Only about half of the state’s lawyers perform pro bono work

By Gary Blankenship
Senior Editor

Despite a steadily rising Bar membership, pro bono work remains flat and the Bar’s Pro Bono Legal Services Committee is working on a three-pronged attack to improve those statistics.

The committee reviewed and refined its plans at a September 9 meeting during the Bar’s Tampa General Meeting. Those plans include participation in a likely ceremonial session at the Supreme Court at the end of October as part of a national pro bono week celebration.

“I view this as a three-legged stool. One leg is an outreach to the lawyers of Florida to inspire them to increase their pro bono activities,” said committee Chair and First District Court of Appeal Judge William VanNortwick. “The second leg is reinventing pro bono with legal service organizations. . . . The third leg is to have sophisticated marketing materials that can be used by Bar leaders, judges, and justices in their outreach to lawyers.”

VanNortwick reported that the ABA has set the week of October 26 as a celebration of pro bono, and Florida is planning to participate. He said he had discussed the matter with Chief Justice Peggy Quince and that the court was tentatively planning a pro bono ceremonial session on October 26.

Committee member Kathy McLeroy will head up the state’s efforts to participate in pro bono week, he added.

Tallahassee consultant Gary Yordon outlined the “One” campaign geared to improve lawyer participation. The slogan for the campaign, aimed at getting lawyers to take a single pro bono case, is “One: One client, one attorney, one promise.”

Promotional materials will include a brochure as well as an online video featuring interviews with lawyers and judges about the benefits they’ve received from pro bono work.

Yordon said the videos primarily will be a “peer-to-peer” communication to focus on the benefits from pro bono that attorneys have seen in their professional and personal lives.

Also under consideration, he said, is a poster that could be hung outside judges’ chambers.

“It essentially says, ‘When you come in this chamber, ask me how you can be the one.’ We want judges to be able to tell them, ‘Here’s what you can do,’” Yordon said.

He said the brochures and video could be ready by mid to late October.

Those materials will be part of the community-based pitch that will be made to lawyers, according to Sheila Meehan, pro bono developer with Florida Legal Services, Inc.

She noted the organization, using a Florida Bar Foundation grant, has hired Adrienne Davis to be the coordinator for the new campaign.

Davis, who has already met with several law firms, said the program wants to do more than just make a presentation at a local bar and then hope for the best. “This is not just a professional responsibility that comes for lawyers, but a passion on how we can improve the quality of life,” she said.

The campaign will look at the unique resources of each area of the state — existing pro bono programs, legal aid agencies, law schools, law firms, and local bars — and tailor the program for that locale, Davis said.

“We’re trying to be strategic about engaging not just legal aid organizations, but getting all members of the legal community owning what we’re doing,” Davis said.

To that end, the committee is striving to collect information about every legal aid and pro bono program in the state, both to use in designing an outreach for each area and to compile in a Web site that can help lawyers looking for an opportunity to do pro bono work.

Committee members said it would be good if the site outlined what kinds of pro bono work each program or organization offered, but some said the actual matching of an attorney to a case should be left to the various programs and agencies.

“The experience we’ve had with using the Web site to place attorneys with particular cases has not yielded good results,” said committee member Rob Johnson, executive director of Brevard County Legal Aid. “I think what really the Web site should do is describe opportunities and have attorneys contact the program about taking certain types of cases.”

Paul Doyle, of The Florida Bar Foundation, recounted how the Foundation has awarded eight grants totalling $650,000 including one to the pro bono committee. The Foundation has another $170,000 for further applications, he added.

The grant recipients cover a variety of programs, ranging from helping children aging out of the foster care system to assisting solo practitioners with pro bono services, he said, and also has geographic as well as rural and urban diversity.

When the Supreme Court approved the current aspirational pro bono program about 15 years ago, a statewide system for monitoring the program was established.

“We built something on the theory ‘If we build it, they will come,’ and they did come,” Doyle said of that system. “Unfortunately, they didn’t stay.

“We have to keep the system and the opportunities alive and vibrant.”

The committee’s discussion focused on many challenges to boosting pro bono.

Committee member Robin Rosenberg said the current pro bono plan has circuit committees to oversee local pro bono efforts. While helping to coordinate pro bono efforts, those committees have undermined judges’ traditional role of recruiting lawyers to take on unrepresented parties.

Doyle added, “On the local level, the judges are critical, particularly among smaller firms and individual practitioners. I don’t think it was sustained on a consistent level when this [the current system] was started 10 to 15 years ago.”

“One of the things I hear a lot from lawyers, especially the last couple years when jobs are scarce, is the potential impact of doing anything that’s not job-related to their future,” said Young Lawyers Division President R.J. Haughey. “We need to emphasize that this is good for your career.”

One potential solution discussed by committee members was persuading judges to hear pro bono cases first on their motion dockets. This step, they said, would provide recognition to the pro bono attorneys and reduce the time required by a pro bono case. McLeroy said that’s already done in some Miami courts.

The committee began its work to increase pro bono after a study last year by Kelly Carmody & Associates showed that while the Bar membership is increasing by about 2,500 lawyers a year, the amount of pro bono work in the state has been stagnant for several years. It also showed that only about half of the state’s lawyers perform pro bono work and that 64 percent cite lack of time as a reason for not providing pro bono service.

The committee has been using the report as guideposts for designing its program to boost pro bono.

Yordon said the report shows of the 50 percent of attorneys who do not do pro bono, about half of those are unlikely to, but the other half would be willing but don’t understand how pro bono works.

The program, Yordon said, also aims to build on another finding of the study: Once lawyers begin doing pro bono, they find it so rewarding that they continue doing it.