Letter of Law Applied to Pro Bono Work

Many observers would agree that the scales of justice in America are easily tipped by cash. To help elevate inequities, law firms are supposed to offer freebie service to deserving but impoverished clients and causes.

That’s what they’re supposed to do.

For the past five years, American Lawyer has charted the country’s most lucrative law firms, listing them according to how much cash they bring in--in some cases, more than $1 million per partner.

This year, though, the editors also decided to check up on how much pro bono publico (“for the public good”) work the firms do.

Their conclusion: “Every firm claims to be deeply committed to doing pro bono. In practice, many of the richest and most successful firms are doing the minimum.”

Here in Los Angeles, the big firms are even more parsimonious with their time than are firms elsewhere.

American Lawyer rated 100 of the nation’s most prosperous, prestigious law firms on a scale of A to D, based on the number of hours of work donated per lawyer and the number of lawyers in a firm involved in doing 20 hours a year or more of pro bono work.

Not a single Southern California firm made an A on the list, “a troubling sign from a city that has housing and homeless problems that compare with New York’s and a burgeoning population of refugees and illegal aliens who need assistance in seeking asylum or legal immigration status,” the editors write.

The prestigious firm of Latham and Watkins (gross revenues of $223.5 million) reported only 16 pro bono hours per lawyer (rating: C), while Irell & Manella, O’Melveny & Meyers and McKenna, Conner and Cuneo received B ratings.

Lawyers’ pro bono work comes in all varieties, from defending poor criminals to major “impact litigation” cases designed to change the system. The stories of legal altruism in defense of persons with AIDS, the homeless, poor immigrants, and death row inmates are inspiring.

Yet, in a statement issued last April, New York’s Committee to Improve the Availability of Legal Services stated: “It is grotesque to have a system in which the law guarantees to the poor that their basic human needs will be met but which provides individuals no realistic means with which to enforce that right.”

In an amusing accompanying story, “Deep Pockets and Weak Excuses,” lawyers from some of the nation’s top firms try to weasel out of their responsibility, make sniveling excuses and openly attack their competitors’ records. One lawyer even snitches on a competitor who counted the hours he spent getting a green card for his housekeeper as pro bono time.

REQUIRED READING

* The 1980s saw a “renaissance of racism,” complete with old-fashioned bombings in Alabama and Georgia. Now it’s time to reverse the trend, Julian Bond writes in September’s Exposure. In an essay anchoring a chilling gallery of photographs of racial hatred from Bensonhurst, N.Y., to Pulaski, Tenn., Bond denounces “Trickle down racism,” in which “thought becomes word; word becomes act; act becomes confrontation, and someone dies.”

* Get off your collective duffs, Hollywood. There’s still time to whip out a made-for-TV-movie before the gubernatorial election. It might be called “The Dianne Feinstein” story. It could be based on Sidney Blumenthal’s darn-near adoring profile of the candidate in the Aug. 13 New Republic. But what actress could play this woman, this “resolved personality,” who, shaped by a life rich in tragedy and drama, has fused “empathy and self-control, warmth and coolness,” into a “mature equilibrium”?

* More than 2.6 million Latinos in the United States now have household incomes of $50,000 or more, reflecting better than a 200% increase from 1972. According to an article in the August American Demographics, Honolulu has the highest percentage of affluent Latinos (25.3%), while the Anaheim, Santa Ana, Garden Grove area ranks No. 7 at 14.2%. Los Angeles ranks No. 17, possibly because the large numbers of recent immigrants bring down the income averages.

* As the head of Nintendo Corp., Hiroshi Yamauchi is a very rich man. His Nintendo stock alone is worth $2 billion. His rising share-price and dividends bring in another $4 million a year. But Yamauchi is no Akio Morita (the gregarious head of Sony) or Ryoei Saito (the Japanese magnate who’s been buying up Renoirs and Van Goghs). Rather, Yamauchi’s home in Kyoto is relatively modest, and in an interview in the August Business Tokyo, he remains aloof, almost irritable in discussing the company whose video games have conquered America. Of the antitrust cases pending against Nintendo in the United States, for instance, he says: “I’m not the judge, so I’m not going to sit here and debate it.”

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

* Last year, the classic back-to-nature publication Mother Earth News found new owners, got a city-slick make over and moved to New York, leaving a seasoned staff in Mountain Home, N.C. Now the old gang has started a new publication they call BackHome. Dedicated to “hands-on, down-to-earth, how-to information for independent family living,” the quarterly is geared to rural folk possessing individualism and community spirit. The group editorial photo hints at the publication’s hippie heritage. But the content eschews pie-in-the-sky communal Earth Goddess blather in favor of nuts and bolts pragmatism.

There are articles on the trials of an owner-builder, controling weeds without poison, a case study of a citizen’s group that fought an incinerator and a primer on tool rental. BackHome also features an article, “Ode to a Toad,” which reveals that, in three months, the average toad eats 9,936 insects.

(BackHome, one year $16, P.O. Box 370, Mountain Home, N.C. 28758, (704) 696-3838.)