Size doesn’t matter: Large or small, your law firm can help pro bono causes

For more articles and tips on practising pro bono, check out the CBA PracticeLink supplement produced in coordination with the January/February 2009 issue of National.

cba.org/practicelink/probono

Montreal lawyer Geeta Narang runs an independent practice and is director of the Mile End Legal Clinic, which offers free legal consultations in the Plateau area of Montreal. Narang has several volunteer lawyers she can call on to supervise and provide guidance to law students, mostly from McGill, who do most of the preparatory work for cases that usually involve family, criminal, or tenancy issues.

In her experience, Narang says, smaller firms have been easier to access, though firms of any size could help clinics like Mile End in a variety of ways. She suggests firms be flexible in their approach to pro bono.

“[Firms] can help in ways other than just going to court,” she says. For example, larger firms could help organize exhibits in a file, find jurisprudence, or lend the services of their legal secretaries. Or they could simply provide financial support. Firms should also have a point person to contact regarding pro bono work. “Law firms that have pro bono programs need to make them more accessible,” she says.

Colin Irving, a partner with Montreal firm Irving Mitchell Kalichman, lends his time to the Mile End Clinic and another legal clinic in Montreal. All the lawyers at his 11-person boutique firm offer pro bono services, but the firm has no policy setting out what and where to do this work. “We have a policy that we will not turn people away who have a meritorious case because they can’t pay,” says Irving.

“Smaller firms have always been more engaged on an ad hoc basis simply because the client cannot pay,” says John Henderson of Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP in Edmonton. “Firms are now moving to an approach where it’s known from the outset that the work will be done on a pro bono basis.”

Even his much larger firm has traditionally approached pro bono at the local level, with each office setting its own pro bono programs individually. For example, Henderson was the founding chair of the pro bono clinic Edmonton Community Legal Centre, and is vice-president of Pro Bono Law Alberta.

Fraser Milner is assessing the extent of individual work done on a pro bono basis and cataloguing it to identify areas where it can do things more efficiently and avoid duplication of work through greater communication among offices. The national committee will also determine how the firm can use its national platform to improve the practices in the local offices and to develop projects that are national in scope.

Most of the pro bono work Fraser Milner Casgrain performs is litigation-oriented, though the firm is moving into corporate/commercial and tax law for charitable organizations.

While the firm supports any pro bono work its lawyers do, it does not set minimum or maximum requirements. “It’s work that is encouraged but it’s not mandated,” says Henderson. “You want people to do it for the right reasons.” Similarly Henderson says the firm does not have to justify pro bono work economically. “I don’t think it has any negative impact at all in terms of profitability…Lawyers do pro bono work above and beyond the work that they’re otherwise doing.”

The message from all these lawyers, from the independent practitioner, to the partner in the boutique firm, to the big firm partner, is that it takes personal commitment as well as any guidelines set out by the firm. “The pro bono policy is probably the easiest thing to achieve,” says Henderson. “What is important really is that the firms just do it.”

—By Alison Arnot