"Public funding has been cut, advice agencies' budgets and the voluntary sector have been cut, so pro bono is critically important."
LONDON (TrustLaw) – Lord Goldsmith is the European chairman of litigation at U.S.-based law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. Between 2001 and 2007 he was Britain's attorney general – the country’s chief legal adviser. He is a well-known supporter of pro bono initiatives, having established the Bar Pro Bono Unit in 1996, a charity that matches barristers who are willing to act pro bono with those who are in need of legal help but cannot afford to pay.
TrustLaw spoke to Goldsmith about the importance of pro bono, how its practice can be spread around the world and how publicly employed lawyers can also get involved.
Why do you think the practice of pro bono is so important?
There are a lot of people who need help, need in today’s world the sort of expert help that you can only get from lawyers and they can’t afford it unless they get help pro bono. Public funding has been cut back, advice agencies’ budgets and the voluntary sector have been cut back, so that the pro bono side is critically important to helping people.
What is often not understood or forgotten is that if we’re talking about individuals, sometimes a legal problem, which for a well-off person can relatively easily be solved. For someone who isn’t in that position it can become not just a problem that’s worrying but starts to consume their life. So this pro bono help can be critical. Then if you move into the fields of the voluntary sector, where charities, NGOs and others are doing fantastic, different sorts of work to make people’s lives better, often today they need technical legal help as well; so organisations which provide help to them are very, very important.
At the moment, pro bono is practiced largely in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the UK, in the U.S., Australia and South Africa. What can be done to help pro bono be spread around the world as a culture?
Other countries do have systems, they may not call it pro bono; interestingly, a lot of countries talk about legal aid and when you find out what is legal aid, legal aid is actually government regulation that says that every lawyer has to work free for a certain number of clients, so we call it pro bono and they call it legal aid.
There are a number of organisations whose work is noticed, who talk internationally about what they do and can be seen to be doing it internationally and I think it’s that seeing what good people can do and the ethos of pro bono which will help spread the word even further.
Having worked in both the public and the private sector, do you have any thoughts as to how the practice of pro bono can be institutionalised in the work place?
This is one of these very tricky questions because as soon as you make something that should be voluntary compulsory, you actually start to destroy the ethos which is behind it. Encouragement is important. In the private sector, I’ve got no doubt at all that the most important thing for law firms is for the partners in the firms to be very open to their lawyers doing pro bono and better still, doing some of it themselves. The worst problem is someone who’s working in a law firm, obviously ambitious, they’re a bright young man or woman, want to get on, and if they get any sense at all that by doing this pro bono work, the partner in charge thinks the less of them – ‘why aren’t you working on getting more billable hours for the firm rather than doing this?’- of course that will put them off; so it needs to be available to them, they need to know that they can do it, and that includes for example allowing it to be taken into account in their personal assessments. So actually, somebody needs to know that if I do this, it’s not going to be a black mark against me, indeed if I do a good job on this pro bono case it will count well for me in further employment/partnership, just as if I were doing a paid piece of work.
Do you think that public sector lawyers feel they’re doing their bit for ‘the greater good’ anyway and it might be more difficult to persuade them to partake in pro bono?
I don’t think the problem is persuading publicly employed lawyers at all, the problem is finding the opportunities for publicly employed lawyers. I’m a great believer that pro bono work should be doing the work that you’re experienced in. You don’t want a city takeover specialist advising someone on a rape charge. The problem that you have with public lawyers is that what they’re best at is claims against governments, dealing with disputes with government. Well, obviously, they can’t act for individuals on those while they’re still involved in the public service, so finding the work for them to do is more difficult and there are technical problems like insurance. There’s something called the Government Legal Service Pro Bono Network. They’re very enthusiastic and look for other ways they can do pro bono work like, for example, training. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be able to train other lawyers or go out on programmes that are called Street Law programmes where you go out and talk to people about what their rights are; you don’t need insurance to do that, you’re not acting against the government, it’s not a conflict of interest. So you have to be a bit more imaginative to find that sort of work for them but I think it’s very important that lawyers in public service also have an opportunity of giving because in my experience, they’re very keen to do so; possibly because they spend 23 hours a day acting for ‘big brother’, looking after the government, they’d like to spend a little bit of time helping someone else.
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