More Lawyers Find Benefits Beyond Fees in Volunteer Cases

Large public companies usually pay lawyers at high-powered firms such as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom hundreds of dollars an hour to get guidance on contracts and mergers. Then there are clients like Engrid Lewis.

She’s the founder of Anointed Hands Cleaning Service in South-Central. She employs five graduates of an inner-city job training program, and they get extra practice cleaning local churches. She’s been trying to bid on several county projects, in addition to cleaning private homes and small businesses in the area.

Yet despite her company’s small staff and thin margins, last July she got extensive advice from Gia Twine, a lawyer in the Los Angeles office of New York’s Skadden, Arps on how to negotiate commercial contracts with cleaning products suppliers. And it was free of charge.

Twine “was letting me know the ins and outs of what was legal and what was not,” Lewis said. She said the sessions over four weeks taught her how to easily navigate government contract applications, which are often written in dense legalese.

There was a time when trial lawyers staging last-ditch appeals for indigent convicts on death row were the only attorneys doing free legal work for the poor. But attorneys who specialize in reviewing incorporation documents, writing contracts and negotiating leases increasingly are taking on more of this pro bono work.

Because corporate pro bono work is scattered across a wide range of clients and legal issues, its impact is not easily measured. But Public Counsel, a Los Angeles public interest law firm, estimated that local attorneys provided $26 million in free corporate legal services in 1998, the most recent year available. Although the number is a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars California law firms generate in billings each year, nonprofit operators and small-business owners said they have benefited from the donated efforts of corporate lawyers--who regularly charge more than $300 an hour for their work.

Working pro bono publico, or literally “for the public good,” isn’t always purely a matter of charity. For young lawyers, it can build resumes. On heavily staffed deals for high-paying clients, these associates usually have minor roles limited to library research or document review. In contrast, junior lawyers often handle every step of a pro bono case, from the first conversation with the client to the last proofreading of a contract.

By working for free, “you get to do more advanced and more challenging work earlier in your career,” said Dan Grunfeld, head of Public Counsel, which works to match big-firm legal talents with worthwhile projects.

What’s more, as they scrutinize employers in a tight job market, more law students are asking about their potential employers’ public interest profiles, and whether hours worked pro bono count toward yearly bonuses tied to billed hours.

One measure of the corporate pro bono trend can be seen at the Los Angeles headquarters of the O’Melveny & Myers firm. As recently as three years ago, the corporate lawyers there recorded one-tenth as many hours of pro bono work as the trial lawyers. In 1999, corporate lawyers at the firm served 1,400 hours, a quarter of the hours done by trial lawyers, said Brett Williamson, a litigation partner at O’Melveny’s Newport Beach office who chairs the firm’s pro bono committee. The amount of pro bono work done by the two groups “is certainly closer to equal than it has been ever before,” Williamson said.

Janet Lavender is one pro bono client who said she appreciates the effort by private lawyers, whatever the reasons behind it. A former welfare recipient who lived in a women’s shelter, Lavender founded Dress 4 Success, a nonprofit with offices in North Hollywood, Chatsworth and downtown L.A. that supplies poor applicants with professional clothing for job interviews. Lavender wrote bylaws for the organization with pen and paper when it was formed in 1996, having no money to pay for a lawyer.

That changed after Community Impact Consulting, a Pasadena advisory service for nonprofit organizations, introduced Lavender to Dean Sussman, an O’Melveny & Myers associate who works daily for banks and securities firms. In a series of meetings last summer, he guided her through the legal basics of corporate governance, including instruction on how to decide the size of her board of directors and how to establish a quorum.

“Now I feel like Dress 4 Success is a legal entity that can be reviewed by anybody,” Lavender said, including foundations that may want to check on the group before donating money. She said having thorough incorporation documents strengthened her application for a grant from Bank of America’s charitable foundation, which gave her $40,000 in September.

While major corporations often have in-house attorneys who answer basic legal questions, pro bono clients tend to know much less about the law, putting added responsibility on the volunteers who serve them. “We know that what we say will be taken as gospel,” Sussman said.

When Canyon Acres, a charity that treats sexually abused children at several Orange County locations, wanted to rent office space in Anaheim Hills last fall, it was hit with a Byzantine 75-page lease. Janet Toll Davidson, a real estate lawyer at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker’s Costa Mesa office, advised the charity for free, and suggested many changes. The final version of the lease, signed in November, was much more favorable for the nonprofit, and even helped it avoid increased property taxes, said Canyon Acres board president Larry Campbell.

Still, when it comes to total pro bono commitment, L.A.-based firms trail rivals in other cities by at least one measure.

Since 1995, the Washington-based Pro Bono Institute has issued an annual challenge asking firms to contribute at least 3% of their total billed hours to pro bono work.

Only four of the 154 firms that have signed--including Los Angeles-based giant Latham & Watkins, which has nearly 1,000 lawyers nationwide--are based in Southern California. In comparison, eight of the firms are from San Francisco, 12 from Chicago and 18 from New York.