Welcome to a special edition of the National Pro Bono News devoted to highlighting pro bono partnerships. Our regular wrap-up of news can be found at the end of the issue.

As always, we welcome your feedback/contributions/ideas – please email info@nationalprobono.org.au.

1. AWARDS: Pro Bono Partnerships highlighted
2. NEWS: New Report from National Association of Community Legal Centres on Pro Bono Partnerships
3. JOBS: For the latest jobs check out Social Justice Opportunities
4. PRO BONO IN THE NEWS: OCTOBER – NOVEMBER 2012

The partnership between Amnesty International Australia and DLA Piper

For more than five years, DLA Piper has helped ensure Amnesty International Australia’s governance, strategy, policy and operations are conducted based on robust legal advice thus allowing Amnesty to focus on its mission of ending systemic injustice around the world. Most of this work has been done through the Sydney office of Amnesty and includes providing secondees, and advice on corporate matters, tax, wills and bequests, employment matters and contracts, but also work on particular court appeals and projects, merits advice, freedom of speech and strategic litigation.

The partnership between the Arts Law Centre and the Australian Government Solicitor

The Australian Government Solicitor leads the way in the provision of pro bono services by government lawyers with 25% of its lawyers participating in their pro bono contribution this year. Since 2009, AGS has provided highly experienced lawyers on secondment to the Arts Law Centre, which supplements the Arts Law Centre with an additional staff member for their telephone legal advice, and document review service. AGS has also conducted seminars on relevant issues for clients of the Arts Law Centre and undertaken reviews of ALC’s sample agreements for artists.

The partnership between the Cancer Council Legal Referral Service and its many lawyer and law firm partners

The Cancer Council Legal Referral Service has had astonishing growth from being a six-month pilot project with four law firms in March 2010, to its present network of 144 law firm, sole practitioner and in-house counsel partners many of these based in regional NSW. Through this network the Service is able to assist about 1000 clients per year. This is a great example of a medical-legal alliance that uniquely integrates health, counselling and legal assistance, so that chronically ill patients can receive assistance where and when it is needed

The partnership between the Cooperative Legal Service Delivery program regional coordinators in the South Coast, Far West, Central West and Mid North Coast of NSW and Ashurst Australia.

Ashurst has worked with the Cooperative Legal Service Delivery program, an initiative of NSW Legal Aid, in regional NSW since its inception in 2009. With the help of Ashurst, the program’s regional coordinators are better able to respond to the legal needs of geographically isolated and remote communities – particularly Aboriginal communities. Ashurst lawyers have shown a generous willingness to travel to remote and regional areas of NSW to provide case work assistance and advice, free community legal education sessions and on-site legal services including successful clinics drafting wills, powers of attorney and guardianship documents which have been particularly appreciated in a number of Indigenous communities.

The partnership between Kingsford Legal Centre and Herbert Smith Freehills

For over 20 years, Freehills has provided Kingsford Legal Centre (KLC) with a full-time secondee solicitor every six months, as well as providing high-level advocacy and administrative support. 

The partnership between Offshore Asylum Seeker Project and its significant number of barrister, law firm and other partners (124 in all)

The Project started 18 months ago as a result of the increased demand from asylum seekers for advice following the M61 High Court decision that returned judicial review rights to offshore asylum seekers for adverse refugee status assessments.

This project involved close collaboration between Legal Aid NSW, the NSW Law Society, Members of the NSW bar, migration support groups and solicitors from private law firms, pivotally coordinated by PILCH NSW, who either worked together, or to their strengths, on devising strategy, providing training, making initial assessments of the reviewability of administrative decisions, providing legal advice to clients often far away in detention centres, and providing legal representation in appropriate cases.

Further Examples and Contact Information

Further examples of pro bono partnerships can be found amongst previous winners and nominees of this award as well as amongst recent National Pro News stories such as the partnership between Clayton Utz, the Loddon Campaspe Community Legal Centre and PILCH (VIC) and the partnership between Allens Linklaters, the Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre and various barristers.

Law firms or community legal centres wanting to develop partnerships should talk to the pro bono clearing house in their State or Territory and or to their State Association of Community Legal Centres.  The Federation of Community Legal Centres in Victoria has a dedicated staff member (Claudia Fatone) to help firms and Centres form partnerships. An article about the Victorian Community Law Partnerships scheme can be found at page 83 of the Jan-Feb 2012 edition of the Law Institute Journal.

On 1 November 2012 the National Association of Community Legal Centres released the results of their survey of Community Legal Centres and Pro Bono Partnerships that indicated a contribution of over 50,000 hours being made to 106 CLCs nationally by law firms in the past year.

The survey indicated that the pro bono contribution of firms had increased the reach of CLCs and their specialist capacity through providing direct legal services to CLC clients and centres, assisting with publications, in governance and management, providing venues and catering, administrative support and in fundraising. The Centre undertook some further analysis of this data and produced a media release “One hour’s investement by CLCs retruns a day’s pro bono work” found here.

Check out Social Justice Opportunities for information on finding a job or volunteering in the social justice sector. The website includes a ‘Latest Opportunities‘ section which provides a list of current jobs and volunteering opportunities around the country. Currently there are more than twenty positions listed.

To keep abreast of all the latest opportunities you can follow @SJOpps on Twitter or like us on Facebook.

Articles of interest to the pro bono community from October to November 2012. Click through to read any news article in full.

Australia

9 November 2012 – The Australian
The National Pro Bono Resource Centre has found that individual lawyers, rather than law firms, provide at least two-thirds of the pro bono legal support for the nation’s community legal centres. While volunteers need to be supervised and trained, the resource centre found that every hour spent on supervision results in 7.2 hours of pro bono work.

9 November 2012 – The Australian
We don’t expect Australia’s public health system to rely on doctors working for free. So why do we expect our legal safety net to rely on the goodwill of lawyers who do pro bono work? Pro bono, broadly speaking, is work done for free or without expectation of a fee, for the public good. The often poor reputation of lawyers belies their proud and long-standing commitment to this work.

International

9 November 2012 – The Law Society Gazette
The average amount of pro bono work undertaken by solicitors has fallen by nearly 15% over the past year, according to a Law Society survey published today. Although Chancery Lane says the decline reflects a narrower definition than that used in previous polls, the trend will renew fears about access to justice following cuts to legal aid.

6 November 2012 – The Guardian
National Pro Bono Week is upon us once again. The annual campaign, sponsored by the Bar Council, the Law Society, the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, and the College of Law, kicked off with a Law Society debate on Monday. We asked some of the UK’s leading law firms, many of whom are involved in several projects, to tell us about their proudest pro bono moment of 2012.

US: In Storm’s Wake, Am Law Firms Make Charity, Pro Bono Commitments

5 November 2012 – The Am Law Daily
With recovery efforts continuing in New York & New Jersey a week after Hurricane Sandy hit the region hard, members of the legal community are pitching in to do their part. While many local residents wait for their electricity to return & others sort through the wreckage of what were once their homes, a number of Am Law firms are drawing on their collective power to donate legal services to the relief effort.

5 November 2012 – TrustLaw
The United Kingdom’s top 20 legal firms carried out about 180.9 million pounds’ ($289 mln) worth of pro bono work in 2011, research has shown. The figure is equal to 1.85 percent of total revenue among the biggest 20 firms, according to the research by specialist legal recruitment consultancy Laurence Simons. It is the first time the consultancy has done the survey.

UK: Ashurst joins top firms in hiking pro bono incentives [paywall]

2 November 2012 – Legal Week
Ashurst has overhauled its pro bono scheme so hours count as utilised time, as firms step up their effort to increase lawyer involvement in charitable activities. The firm is introducing a target for all lawyers – including partners – to complete an average of 50 pro bono hours every year, which will also count towards billable hour & bonus targets for the first time.

2 November 2012 – Global Legal Post
New York lawyers are rallying to provide free legal advice to hundreds of thousands of people affected by the devastation inflicted earlier this week by hurricane Sandy. Local media report that the state bar association will meet today to co-ordinate pro bono efforts as New York City and the wider eastern seaboard struggles to recover from one of the worst storms to hit the region in living memory.

SINGAPORE: Lawyers ‘should provide at least 16 hours of free legal services’

1 November 2012 – Today Online
Lawyers could soon be required to contribute a minimum of 16 hours of free legal services, as part of the Singapore Academy of Law’s proposal to make it mandatory for practitioners to provide legal aid to low-income and disadvantaged Singaporeans. Lawyers who are unable to fulfil the requirements could give contributions-in-lieu instead, though the two options need not be mutually exclusive.

25 October 2012 – Lawyer Watch
There is a very interesting Gazette piece on pro bono by Grania Langdon-Down. It raises a number of issues. One is the way in which Corporate firms appear to be reframing their pro bono activity away from ‘activity’ and towards ‘impact’, partly (it seems) in response to a downturn in levels of volunteer hours.

UK: Pro bono – minding the gap

25 October 2012 – The Law Society Gazette
The tough economic climate, coupled with the threat to frontline advice agencies from local authority & legal aid cuts, has dramatically increased demand for free legal help. National Pro Bono Week will focus attention on the question “is something better than nothing?” as law firms of all sizes explore how they can best respond, and in-house counsel press for regulatory change so they can offer more pro bono.