Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
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August 17, 2000, Thursday, Late Edition -
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SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column
1; Business/Financial Desk
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HEADLINE: Legal Firms Cutting Back On Free
Services for Poor
BYLINE: By GREG WINTER
BODY:
Many of the nation's biggest law firms --
inundated with more business than they can often handle and pressing lawyers to
raise their billable hours to pay escalating salaries -- have cut back on pro
bono work so sharply that they fall far below professional guidelines for
representing people who cannot afford to pay.
The roughly 50,000 lawyers
at the nation's 100 highest-grossing firms spent an average of just eight
minutes a day on pro bono cases in 1999, according to a survey last month by
American Lawyer magazine. That comes out to about 36 hours a year, down
significantly from 56 hours in 1992, when the magazine started tracking firms'
volunteer hours. Yet with the economy booming, firms are enjoying record
profits, the survey also found. "The phenomenon of being so busy that you don't
have as much time for pro bono work is quite real," said Jack Londen, a partner
at Morrison & Foerster. The San Francisco firm has a long tradition of
taking charitable cases, but since the recession of the early 1990's, its
lawyers have cut their average pro bono hours in half, the survey showed.
"When there is more work than lawyers to do it, and there are not enough
new lawyers out there to hire, the pro bono gets shelved," Mr. Londen said.
The decline is troubling for many in the legal profession, both because
of cuts in government-sponsored legal aid programs and because the American Bar
Association urges lawyers to do at least 50 hours of pro bono work each year.
Only 18 of the 100 firms surveyed reported that their lawyers averaged that many
hours or more in 1999, less than half the number seven years earlier.
Even in cities with strong pro bono legacies, where public service is a
particular point of pride, the trend has emerged, leading to concern that a
cultural shift may be under way. In February, a committee of the District of
Columbia circuit court conducted a survey of 142 private law firms in
Washington, a center of pro bono activity. Less than 25 percent of their lawyers
spent 50 hours or more representing clients who could not pay, it found.
"What we're seeing is a sea change, rather than just a rogue wave," said
Eugene R. Fidell, head of an advisory committee of the Federal District Court in
Washington.
Since many large firms raised starting pay for new
associates by as much as $25,000 this year, hoping to dissuade them from
flocking to Internet start-ups, many worry that the ebb in pro bono work will
only accelerate.
"We're under pressure to work hard to pay for these
rising salaries," said John Payton, a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering
and president-elect of the Bar Association of Washington. "I don't think it's
going to wipe out the tradition of pro bono, but it's clearly going to have some
impact."
Susan Hoffman, the partner in charge of pro bono assignments at
Crowell & Moring, has taken to cornering lawyers in hallways at the big
Washington firm. Her e-mail pleas go unanswered, memos no longer work and phone
calls leave her colleagues unmoved.
"I know there's somebody out here
who has time to do it," she said. "I just have to find that person."
The
drop-off in pro bono work comes when the legal community can least afford it,
many public interest groups say. Since 1996, the Legal Services
Corporation, a major source of representation for low-income people in
noncriminal cases, has lost a quarter of its financing from the federal
government -- the source of the bulk of its budget -- leading to hundreds of
layoffs among its legal staff nationwide.
Also in 1996, Congress
prohibited lawyers who get legal-services money from engaging in class-action
lawsuits or taking cases on a number of issues, including abortion, illegal
immigration and welfare revision. To fill the gap, many say private firms need
to increase their volunteer efforts, not retreat from them.
"Without a
sustained level of pro bono, a lot of people who need legal advice, or who need
their rights protected, are not going to have the same access to justice," said
Robert Weiner, the pro bono chairman of the American Bar Association.
As
practices shy away from pro bono work, many civil rights lawyers say it is
becoming increasingly difficult to find volunteers for cases that would have
elicited quick responses years ago. Hilary Chiz, the executive director of the
American Civil Liberties Union in West Virginia, says she searched for a law
firm to represent students who were told to pray in school but had no takers
after a year.
"It's a hot issue; it's sexy; it's First Amendment," she
said. "I would have thought it would have been easy to place.'
Vera E.
Kennedy, 55, is also frustrated by the lack of free legal representation. Ms.
Kennedy's apartment is one of about 270 units at Hunter's View, a San Francisco
public housing development that the city wants to demolish and rebuild.
When similar buildings were torn down a few years ago, prominent firms
made sure residents had adequate interim housing and would be allowed to move
back when work was finished. Local public interest lawyers have been scrambling
unsuccessfully for months to find a firm to do the same for Ms. Kennedy and the
other tenants. "There are mothers with young children here," she said. "They
need the protection of having a place to live."
To be sure, civil rights
lawyers, advocates and poor people themselves have long lamented the difficulty
of finding lawyers with the imposing resources often needed to bring forward big
lawsuits. A 1993 study by the American Bar Association showed that less than 30
percent of low-income people who needed a lawyer for a civil matter actually got
one -- proof that, even at its best, volunteerism may not solve the legal
difficulties of the poor.
"But a problem that was bad in 1993 is only
going to be exacerbated by the fact that you have fewer lawyers doing pro bono,"
said Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who has been directed by
President Clinton to monitor and promote pro bono work in minority communities.
Not that big firms do all the unpaid work. Small practices and
one-lawyer offices take on the bulk of pro bono cases, though their volunteer
hours often go uncounted. Many of these lawyers continue to take on a wealth of
unpaid assignments, even though they are busy, given recent surges in
employment, disability and sexual harassment litigation. But in some rural
areas, where small law offices often comprise the entire legal community, many
firms have become as preoccupied as have their larger counterparts in cities.
"They can't say yes to everybody," said Angele Court, pro bono
coordinator for Vermont's legal services program. "So they say no to the more
difficult case."
Representing the poor is an integral part of being a
lawyer, ingrained in the profession since its origins in ancient Rome. In the
United States, the commitment to pro bono work is in the code of ethics that has
governed the profession for nearly a century. For many, the leadership of
corporate firms is critical for setting the tone that pro bono work is still
more a responsibility than an act of charity.
"The big law firms provide
the litmus test for the legal community," said Steven B. Scudder, counsel to
American Bar Association's standing committee on public service.
Most
firms say it is not their commitment that has waned, just their ability to take
on as many cases as in the past. While lawyers typically billed 1,700 hours
annually just a few years ago, today they routinely bill 2,200 to 2,300 hours,
said Esther F. Lardent, director of the Pro Bono Institute at the Georgetown
University Law Center.
The rush of new business has also meant rapid
growth within firms, sometimes by as much as 40 percent a year. Practices have
sprouted new offices around the country, often in cities where the firms have
few community ties. The lawyers hired to run them are so frantically managing
busy practices that it will take time before they can branch out and take pro
bono cases, firms say.
And it is not as if lawyers are turning their
backs on the poor. With more than 150,000 lawyers at their disposal, the top 500
firms still set aside about two million pro bono hours each year, according to
the Pro Bono Institute. Some firms are donating more money than ever to legal
services organizations to compensate for their declining hours, while 21 of the
top 100 firms have stepped up their volunteer efforts, or at least kept them
from dwindling.
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which in 1999
became the first law firm to gross more than $1 billion in a year, now flies new
associates to its headquarters in New York for a pro bono pep talk, gives
public-service awards to high achievers and has expanded its placement of
lawyers in community organizations for several months at a time. But the firm
only began these initiatives after its pro bono hours started to slip in 1998.
"It wasn't a horrible downturn, but it was enough of one," said Ronald
J. Tabak, the firm's pro bono coordinator. In the current climate, Mr. Tabak
added, keeping up pro bono hours takes a concerted effort, since the demands of
paying clients alone occupy far more than a 40-hour workweek and the competition
for new lawyers has greatly intensified.
To pay for rising salaries,
most firms have raised the minimum number of hours lawyers are expected to bill
clients, yet often do not count pro bono work in the totals.
"We didn't
want to be in a position where the associates would decide between doing their
fee-paying work or not," said R. Bruce McLean, chairman of Akin, Gump, Strauss,
Hauer & Field in Washington. Last year, the firm decided not to credit pro
bono time until lawyers billed at least 2,000 hours in a given year.
Some worry that such changes may chill lawyers' willingness to take pro
bono cases. Michael Harris, assistant director of the Lawyers' Committee for
Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, says that lawyers who would
otherwise take cases are unusually tentative this year, waiting to see how pro
bono hours will be treated at bonus time. The cases they do take, he says, tend
to be short and easy, lest the lawyers become stuck with long-term commitments
that may end up counting against them. "If the people who did pro bono work get
rewarded at the end of the year," he said, "the people who have been standing on
the sidelines will come back."
But even when volunteer hours are, in
theory, given equal weight, some associates feel that their careers will be
better served by concentrating on paying clients and steering new business to
the firm.
"It's a long race going up the partnership track," said Randi
L. Strudler, a partner with Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in New York. "Rightly
or wrongly, not everyone values pro bono work the same as client work."
Since President Clinton asked asked lawyers last year to step up their
volunteer service, there have been a number of initiatives to stimulate pro bono
work.
One of the leading efforts, called Lawyers for One America, is
composed of corporate law firms, law schools and bar associations nationwide.
The group, based in San Francisco, seeks to draw from the growing ranks of
business lawyers -- the largest segment of many large firms, particularly in
Silicon Valley.
Because many corporate lawyers focus solely on
transactions and never go to court, they often feel out of place handling the
mainstays of pro bono work -- divorces, tenant-landlord disputes or social
security cases. Officials at Lawyers for One America and other public interest
groups hope to soften that discomfort by matching business lawyers with
low-income people looking to start companies of their own.
But they say
the concept is only starting to take root at firms, and some question whether
the standing of pro bono work has diminished.
"The dollars are so
astronomical that they're blinding people to public service," said Teveia R.
Barnes, the group's executive director. "It does a disservice to the legal
profession and our reputation."
http://www.nytimes.com
GRAPHIC: Chart: "Charitable Decline"
Pro bono work
has declined considerably among the nation's most successful law firms in recent
years. Here are the law firms with the highest pro bono hours per lawyer at the
100 highest-grossing firms last year versus 1992, as ranked by The American
Lawyer magazine.
PRO BONO HOURS IN 1999
FIRM:
Covington & Burling
BASED: Washington
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 320
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 105.5
FIRM: Jenner &
Block
BASED: Chicago
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 377
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS
PER LAWYER: 105.1
FIRM: Arnold & Porter
BASED: Washington
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 441
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 89.3
FIRM: Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering
BASED: Washington
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 275
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 86.3
FIRM: Debevoise & Plimpton
BASED: New York
NUMBER OF
LAWYERS: 402
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 83.2
FIRM:
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison
BASED: New York
NUMBER OF
LAWYERS: 395
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 81.0
FIRM:
Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe
BASED: San Francisco
NUMBER OF
LAWYERS: 400
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 80.0
FIRM:
Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson
BASED: New York
NUMBER OF
LAWYERS: 426
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 76.1
FIRM:
Morrison & Foerster
BASED: San Francisco
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 682
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 71.2
FIRM: Schulte, Roth
& Zabel
BASED: New York
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 239
AVERAGE PRO BONO
HOURS PER LAWYER: 70.7
PRO BONO HOURS IN 1992
FIRM: Arnold & Porter
BASED: Washington
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 333
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 220.6
FIRM: Morrison &
Foerster
BASED: San Francisco
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 572
AVERAGE PRO
BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 149.4
FIRM: Covington & Burling
BASED: Washington
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 307
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER
LAWYER: 143.3
FIRM: Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering
BASED:
Washington
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 220
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER:
142.1
FIRM: McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen
BASED: San
Francisco
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 240
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER:
131.6
FIRM: Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge
BASED:
Washington
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 228
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER:
122.8
FIRM: Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe
BASED: San
Francisco
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 393
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER:
118.0
FIRM: Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison
BASED: New York
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 336
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER
LAWYER: 106.8
FIRM: Cravath, Swaine & Moore
BASED: New
York
NUMBER OF LAWYERS: 308
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 101.3
FIRM: Jenner & Block
BASED: Chicago
NUMBER OF
LAWYERS: 336
AVERAGE PRO BONO HOURS PER LAWYER: 92.0
(pg.
C5)
LOAD-DATE:
August 17, 2000 
