Pro bono service is beloved by recruiters pitching firms to law students, concerning to those same law firms' accountants obsessing over the bottom line and desperately needed by legal aid organizations providing services. As an opportunity to develop skills as well as help others, pro bono service plays an important role in the practice of young lawyers. Even in a world where law firms have become multimillion-dollar businesses, pro bono service is no mere relic of a bygone age. Rather, pro bono service is a fundamental feature of what it means to be an attorney. Although the practice of law is now impacted by technology and legal issues that an attorney from the early 1800s never could have conceived, that earlier iteration of a "Philadelphia lawyer" probably would have recognized the three reasons why pro bono service continues to matter. Why should we serve? Today, as ever, attorneys should provide pro bono service because we are lucky. We should serve because there is need. And we should serve because we can.
On June 2, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave a commencement address at Princeton University. In his remarks, Bernanke made the interesting observation that meritocracy, while better than alternative systems, involves far more luck and less fairness than we realize: "A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate — these are the folks who reap the largest rewards."
