What does it mean???

I think, Skyler, that the route to improvement here lies mostly in the sharpening of arguments and the anticipation of objections.

Large law firms have been over the last century pyramids that sell hours. Every lawyer's license carries with it a responsibility to serve the public, without fee or reward, some portion of the time. Firms that buy up lawyers' licenses wholesale and sell the lawyers' resulting hours retail want to put every hour that can be used out at its highest value. Partners want their obligations to work for free covered by other peoples' hours. They want their valuable associates to use all their hours valuably. But they want their statistics to look better than good enough, and they want people to feel that the hours contributed to fee-less feels-good practice are recognized, but not recognized—most of the time—enough for such an hour ever to seem more valuable than hours producing monetary value for the partners. (Labor market value, as you notice, in attracting and—sometimes—retaining non-partner talent is also part of the calculus). Achieving something like the right level of hours at something like the right level of cost is a firm-within-a-firm management problem.

If the lawyers doing the work were managed within the pro-bono organization, that would be sufficient: the pro-bono firm within the firm would have a budget, and would practice within the budget, much as an external non-profit practice like mine works. But then it wouldn't be providing emotional wonderfulness for everybody else. So the management of the lawyers remains within the structure of the hour-selling pyramid scheme, which destroys the effectiveness of the pro-bono practice it is trying to foster. Rarely is the low-level of bang for buck visible, however. Unless one has the perspective you speak from.

These large firm pro-bono operations could also lend out lawyers to external pro-bono organizations, of course. But that would mean paying high salaries to workers sitting alongside people earning much less for the same work under the management that is compelled to underpay them. And even I would be against allowing the firms to monetize their pro bono responsibilities by giving their ill-gotten cash to practices like mine.

So you could approach the question from an economic, moral or professional perspective and find new things to say that are more helpful to your case than an anecdote from S&C or rhetorical thwackings of associates' indifference to the "public radio pledge drive" quality of some law firm pro bono promotions.

But you should also anticipate some more of the most obvious objections. Your "what should we do instead?" answers are full of blue skies and songbirds, but they don't exactly add up to a platform. Not performing math to prove how virtuous they are will never appeal to these guys and you know it. If you don't allow them to keep public count of their mitzvahs, it's always going to be no deal. And if it's all such a botch then why shouldn't we just abolish pro bono requirements, and let the stupid virtuous lawyers who want to give away their time do it after we've sold every last hour we can wring from them, while we promote to partnership the ones who never outgrew Ayn Rand?

Pro Bono

-- By SkylarPolansky - 15 Feb 2012

Introduction

“Certain words and phrases are useful for the purpose of releasing pent-up emotions, or putting babies to sleep, or inducing certain emotions and attitudes in a political judicial audience." (Cohen, 812).

Reading this quote I thought: What words and phrases do law firms, trained in the mastery of words and manipulation of phrases, use to allow its worker bay-bees to sleep at night? During my 2-year experience working at a firm the area of law I was most disgusted with was the area of law that firms are increasingly touting as their saving grace: Pro bono. Pro bono cases were consistently referenced as the only times when an attorney felt they had done well, yet pro bono work was spoken of as though it were a side dish to the main course of insurance amalgamations and antitrust defense. The below is an exploration of the meaning of pro bono to a law firm, and what it may illuminate about the problems with firms and how to fix it.

What does it mean?

The literal definition of pro bono is for the public good. If law firms classify one area of law as being for the public good, doesn’t this highlight the fact that the rest of the work the firm does is not for the public good?

What does it mean??

“All concepts that cannot be defined in terms of the elements of actual experience are meaningless." (Cohen, 826).

The only elements through which firms attempt to define the pro bono experience are hours. Law firms institute pro bono hour requirements. They award prizes (coffee mugs, blankets, and handbags emblazoned with the firm name) that increase in worth according to the amount of hours completed. Some firms use the number of hours spent on pro bono projects in their calculus of who makes partner. Still others allow their attorneys to “credit” the time spent on pro bono projects towards the required number of billable hours. To me this is the most disgusting display of the devaluation of the potential benefit of pro bono. By re-naming hours spent on pro bono cases “credits,” firms imply real work was not done, but because of their benevolence they will agree to call it real work. But wasn’t this work done for the public good? Why is this not real? What could be more real than saving a man’s life by stopping the state from murdering him (ironically in it’s attempt to instill how wrong it was for him to commit murder)?

The disgusting display of the Sullivan & Cromwell associates who handled just such a pro bono case in Maples v. Thomas is an example of how the attorneys working pro bono cases really don’t give a shit. One would think (or at least hope) that there would be no more important case than one in which the outcome at stake is a human life. Not so for these associates who left the firm (and were rewarded with more prestigious positions at another firm) without turning over responsibility for this death-row inmate’s case. I doubt the associates forgot to turn over the cases they handled in which millions of dollars were at stake. That would have been unethical. The callous indifference towards human life exhibited by these attorneys exemplifies the dissociation bred via firms’ quantification of pro bono hours, between what a case does for the public, and what the law does for the firm/attorneys who work for it.

Pro bono work is about the number of hours worked, not the outcome for the people, the public. But this shouldn’t be a surprise. Firms and lawyers consistently quantify their work and turn people into numbers. Measuring performance by numbers perhaps makes sense when working for a corporation, which doesn’t really exist anyway, but in terms of the functionalist approach when helping humans, it does not. It feels so good to help somebody, yet law firms have to turn the hours spent achieving this goal into billable quantities. Why must they create this extra reward? Saying something requires an extra reward makes people devalue the emotional good they feel from helping others. This takes an attorney’s attention away from the emotional impact their pro bono work made on them and the human they helped. Perhaps instead of the parade of hours by which pro bono is currently measured, it would be better, more functional to compile testimonies from individuals involved in pro bono (the attorneys and clients), the emotions they felt, and the lesson they learned.

If we are not satisfied by defining the concept of doing work on behalf of the public good with the emotional experience obtained from doing that good, then our work is meaningless.

What does it mean???

Pro Bono is a misnomer. We call it pro bono and claim it’s for the public good. It is not for the good of the people; it is for the reputation of the firm and the mollification of the collective conscious of the attorneys doing the work. By claiming they have a strong pro bono department firms justify the evil of the real work they do.

We play with words but the joke is on us. To reduce something so human into hours and percentages robs a meaningful experience of the emotional benefit it provides, and thus leaves one feeling hollow and empty inside. Pro Bono work is a band-aide; a mask on a skeleton. It exemplifies the disconnect between what is important (life) and what we are told should be important ($/hours). Perhaps by focusing on the emotions doing pro bono work makes attorneys and their clients feel, this area of law firms can be functional.

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