Pro Bono Work Research Articles

CAPA Supervision

ABSTRACTThis article is an attempt to describe concisely the supervision experience of CAPA (Chinese American Psychoanalytic Alliance). From the perspective of my personal experience of supervision, I will also add a systems perspective on the development of this remarkable organization. Considering that this is pro bono work, its growth is rather remarkable. The evolution of a system to organize, recruit, assign supervisors and evaluate students is worthy of closer examination. I have found my experience with the individuals I supervised gratifying to the extent that I remain very involved with CAPA. The individual experiences of other supervisors, not only from America, but several other western countries have been sufficiently gratifying to keep up with the increasing demand. It is useful to speculate on the nature of this experience that has kept so many professionals involved in a volunteer organization.

The Mandarins of the Law: Pro Bono Legal Work from a Comparative Perspective

The Mandarins of the LawPro Bono Legal Work from a Comparative Perspective Daniel Bonilla Maldonado (bio) Introduction The right to access to justice is one of the pillars of modern liberal democracies. On the one hand, it allows citizens to solve their conflicts by appealing to courts and to the administration.1 On the other, as argued in the theoretical papers gathered in Part I, it allows citizens to choose and realize their life projects and to be fully included in the political community. Yet, all modern liberal democracies suffer an access to justice deficit to varying degrees. As argued in the introduction of this special issue, class, epistemological and market inequalities create notable obstacles to the materialization of the right to access to justice. Modern liberal democracies have developed four institutions— public defenders’ offices, court-appointed counsel, legal clinics, and pro bono work—to realize the State’s and lawyers’ obligations to securing the right to access to justice for all. This article is focused on only one of these institutions: pro bono legal work. This article pursues two intertwined aims: first, it describes and analyzes the conceptual architecture that supports pro bono work;2 second, using these theoretical tools, it describes and analyzes the pro bono discourse and practices developed in Argentina, Colombia, and Chile. [End Page 131] In Part I, I present the elements that form the standard global concept of pro bono work. Pro bono work is a global phenomenon defined by, and based on, a transnational discourse.3 In the first section of Part I, I argue that this transnational discourse conceptualizes pro bono work as a set of institutionalized free legal services that lawyers voluntarily provide to people with few financial resources or to protect the public interest. In the three following sections, I specify and analyze the concepts of subject,4 time,5 and space6 that this understanding of pro bono work creates, to present the categories that structure the discourse on pro bono work and contribute to the creation of part of the modern legal and political imagination. In the final section of Part I, I present and analyze the conceptual oppositions that structure the discourse on pro bono work and contribute to the creation of the concepts of subject, time, and space that support its conceptual apparatus. In Part II, in the first section, I argue that the pro bono discourse and practices in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia are the result of a legal [End Page 132] transplant between the legal mandarins of North and South America. The Argentinian, Chilean, and Colombian legal elites import this set of practices and theories; the US legal elites export them.7 In the second section of Part II, I explore the reasons for the exchange of pro bono knowledge. In the third section, I present and analyze the role that clients and the state have in pro bono, as well as the local interpretations and variations of the transplantation that are emerging. Finally, in the last section, I explain why this knowledge still has not fused into stable institutions and practices in the importing legal communities. This legal transplantation has not taken root in the private spheres of the importing liberal states, and has had a minor impact on the realization of the right of access to justice.8 The two parts of this article intersect. The conceptual architecture of the globalized pro bono legal discourse is fundamentally the same as the concepts that have been promoted by the pro bono foundations of Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. The theoretical analysis is useful for understanding both the standard pro bono discourse already disseminated globally and practiced by Argentinian, Chilean, and Colombian lawyers. This cultural analysis of pro bono work does not occur in the abstract. The differences and similarities among pro bono work in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia; the patterns that the pro bono discourse and practices follow in these three countries; and the specific ways they have contributed to the construction of regional lawyers’ legal consciousness illustrates this cultural analysis. The relationship between theory and practice, therefore, goes both ways. The theoretical and comparative analysis presented in this article is informed...

Pro Bono Work in Colombia: How Can It Help Broaden, Equalize, and Ensure Access to Justice

Pro Bono Work in Colombia: How Can It Help Broaden, Equalize, and Ensure Access to Justice

Pro bono work as a zone of development between commodity exchange and reciprocity as gift exchange:

Pro bono work as a zone of development between commodity exchange and reciprocity as gift exchange:

Measuring Law Students’ Attitudes Towards and Experiences of Clinical Legal Education at The University of Hong Kong

As law schools in Hong Kong begin to integrate experiential learning into their educational models, clinical legal education (CLE) has symbiotically gained traction as an effective way for students to apply their legal knowledge in a skills-based and client-centered environment. This empirical study is the first of its kind to evaluate the impacts of CLE at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) over the past ten years, by analyzing the survey responses provided by 125 law students regarding their attitudes towards and experiences of CLE. The article traces the birth and development of CLE at HKU, turning first to its theoretical basis to make the case for its importance, and placing emphasis on the ability of CLE’s teaching-service pedagogy to alleviate the public interest law deficit and supplement passive learning as an engaging instructional method in the Hong Kong context. The survey results are then discussed in light of the doctrinal analysis to illustrate that clinic and non-clinic students alike are generally satisfied that HKU’s CLE program has achieved its skills, cognitive, and civic aims, and notably, that clinic students had a statistically significant higher intention to participate in pro bono work after graduation than non-clinic students or students engaged in volunteering.

Pro Bono Legal Work: The disconnect between saying you’ll do it and doing it

Pro bono is a significant component of one of the many professional obligations a lawyer has to fulfil for the public good. It is evident that this is acknowledged by not only those who practice law, but those who are training to be a lawyer and by the professional bodies. Despite this acknowledgement there is a clear disconnect between the importance placed on delivering pro bono services and the actual delivery of the same. There have been previous suggestions that in order to increase the commitment to pro bono work, there is a need to mandate its delivery. However, the notion of mandatory pro bono work has always been dismissed and therefore it is now appropriate to consider other ways in which a commitment could be encouraged and adopted. This paper will consider the reasons why the profession, at all stages, considers pro bono to be such an important social function and whether such motivations are sufficient to sustain a commitment throughout a lawyer’s career. Such considerations will be made from the perspective of a solicitor in England and Wales, as this is connected to the author’s own pro bono experience. The paper will also consider why there is a disconnect, and what the rationale is for non-participation in pro bono work once in practice. It will consider the key barriers to full participation and recommend action that ought to be taken in order to develop a pro bono culture and therefore commitment.

In-kind contributions to Orange County marine protected area management

California's network of 124 marine protected areas (MPAs) is managed by state agencies with support from non-state partners. Partners include MPA Collaboratives, which were established through the California Collaborative Approach to provide a localized, comprehensive approach to ocean resource management by bringing together local experts and authorities in the areas of outreach and education, enforcement and compliance, and research and monitoring. Given their role in MPA management in California, there is a need to understand the contributions that MPA Collaboratives are making to MPA management activities. In this case study, Blue Earth Consultants, a Division of ERG, conducted a valuation of in-kind contributions made by non-state members of one Collaborative, the Orange County Marine Protected Area Council (OCMPAC), to MPA management activities in Orange County. We performed research and worked collaboratively with OCMPAC to develop a definition of in-kind contributions and a contribution reporting framework that asked respondents to report contributions by type (Labor Services; Goods, Equipment, and Supplies; Travel; Facilities; and Other) as well as by category (Outreach, Education, and Compliance Building; Research and Monitoring; Partnership Coordination and Fundraising Support; and Other). We distributed the reporting framework to each member organization of OCMPAC and performed data analysis to quantify the total values of the contributions they reported. We found that non-state members of OCMPAC contributed support worth over US $4 million to Orange County MPA management during a two-year time frame between 2013 and 2015. In both years, the contribution type with the greatest value was Labor Services, and the category with the greatest value was Outreach, Education, and Compliance Building. Member organizations also noted that their future contributions to OCMPAC, particularly volunteer hours and pro bono work, may be vulnerable to changes in funding, staff time, and organizational priorities. To help ensuring ongoing support for MPA management, OCMPAC and member organizations would benefit from dedicated staff time for MPA-related work, coordinating OCMPAC activities, and education and science programs, among other needs. The approach developed for this case study provides a replicable methodology for quantifying the value of in-kind contributions made through local partnerships to the management of natural resources in California and beyond.

Crime Victims and Their Unmet Civil Legal Needs: Pro Bono Service Provision Among Private Attorneys

Crime victims often experience a host of negative consequences. In relation to these consequences, crime victims may also find themselves in need of assistance from the criminal justice system and civil legal service providers. Despite this need, crime victims often lack access to civil legal services. One way to potentially improve the availability and accessibility of civil legal services for crime victims is to increase the provision and availability of pro bono services; however, the way that attorneys perceive pro bono service for crime victims may be an impediment to service provision. Despite this, little is known about how private attorneys view pro bono work with crime victims. We examine how private attorneys view pro bono work with crime victims, the barriers to this service and what may incentivize them to engage in this work by utilizing data from a project assessing the civil legal needs of crime victims in the state of Georgia (USA). We find that a relatively small proportion of private attorneys in Georgia engage in pro bono work with crime victims. Barriers and incentives to pro bono service engagement and implications are discussed.

Professional Identity Formation Through Pro Bono Revealed Through Conversation Analysis

Law school is supposed to teach legal analysis and lawyering skills as well as mold law students’ professional identities. Pro Bono work provides an opportunity for law students to use their legal knowledge and skills and to develop their identities as emerging legal professionals. As important as both pro bono work and identity formation are, there has been very little research regarding how pro bono contributes to students’ identity formation. This paper utilizes a data set of over forty student-client consultations at a pro bono brief advice clinic that have been recorded and transcribed. It uses conversation analysis to study the approaches students take in presenting themselves to clients. These students are volunteers supervised by pro bono attorneys and are not enrolled in a clinic or class designed to teach lawyering skills or to explore professional ethics. As a result, their presentations of themselves are largely untutored portraits. The paper mines this rich data set to understand not only the inclinations of the students but also how law schools might best guide and assist students to reflect upon and develop their professional identities in the context of their clinic volunteering.

Improving Access to Justice: Community-based Solutions

Inaccessibility to justice is a major issue internationally, and in some countries access to justice has decreased in recent years. For example, the growth of inequality and decline of state support have left access to justice in the UK and the USA in a worst state in decades. There is therefore an urgent need to find solutions to protect peoples’ rights. This article outlines key issues of access to justice and identifies a number of solutions from grassroots efforts to organizational changes. The article highlights the importance of community-based solutions, such as mass pro bono contributions from individuals, law service providers and other organizations. It also proposes, as a key solution, making legal professions more representative of societies, and calls for law schools and legal regulators to take the required steps. Another important contributor to improved access to justice is promotion of pro bono work by all lawyers and law organizations at their own initiative. The article also discusses enhancing existing law degrees with additional topics on access to justice, to help students gain an objective picture of the realities of the legal system, and on individual differences, to benefit from latest interdisciplinary science. Community-based solutions provide stability even in times of difficult economic circumstances and political turbulence, and therefore are relevant to all societies.

Corporate Support for Legal Services

The gap in pro bono legal services provided by corporate legal departments and large private law firms is not surprising: The formalization of pro bono work by large firms has been underway on a significant scale for far longer than it has within corporations. This process has made large firm pro bono efforts more efficient and effective through improved practices. It has also led firm leaders and lawyers generally to expect more volunteerism of this sort. Companies that apply their resources, business experience, or other assets have successfully expanded the impact of their pro bono hours. Because of the scale of this need, and because legal-services lawyers have specialized expertise that corporate lawyers can't easily replicate, corporate pro bono efforts will not, on their own, close the justice gap. But these efforts have the potential to contribute significantly more to the ability of legal-aid organizations to serve their clients, and to help close this gap.

TO THE QUESTION OF NEED TO INTRODUCE THE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS FOR CONSULTING STUDENTS IN LEGAL CLINICS

Legal clinics have a special place in non-governmental system of pro bono legal assistance. However, there are often doubts about the competence of consulting student who provide legal assistance in these clinics. The absence of minimum requirements for such students provokes many questions. The author analyzed this problem in the context of pro bono work legislation and formulated her own minimum prequalification requirements.

Reclaiming the Role of Lawyers as Community Connectors

With the prospect of nonlawyers stepping in to do low-fee legal work, how should the legal profession conceive of its relationship to that work and ensure that nonlawyers bolster rather than undermine the value that lawyers add to society? Lawyers should reclaim their role as connectors in their communities: interstitial figures with the knowledge, skill, and trust to help resolve disputes, move beyond stalemates, dispel tensions, and otherwise bring people and resources together in productive solutions. They should do so, at least in part, through pro bono work for poor and low-income clients. It would be a mistake to stand in the way of innovative solutions to the justice gap. But it would also be a mistake, and a deep loss, if lawyers–particularly those who do not normally represent poor and low-income clients– turned their backs on the poor and low-income segments of our society.

Multinacionais do Direito, escritórios de advocacia e pro bono: elementos para uma análise comparativa dos campos jurídicos francês e americano

A partir da comparação dos Estados Unidos e da França, o artigo problematiza a natureza nacional do campo jurídico tendo como foco a advocacia pro bono nas multinacionais do Direito e nos escritórios de advocacia franceses. Nessa perspectiva, se pergunta quais as condições em que práticas e normas jurídicas podem ser transplantadas de um país para outro (legal tranplant). A pesquisa realizada iniciou por uma série de entrevistas com advogados deste setor e com a observação direta de interações entre prestadores e destinatários das atividades pro bono. As primeiras conclusões indicam que a maioria dos escritórios franceses não têm meios humanos e financeiros para institucionalizar o pro bono com a amplitude de um verdadeiro dispositivo de ação pública.

Una radiografía de la industria de la comunicación en Costa Rica. Encuesta a 100 empresas del sector (2016)

Este artículo presenta un análisis general del quehacer comunicativo en Costa Rica y pretende ser una forma de acercarse a un mejor entendimiento del futuro de esta área y la profesión. El estudio, una encuesta a 100 empresas del sector de la comunicación, da pistas sobre cómo está constituida esta industria en el país (tamaños de las empresas, alcance geográfico, cantidad y perfil de colaboradores, entre otros) y cuáles son sus aportes a la economía nacional (facturación, encadenamientos y trabajo pro-bono). Por tratarse de un estudio exploratorio, se espera que los hallazgos estimulen la discusión en la industria y en la comunidad académica y que esto resulte en la generación de futuras investigaciones de mayor profundidad.

Four Quatrains for improving mental health and well-being in the law

This article looks briefly at two famous judges, Lord Bowen in the 19th century and Sir Owen Dixon in the 20th century and asks what made them somewhat lugubrious about studying law? The article makes four suggestions for improving the mental health and well-being of the profession: these are mentoring, pro-bono work, ethical training and creative opportunities. These four pervasive ‘law plus’ areas of endeavour, or quatrains, which form part of the literature on legal professional wellness, could be pervasively woven into the law school curriculum. These elements could likewise unite the various stages between education, training and professional development.

Use and Application of Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) Database

University experts can offer uniquely valuable insights for informing policy based on expertise they develop through research. The application of knowledge through public service is an important and understudied mechanism for translating academic expertise to government and other communities. Today universities encourage researchers to engage in public service, and often they actively provide institutional support to create a culture and environment where such pro bono work is regarded as an important activity by the research community. Yet the question remains as to whether or not a systematic mechanism exists to track, record, and measure the value of university expertise influencing policy within the context of research. We explore a useful but underutilized administrative data source, the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) database, with an eye towards linking the federal service data to other sources in order to measure research impact in a sociopolitical setting. This publicly available dataset contains rich information on federal advisory committees that play an important role in shaping national programs and policies. Each year an average of 900 advisory committees with more than 60,000 members have provided either policy or grant review advice in 40 different issue areas. Our exploratory findings suggest a steady increase of academics in federal service, the different level of federal service contribution by universities, and the association between federal service and university R&D spending. We also discuss the importance of data cleaning when using administrative data for research and data linkage methods when linking federal service data to university research spending records.

The Mandarins of the Law - Pro Bono Legal Work in a Comparative Perspective

The article provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis of pro bono legal discourse and practices in Latin America. This article seeks to describe and analyze the conceptual architecture of the transnational discourse on pro bono work. Using these theoretical tools, the article also describes and analyzes the pro bono discourse and practices developed in Argentina, Colombia and Chile. In the first part of the article, I present the elements that form the standard global concept of pro bono work. Pro bono work is a global phenomenon defined by and based on a transnational discourse. The purpose of this section is to present the categories that structure the discourse on pro bono work and that contribute to the creation of a part of the modern legal and political imagination. In the second part of the article, I argue that the pro bono discourse and practices in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia are the result of a legal transplant between the legal elites of North and South America. In this section, I also describe and analyze the reasons that explain this legal transplant, its consequences, and local adaptations. The theoretical and comparative analysis presented in this article is informed by both a cultural analysis of law, which serves as the theoretical framework, and field work done in Bogota, Buenos Aires and Santiago. During fieldwork, research teams conducted 183 semi-structured interviews with the staff of foundations that work on pro bono issues in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, as well as with lawyers who work at the firms that created and are affiliated with these organizations. The analysis is also based on three online surveys that were sent to all of the firms affiliated with the pro bono foundations.

Pro bono as a human capital learning and screening mechanism: Evidence from law firms

Research Summary: Inquiry into CSR as a human capital management tool has suggested that firms benefit from such activities because employees value the meaningfulness of these activities, which influences motivation and retention. We propose an alternate avenue through which firms can benefit from an important type of socially responsible activity—pro bono services—that does not require that employees derive utility from the meaningfulness of the activity. We propose that pro bono activities can benefit firms through human capital learning and screening mechanisms, given the stretch roles that pro bono engagements allow. We formalize this argument in the legal services industry, where we provide primary evidence, a formal model, and empirical results using a panel dataset of the top 200 law firms to support this argument.Managerial Summary: We examine a type of CSR activity, pro bono engagements, in the context of the top 200 law firms in the United States. We show that firms can benefit from these engagements through human capital learning and screening mechanisms, due to the stretch roles that pro bono engagements allow junior lawyers. Our findings suggest that firms in which pro bono engagements provide stretch roles for junior employees can benefit from pro bono activities regardless of whether their employees value the meaningfulness or social impact of the pro bono work.

THE COST ASPECT OF MEDICAL EXPERT WITNESSES AND THE POSSIBLE INTRODUCTION OF A MEDICAL EXPERT WITNESS PANEL IN SOUTH AFRICA

This article is underscored by the importance of expect witnesses on court cases but also the realisation that expert witnesses are often beyond the means of those who need them. An analogy is drawn between the pro bono work that legal practitioners must do and the idea that medical practitioners can serve as expert witnesses as part of their pro bono work. This article will critically evaluate whether medical practitioners should be required to give themselves a certain number of pro bono hours to serve as expert witnesses.