Personally, I’m ambivalent about pro bono and the wider concept of the legal profession doing charitable work. Partly, that is, because I tend to think the primary job of commercial law firms is to make money and provide an outlet to competitive professionals. There are also grounds for cynicism regarding the supposed commitment from clients that say they want to instruct pro bono-heavy firms and junior lawyers that claim they want to join them. More importantly, it’s hard to get that comfortable with the idea of businesses offering services that ought to be, in many cases, provided by the state. Even so, on balance, it’s very hard to make a case that extremely wealthy businesses driven by socially-advantaged individuals should not give something back to society.
The point I’m making is that even as an observer of the legal world with a somewhat jaded view of the pro bono bandwagon, it strikes me that it’s high time the UK profession stopped fiddling at the edges and committed to the next logical step. That step would be to create a formula, however rough around the edges, to codify, standardise and disclose the pro bono commitments of individual law firms.
