AIG Launches Pro Bono Program for its In-House Lawyers

Career Gear, a job-seekers’ nonprofit with headquarters in New York City, has affiliates all over the country, a slew of corporate partnerships, and program participants who run into a wide range of legal questions every day. But Career Gear has no lawyers on staff or on retainer—which is where American International Group (AIG) comes into the picture.

AIG—by some measures the largest insurance company in the world—has about 500 attorneys in-house. And with the Wednesday kickoff of AIG’s new pro bono law program, Career Gear and AIG are about to make a perfect match.

“You want to give people the opportunity to contribute to the community, and you want to be supportive of that in a lot of different ways,” says AIG general counsel Thomas Russo. “We wanted to do it right, and that took time.”

With the wholehearted blessing of Russo—who used to defend, pro bono, New York City street musicians accused of violating city ordinances—AIG joins a growing pro-pro bono trend among corporate law departments. But establishing the program is also a big part of how Russo conceives of the company’s comeback, after receiving the largest government bailout in U.S. history during the 2008 financial crisis.

“This year, we are in every sense of the word a normal, large, vibrant company,” he says on the morning of his two-year anniversary at AIG, just ahead of the pro bono program’s launch. “So as a normal company, you have to begin to think about things that normal companies do, and perhaps—on the topic of pro bono—what normal companies should do.”

Pre-crisis, AIG attorneys engaged in pro bono, though not under the banner of a formal program, according to the Pro Bono Institute. Post-crisis, suffice it to say, AIG’s in-house team had much to keep them busy: paying back the Federal Reserve, selling off various companies, and readying the firm’s so-called “re-IPO,” when the U.S. Treasury Department issued AIG shares last May to lessen the government’s ownership stake in the company.

Last spring, however, deputy general counsel Eric Kobrick approached Russo about offering pro bono opportunities to members of the law department. Both attorneys have pro bono backgrounds—Kobrick as an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Russo, both during law school at Cornell—where he was involved with Legal Aid—and when he was with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, visiting with street musicians in Lower Manhattan’s “The Tombs” jail cells and representing them in court.

Kobrick got the green light and started doing his research. He contacted the Pro Bono Institute in Washington, D.C., for guidance and surveyed the department to gauge reception to the idea of doing pro bono. Seventy percent of AIG’s lawyers said they were interested. The top practice areas they voted for in the survey included assisting low-income or minority individuals, children’s issues, community issues, counseling nonprofits, and educational projects.

“I think it was eye opening for a lot of people when I sent the survey around,” Kobrick recalls. “They came up to me and said, ‘I thought my pro bono days were over essentially when I left the law firm.’ ”

Ultimately, Kobrick wanted to be able to present the department with a menu of options that could be pre-screened for any potential company conflicts, while also offering attorneys access to pro bono opportunities for which they could sign up immediately, if they chose. In addition to Career Gear, the organizations that fit the bill include Coalition for the Homeless, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and the City Bar Justice Center. Kobrick says AIG’s law department will also identify opportunities for attorneys stationed at their various national and international offices.

Russo, for his part, wanted to encourage his department to partake, without sending the message that pro bono is a requirement. “I realized there are a lot of people who don’t have the time or the inclination to do pro bono,” he says. “But by the same token, if they wanted to do it, I didn’t want them to sneak out the back door because their bosses would say, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

Hearing that message from the general counsel is important, according to Eve Runyon, project director of Corporate Pro Bono, a joint partnership between the Pro Bono Institute and the Association of Corporate Counsel. “You need visible support from the top,” she says.

Runyon adds that the choices AIG made reflect other in-house pro bono trends: taking ownership of a project where the company fills a need—as they did with Career Gear—identifying readymade opportunities that speak to the department, aligning the law department’s work with the company’s overall ethic, and planning for how they will measure the success of the program.

At Career Gear, says Leta Malloy, director of corporate partnerships, they’ll finally have somewhere to turn for help drafting contracts and bylaws, protecting their trademarks, and finding legal advice for the people in their program. “The value of that for us is incredible,” she says.

See also: “Stepping Stones to More In-House Pro Bono,” CorpCounsel, February 2012.