Pro Bono Rankings: AmLaw 200 Firms Still Have a Way to Go

Posted by Margaret Daisley

   

That’s the message conveyed by The American Lawyer in its review and rankings of pro bono activities among The Am Law 200 firms. Though overall, there was an 8.2% gain since last year in the number of lawyers who met the minimum standard of performing 20 hours of pro bono work. Still, only 37.3% of attorneys reached or exceeded that figure in this year’s survey. The top five firms were mostly the usual cream of the crop – Covington & Burling, Debevoise & Plimpton, Wilmer Cutler, and Arnold & Porter. But Hogan & Hartson found itself in 4^th place this year also, up from last year’s 26^th place ranking. As Michael Aneiro put it in his overview of the Pro Bono rankings, “Managing partner J. Warren Gorrell Jr. used the occasion of the firm's 100th anniversary in late 2004 to challenge the partnership to step up its pro bono work. Gorrell asked all Hogan & Hartson lawyers to devote at least 20 hours a year to pro bono, and 88.7 percent met that challenge … up 50.5 percent the year before.”

   

The American Lawyer's annual report on the state of pro bono work in the nation's largest law firms is available in spreadsheet form through ALM Research Online for $250.00, or free to subscribers. Included for each firm, besides the score and rankings, are the total pro bono hours performed by each firm in the previous fiscal year, the total number of lawyers, the percentage of lawyers working in the U.S., the average number of pro bono hours per U.S. lawyer, and the percentage of lawyers with more than 20 hours of pro bono work. Pro bono information in the ALM Research database goes back to 1991.

   

Other reports about the Pro Bono rankings included Carlyn Kolker’s review of what counts as pro bono work from The American Lawyer, and Bob Ambrogi’s piece for the Law.com Blog Network on the fact that pro bono is hard work. Kolker addressed the difficult questions – “Is free legal work always pro bono? May a firm fairly include in its pro bono hours exemplary work for which it is paid?” “These are questions The American Lawyer has been discussing more than usual this year,” Kolker writes. “As we sifted through pro bono data from participating Am Law 200 firms, we confronted a handful of examples that seemed to inhabit a gray zone-neither the snowy white of do-gooder work nor the basic black of for-profit endeavors.”  Ambrogi writes that he was “struck by the fact that a firmwide commitment to pro bono is more than aspirational -- it is hard work. Firms devote much talk to developing strategic plans for building their fee-paying business. It seems that the firms that stand out in the pro bono arena have devoted the same kind of strategic thinking to serving the poor.”