The first emails arrived on Friday as Hungarian M&A lawyer Oliver Koppany settled into a village outside Budapest for a firm retreat. Barely 24 hours into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, KNP Law clients in Kyiv and Lviv reached out to their attorneys for a different kind of counsel: Can you book me a plane to Munich? Or a train to Warsaw?

Koppany went into travel agent mode for his clients and advertised his firm’s pro bono services on LinkedIn. Soon, emails from Ukrainians across the country flooded the KNP Law inbox. With the help of a Hungarian Google employee, Koppany put together a list of lawyers in his network and continued promoting the list in subsequent LinkedIn posts while manually pairing volunteers with refugees.