since each potential partner or counsel pitched the role to specific firms depending on the firms’ interests and needs. In the early stages, most positions were part-time because there was some reluctance to hire lawyers into these roles.

Ambiguity is central to the role of pro bono partners and counsels in large law firms. They typically devote between 5 percent and 60 percent of their time to legal practice at any given time. Table 3 indicates the broad areas of practice on which these lawyers focus. While some probono partners have superiors in similar roles, many do not.

To maintain their identities as lawyers, pro bono partners and counsels strive to be perceived as “real lawyers” in their law firms. While the client-type theory of intra-pro-fessional status might suggest that. providing legal services to pro-bono clients is congruent with a low status, pro.bono partners provide legal representation to individual clients or impact litigation to maintain their. identities and boost their status. The data does not suggest that there are particular types of matters that pro. bono. partners and. counsels pursue to achieve the goal of being perceived. as ‘real lawyers’

In the large law firm setting, business generation is part of the role of high-status fee-charging equity partners (Nelson 1988; Galanter and Palay 1995). Pro bono partners and counsels have chosen to adapt to the profit-making logics of law firms by reframing their roles.

A pro bono counsel explained that “a lot of times, what they really want is a one-day clinic.” Even when firms and corporate legal departments co-counsel, corporate clients tend to handle discrete legal matters. Pro bono partners and counsels reframe their roles as business generators with corporate clients to boost their law firm status.

Some outlier pro bono partners and counsels who practice law choose not to track their time. Pro bono counsels strategically strive to conform to the billing time to raise their status in their firms. Establishing a common identity can involve developing formal organizational characteristics.

Pro bono partners and counsels in law firms are at once lawyers, managers, administrators, recruiters, and supervisors. By the nature of their roles, they are often either the only lawyers who occupy their roles in their law firms or one of a handful of lawyers. APBCO allows its members to develop a shared sense of purpose and common identity.

If you’re a partner you have a certain level of respect within a firm. Pro bono counsels who started as managers or coordinators have had to negotiate to be designated as counsels. 12 of the twenty-three pro bono. counsels in the interview study expressly negotiated their titles.

Office space is another important factor that determines intra-organizational status in law firms. Partners tend to have very large corner offices with big windows and what are relatively the best views. Associate offices are usually smaller than partner and counsel offices but often have windows. Whether an office has a window can also be a signal of status.

Office spaces are a marker of status and prestige in law firms. Pro bono partners and counsels negotiate their office spaces to raise their status. Men and women have similar backgrounds and experiences in terms of tiers of law schools, prior legal practice settings, and prior areas of law practiced.

Law firms ascribe differing levels of prestige to different areas of law. Women are statistically significantly less likely to practice law and exclusively manage pro bono matters. Not practicing law also probably makes it more challenging to be perceived as a real lawyer in comparison to the lawyers who practice. Pro bono partners and counsels have varying degrees of autonomy.

Like pro bono partners, probono counsels who are counsels both internally and externally also have the discretion to approve matters with little oversight from above. Pro bono lawyers are overwhelmingly female and struggle the most to raise their status as lawyers in their firms. These lawyers usually approve pro Bono matters with layers of oversight.

Even though women make up the supermajority of pro bono partners and counsels, men have a slight edge in being named partner. Gender also plays an important role in the level of autonomy that a lawyer who manages a law firm’s probono program enjoys.