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American Bar Association Model Rule 6.1, Voluntary Pro Bono Publico Service, says in part:
Every lawyer has a professional responsibility to provide legal services to those unable to pay. A lawyer should aspire to render at least (50) hours of pro bono publico legal services per year.
While the Model Rules are not binding, every state has its own set of enforceable legal ethics rules, and the states have more or less the same aspirational public service requirements for their attorneys.
A little background, for the nonlawyers: those of us with a formal legal education have a state-sanctioned monopoly on the provision of legal services. Part of the bargain for making it a crime for nonlawyers to engage in the unauthorized practice of law is that those of use who are licensed are supposed to provide some work free of charge to people who are unable to afford the exorbitant hourly rates we charge for our time.
A little more context: a 40-hour-per-week nine-to-fiver will put in 2080 hours in a year without overtime. Billable hours in the legal profession are a bit different. We’re paid based on an annual salary, and/or an eat-what-you-kill model that rewards bringing in business. An eight-hour day for an attorney does not result in eight hours of billable time. We are not supposed to bill clients for going to the bathroom or for getting a cup of coffee. So, given that you can’t bill for every moment you are actually at work, something along the lines of a 1,600 billable hour requirement is close to spending the same amount of time at work as the average full-time 40-hour workweek office drone. In the legal profession, at least when you’re new, a 1,600 billable hour requirement per year is definitely on the light end. Many firms start out new associates at more like 1,800, or even 2,000, billable hours per year, and some start even higher than that.
Still, even at 1,600 billable hours annually, the lower end of the spectrum, if you do your ethically required public service, you’re only committing to one hour of pubic service for every 32 hours you spend on paying clients. That should be very manageable for people who have an average annual salary of $144,230.
But almost no one is actually doing it. In my home jurisdiction, we have this thing called the North Star Lawyers list. All you have to do to get on this list is voluntarily go to a webpage and certify that you performed at least 50 hours of pro bono work in the previous year. It is super easy, and takes about 12 seconds. I know this because I’ve done it myself every year for a number of years. There is no reason not to do it if you actually performed the pro bono work; worst-case scenario, you get a tiny bit of recognition for your volunteer work. For 2019, 884 people certified themselves as North Star Lawyers. As of 2019, there were 25,823 resident active attorneys in Minnesota, meaning that only about 3.4 percent of Minnesota’s lawyers were willing to certify that they did 50 hours of pro bono work in 2019.
Now, there are nine states which actually require their lawyers to report their pro bono hours (but with no real penalties or strong enforcement mechanisms). Not surprisingly, the rate of lawyers doing pro bono work in these states is generally reported as being higher, although it’s still not overwhelming. In Illinois, for instance, about one-third of the lawyers report doing pro bono work.
But I don’t buy it. I’ve written before about how most liars don’t actually think they’re liars. Human beings generally have bad, self-serving memories. I sincerely doubt that in reality four percent of attorneys in one Midwestern state are doing legitimate pro bono work compared to one-third in another, the only difference being it’s required to report on whether you did pro bono work in the latter state. At any rate, even a third of lawyers doing what they’re supposed to for the common good is pretty paltry.
Our profession has a lot of improvements to make. And nobody’s perfect. But maybe until we’re at something more like 90 percent of lawyers doing the bare minimum public service that we’re already supposed to be doing, we should all take our egos down a peg or two.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.