Pro Bono Goes Online
By Joan Indiana Rigdon
Photographs by Howard Ehrenfeld
Imagine yourself as a private practitioner who has taken on pro bono representation of a family in imminent jeopardy of eviction and likely homelessness. It is midday Friday and you’re struggling to locate a model answer for a court appearance on the family’s behalf early next week.
Imagine yourself as a pro bono lawyer advocating for the rights of your HIV-positive client to secure adequate health benefits and to be free from discrimination in the workplace. In order to prepare an effective demand letter, you would really benefit from quick access to a basic set of training materials that included sample documents.
Imagine yourself as one of the District’s overwhelmed legal service practitioners, struggling to maintain a caseload of hundreds while staying abreast of the latest developments in poverty law. Wouldn’t it be great if you had easy access to the latest court decisions and related news stories on such topics as family law, community development, asylum, civil rights, and even the death penalty?
Now open your eyes, turn to your computer keyboard, and log on to www.probono.net/dc, the District of Columbia’s free "virtual public interest law community," a resource that provides all of this support to pro bono and legal service advocates in the District of Columbia. Under the leadership of the D.C. Bar’s Pro Bono Program and the D.C. Consortium of Legal Service Providers, and with the support of a number of individual legal service providers and Washington law firms, this recently launched Web-based resource establishes a whole new starting point for lawyers handling pro bono matters in the nation’s capital.
By piggybacking on a successful framework
originally constructed in 1998 by a lawyer and a pro bono coordinator
in New York City and later launched in San Francisco and Minnesota,
this new site focusing on pro bono practice in the District of Columbia
brings together information in five local practice areas and three
national practice areas through the efforts of the D.C. Bar Pro
Bono Program, six legal service providers, and five law firms. As
a result, the District’s pro bono and public interest lawyers can
now access training materials, research cases, download sample briefs
and pleadings (stripped of confidential information), and keep informed
of current news and upcoming events in their fields of interest.
Although it looks seamless to the visitor, the site is the consequence
of teams of providers and law firms working together with the D.C.
Bar Pro Bono Program to develop and post content in typical poverty
law practice areas.
"Having
these resources available online will go a long way in giving volunteer
lawyers the comfort they need" to take more cases, says Patricia Mullahy
Fugere, executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless
and cochair of the D.C. Consortium of Legal Service Providers.
"Law firms ought to love it," says Andrew H. Marks, a partner at Crowell & Moring and former president of the D.C. Bar, who currently chairs the technology subcommittee of the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program. "It allows them to get a lot more bang for the buck, to help a lot more people for the same number of volunteer hours."
The legal service providers stand to benefit, too. They have searched for years to find more efficient and effective ways to provide support to the volunteers they depend upon to serve Washington’s poor and disadvantaged. Now that basic information, training materials, and model pleadings are available online, legal service providers can spend more of their time working with pro bono lawyers on more complicated matters such as formulating strategies for particular cases, drafting legislation, and counseling impact cases.
As one of the cohosts of the site’s family law practice area, the Children’s Law Center sees an immediate advantage of the Pro Bono Net model. Because it has only one attorney available to mentor pro bono lawyers, access to a virtual library of information dramatically multiplies the amount of support the center is able to provide. "If we put sample pleadings on the Web site, then [the staff attorney] won’t spend as much time e-mailing people sample pleadings, and we’ll be able to use her time more effectively to help provide strategic advice, as opposed to routine information," says Judith Sandalow, executive director of the Children’s Law Center.
Sandalow says her organization plans to improve the family law site by adding an expert witness bank as well as online training materials in the area of childhood development, attachment, and bonding. Sandalow has considered offering a full-day training on the subject, but figures that most pro bono lawyers will not have the time to attend. With online training materials, her volunteers can click through the material at their own pace and in their own space.
Laying the Groundwork
Launched in April 2002, www.probono.net/dc is a collaborative success
story that began four years ago when the technology subcommittee
of the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program, then chaired by John Nields of
Howrey Simon Arnold & White, LLP, joined forces with members of
the D.C. Consortium of Legal Service Providers to find ways to use
technology to increase the amount and quality of pro bono representation.
With Nields as chair of this new Technology Initiative Working Group,
these visionaries held scores of meetings and dedicated hundreds
of hours birthing a major online resource dedicated to making pro
bono work easier and more accessible for busy private practitioners.
In order for that to happen, however, the working group first had
to find a way to improve the technology of legal service providers
that didn’t have adequate computer systems.
"Some
of them didn’t have computers, frankly. They didn’t have Internet
access, they didn’t have e-mail," recalls Marks, who was president of
the Bar when the Technology Initiative Working Group was getting under
way. "They didn’t have the tools of communication that we in private
practice were using every day. When they wanted to communicate with
a pro bono lawyer, they couldn’t send an e-mail or any of the things
that we now take for granted.
"I could see what a pervasive effect the march of technology was having on our daily practice as lawyers. I could also see that the legal service providers in our community did not have the tools to take advantage of the technological revolution. So one of the things I talked about was while the rest of the legal profession raced down the information superhighway, the legal service providers were being left in the breakdown lane. I thought something should be done about that.
"If there is any group of lawyers in our community who need to have the efficiencies and the economies of technology, it’s the legal service providers who are so resource-starved and understaffed," Marks says.
This is how bad it was. In March 1998 two members of the Technology Initiative Working Group conducted a quick survey of the state of technology at 25 major legal service providers in Washington, D.C. The survey found that, except for law school clinics and one legal service agency, no program had "meaningful access to external e-mail or the Internet." They also discovered that although most of these programs’ attorneys had desktop computers, more than one-third of these had 286- or 386-megahertz processors, which made it difficult for them to hook up to the Internet. And hardly any provider had internal case management databases or access to Lexis or Westlaw.
Over the next two years, the working group paired up legal service providers with law firms that were willing to donate computers and help the providers set up their networks. Microsoft donated about $250,000 worth of software and Norton donated antivirus software. By the year 2000 the group had helped to outfit about 16 providers.
"By working together with a common goal, the Bar’s Pro Bono Program and the Consortium of Legal Service Providers were able to accomplish a goal that would have been much more difficult if they had tried to undertake it all on their own," says Nields. "With these donations in hand, we had the foundation on which we could begin to build a whole new infrastructure for pro bono and public interest lawyers."
With the equipment in place, members of the Technology Initiative Working Group began discussing how to make use of it. In particular, they focused on how to use the Internet to help pro bono and legal service lawyers. They asked themselves, "If 10 lawyers in town are all doing social security advocacy for different legal service providers, why are they inventing the social security wheel 10 times over?" recalls Marks.
Members of the working group discussed the possibility of building their own pro bono Web site from the ground up. They figured that the site could be an Internet-accessible repository of collective resources. One member, Julia R. Gordon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Law and Social Policy, had been working to help establish statewide Web sites of legal resources across the country. Gordon helped other members of the group think through what sort of resources they wanted to offer, and whether the site should be targeted at pro bono lawyers in particular or at staff attorneys of legal service providers, or both.
Enter Pro Bono Net
In the midst of these deliberations, the Technology Initiative Working
Group learned about Pro Bono Net, a nonprofit organization begun
in New York City by Michael Hertz, a partner at Latham & Watkins,
and Mark O’Brien, formerly pro bono coordinator at Davis Polk &
Wardell.
If the members of the working group had tried to build their own site from scratch, the effort would have been prohibitively costly. Now they realized the creators of Pro Bono Net had done the work for them. Hertz and O’Brien tackled the issue of how technology could be used to overcome what people said were the biggest obstacles to doing pro bono work. Chief among the problems were recruiting lawyers and getting them quickly up to speed in new areas of law.
"Everybody knows there are lots of lawyers who are interested in getting involved," says O’Brien. "But it’s a very small group of provider agencies trying to do that matching, and they get overwhelmed. They are like the neck of the funnel."
Pro Bono Net’s goal was to break that logjam by giving greater capacity to those agencies. The solution: a boilerplate Web site that promoted and supported pro bono and legal service lawyers.
O’Brien and Hertz had a vision that was straightforward: each Pro Bono Net Web site would have several basic elements, including news with links to the articles about various practice areas; a library, where lawyers can view and download routine information such as training manuals, statutes, and sample pleadings; a calendar of events; and a listing of new pro bono opportunities. Pro Bono Net also developed e-mail tools, which allow legal service providers to create special mailing lists based on information that members provide when they sign up. For instance, a legal service provider who specializes in family law can use Pro Bono Net’s e-mail to target Spanish-speaking pro bono lawyers with experience in adoption law.
Members of the Technology Initiative Working Group realized the value of Pro Bono Net’s model immediately. Fortunately, the idea also captured the imagination of the D.C. Bar Foundation, a 501(c)(3) entity dedicated to providing grants and loans to organizations that provide direct representation to the poor and disadvantaged, and to facilitating and improving the provision of legal services and the administration of justice. The Bar Foundation agreed to fund the project with a $15,000 grant, thus providing the final piece of the puzzle that brought the framework to the District of Columbia.
"It was an exciting time for the community to come together on probono.net/dc," says E. Desmond Hogan, a senior associate at Hogan & Hartson L.L.P., one of the project’s law firm participants. "The pro bono community works best when we work together. The law firms, the providers, and the Bar were all pointing in the same direction. There was a great confluence of energy to get this moving."
The Players
Although securing the framework was a major accomplishment, the
true challenge was dividing up the responsibilities for developing
and maintaining the content specific to practice areas in the District
of Columbia. For the D.C. Bar’s Pro Bono Program, it presented a
logical opportunity to become the "geographical host," the primary
organization responsible for coordinating all the work within the
various practice areas and developing original content and reaching
out to other public interest organizations for submissions to the
site’s main public areas, including the calendar, clearinghouse,
and news areas.
"One of the core missions of the D.C. Bar’s Pro Bono Program is to help lawyers and law firms increase their pro bono involvement in a meaningful and significant way," says Maureen Thornton Syracuse, director of the Pro Bono Program. "We were captivated by the idea of working in collaboration with a network of legal service providers and law firms to create a Web-based resource to support all our work on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged, as well as community-based nonprofits and small disadvantaged businesses in the District. Probono.net/dc presented us with a perfect fit because it helped us bring all the players onto the same ball diamond with a common purpose."
For now, probono.net/dc is divided into five local practice areas (community development, employment law, family law, housing, and public benefits) and three national practice areas (asylum, death penalty, and civil rights). Future plans include a national practice area for bankruptcy to be cohosted by the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program.
Each practice area is hosted or cohosted by a legal service provider, including the Pro Bono Program, which takes responsibility for developing and updating the content, and a law firm that posts the content online and provides other technical assistance. Each participant willing to serve as host or cohost picked a practice area where it envisioned the most cases. But since each part of the Web site is only as good as the content the hosts provide, the goal was to make sure all participants would be able to undertake regular updates to their sites as well. "Do we think we can do a credible job [of maintaining the site]?" is one of the criteria the group used in making the initial choices of hosts and cohosts, says Fugere.
In her role as cohost of the family law practice area, Judith Sandalow says that although the work undertaken to develop that content was extremely difficult, the effort has been worthwhile because the result has been the creation of a starting point for the future.
"The initial phase of probono.net/dc
was very time-consuming," she says. "Organizing the legal library
and pulling together the documents took several weeks, not to mention
learning to think like a Web site designer, not just like a lawyer.
This is just a beginning. I expect that the legal library will grow
dramatically, although it will take significant time and money to
maintain it properly. The family law community needs updated information
on law and on programs and services for families. I hope the family
law site of probono.net will serve that purpose."
Similar
benefits were seen by the D.C. Employment Justice Center, which is host
of the employment law practice area. Kerry O’Brien, the center’s director
of advocacy and outreach, is looking forward to a profound benefit of
the Web site, since it now houses the entire contents of two "really
long" file boxes of forms, including a 300-page employment manual and
FAQ (frequently asked questions) sheets on wage law in English and Spanish.
Previously, those files had to be transported across town whenever her
staff held legal clinics, and also provided to volunteers who handled
matters for her program. "Pro Bono Net is going to make that much easier,"
says O’Brien.
"When we began working on this project," she says, "we were encouraged not to create new materials, but rather to take the existing materials we already were distributing to our volunteers, either in a piecemeal manner or as part of a huge manual that is costly to distribute, and to get those materials online. These materials, which are critical to our program, already were available electronically, so it was relatively straightforward to place them on the Web.
"What was also important for us was to have the forms and FAQ sheets that government agencies publish. We serve about 1,000 clients a year, and we have a very small staff, so sometimes we operate as a self-help group, providing these clients with guidance as they navigate the system on their own. Now that we have compiled all of these materials in a central place that is password-protected, we are just thrilled. Now any one of our volunteers can access these materials anywhere. It is going to be tremendously helpful.
"We also are considering opening a clinic in southeast Washington in the fall, which is a desperately underserved area in terms of legal services, and having these materials online is going to make it 10 times easier to get that clinic up and running."
Where legal service providers brought substantive expertise to the table, law firms stepped forward to offer the technical support that enabled probono.net/dc to move from the drawing board into reality.
"What we lent was technical support," says Desmond Hogan, whose firm, Hogan & Hartson, partnered with D.C. Law Students in Court to build the housing practice area. "We aren’t the experts in this area-we relied on Law Students in Court for that. What we did was to sit down with the provider, gather information, provide updates to certain pleadings that they had given to us [to upload], undertook substantive edits to manuals that had been written some years earlier, and then provide the information technology support to place it on the site."
Playing a similar role in the community development practice area was the law firm of Latham & Watkins. "Our firm helped the Community Economic Development Project of the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program create an outline of the library that we needed to develop for this area of practice," says firm partner William C. Kelly Jr. "Once those resources were identified, our technical staff saw to it that the residual documents were electronically accessible."
In Exchange
Having decided on the content, the site’s developers now had to
determine who should have access to the resources available on probono.net/dc.
(Although the public can freely access the main page of any practice
area, users need passwords to access the secure areas of the site,
such as news postings, the library, and current events). Pro Bono
Net had grappled with this question before it launched its national
site in April 1999; it decided that the hosts of each site should
make up their own rules for access. The partners of probono.net/dc
took the same tack.
In some cases, such as death penalty,
access is a very delicate issue, because pro bono lawyers who are
defending death penalty clients don’t want prosecutors to be able
to view sample pleadings or strategies they post on the site.
In
less politically charged practice areas, hosts have had to deal with
a different kind of access issue: should lawyers be required to take
a minimum number of pro bono cases in order to gain access, or is it
sufficient that they have volunteered in the past? Different hosts have
different policies. At the Children’s Law Center, Sandalow says she
plans to admit anybody, even those who have agreed to complete only
one case. "If a lawyer is taking one pro bono case, we want that lawyer
to do the best job possible. We want to help that lawyer. And we believe
that these cases are so interesting and so compelling and so important
that you can’t handle just one, that once someone takes a pro bono case
that individual will want to take another."
In exchange for access to these free resources, hosts of the practice areas are hoping that individual visitors will contribute materials such as sample briefs to the libraries or post information about their own cases on the message boards. One of the benefits of probono.net/dc is that it allows all members to interact through postings of library materials, articles, and calendar listings. In addition, by facilitating the posting of materials across jurisdictions, lawyers in New York, San Francisco, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia can collaborate and generate more comprehensive training materials and pleadings without duplicating one another’s work.
"In the end, the pie is going to be bigger for all of us if we build our resources together rather than holding onto them and saying, ’These are ours,’" says Mark O’Brien.
Since Pro Bono Net launched its site, its creators have said the most valuable lesson they have learned is that Web sites become worthless unless they are constantly updated. That point is reinforced by those involved in the construction of the District of Columbia’s site.
"My hope is we will get a lot of sample documents entered into probono.net/dc from the work of lawyers who are representing clients, lots of live documents and, from time to time, handbooks and other types of materials," says Kelly. "As a result, lawyers inclined to volunteer on a pro bono matter won’t be starting from scratch and having to rely on their own firm’s resources."
Self-Help Materials
Now close your eyes once again and this time imagine you are a working
person who has been separated from your spouse for two years. You
have no common children and no property to divide. You want a divorce
but can’t afford an attorney on your $12,000 annual salary.
Now imagine an online resource that provides a full range of self-help materials to enable you to handle your own divorce pro se. Open your eyes, turn to the computer keyboard in the public library, and log on to www.lawhelp.org/ny and take a look at New York’s version of what will be the next collaboration between the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program and the D.C. Consortium of Legal Service Providers.
Among other things, a LawHelp site in the District of Columbia will help the public find free legal representation or locate self-help materials that will enable individuals to navigate their own way through the legal system. At press time four states, including New York and Minnesota, have already launched LawHelp platforms, with more than 20 other states hoping to launch by fall, according to Mark O’Brien.
The Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia has already begun developing self-help material for tenants; the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program provides packets of pro se pleadings and instructions to litigants in divorce cases and child support cases; and the D.C. Employment Justice Center offers flyers for recently discharged employees about their legal rights and remedies.
"We are extremely excited about the LawHelp component of the Technology Initiative," says Mark Herzog, supervising attorney with the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program. "We know consumers are online getting legal information, and we are committed to seeing that they get the best and most accurate self-help material possible."
Ongoing Support
Although it is too soon to measure the impact of probono.net/dc,
its success in other locations has been significant.
"One of the overarching things that Pro Bono Net accomplishes is that it creates a real sense of community among the volunteers, and from the point of view of the staff as well, because it enables us to reach out in a collective way instead of individually, one-on-one," says Tanya Neiman, director of the Volunteer Legal Services Program of the Bar Association of San Francisco, the geographical host of probono.net/sf.
"Our volunteers love it because it enables us to use ’push’ technology when matters are available," she says. "That was a big advance for us technologically, because it now allows our volunteers to pretty much instantaneously grab a pro bono opportunity that looks attractive to them. Actually, I’m starting to get complaints from volunteers who say that when they find a case that is attractive and try to reply offering to take it, they often find the case has already been taken!
"Overall, we are very excited, and our staff just loves it in terms of making it easier for everyone."
Offering another positive reaction to the San Francisco experience is Pierre Stroud, project coordinator for the Community Organization and Representation Project (CORP), a legal service provider that helps community groups serve poor and disadvantaged clients in the San Francisco Bay area, who says probono.net/sf produced "an immediate increase in our efficiency and ability to place many cases quickly." Last year, the first full year it used Pro Bono Net’s Web platform, CORP placed 75 new cases, up 67 percent from the previous year, according to Stroud.
The people who put probono.net/dc together expect it will make a big difference here in the District, too. Julia Gordon of the Center for Law and Social Policy notes that the technologies offered through the Web site are similar to those that private firms use to keep their edge in the free market. "If you look to how the private sector practices law," she says, "they’ve got this stuff and presumably they’ve got it because it’s good for clients."
"We are really hoping that the impact of this project will be to give better access to lawyers throughout the Washington legal community who are doing pro bono work, particularly to the substantive information they need when they are doing work outside their regular area of practice," says Desmond Hogan. "Probono.net/dc gives lawyers the tools and abilities to call on experts who have written motions and handled matters in these specific areas. Probono.net/dc will really encourage work to be done because lawyers will see there are tools out there to support them.
"I’d encourage every lawyer in the
District to visit probono.net/dc and see its content. I think they
will be pleasantly surprised at what they find." "Probono.net/dc
will increase the efficiency in the delivery of legal services to
those in need," says William Kelly. With the resources available
through probono.net/dc, a lawyer who might normally spend 50 hours
on a task can cut that time down to 10, he explains. "It is important
that the pro bono work we do has a real impact on the community,"
and Kelly believes that probono.net/dc provides the vehicle to make
that happen.
"Probono.net/dc will greatly aid our volunteers
by giving them the tools they need to provide the best possible representation,"
says Robert N. Weiner, a partner with Arnold & Porter and chair of the
D.C. Bar Pro Bono Committee. "In private practice, technology makes
lawyers more productive. The same holds true for pro bono work. By enabling
pro bono lawyers to use technology effectively, we are leveraging more
resources for the benefit of the least fortunate among us and coming
that much closer to the goal of equal justice."
With probono.net/dc now online, the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program adds one more component to a comprehensive support system for D.C. Bar members eager to take on pro bono matters. And with the ongoing support of the legal service community and its law firm partners, probono.net/dc is likely to continue to serve lawyer volunteers and clients for years to come.
How to Join
Handling a pro bono matter that involves a family facing eviction
and possible homelessness? Would it help to review readily accessible
procedural materials, form pleadings, and unpublished court opinions
in this practice area? Then consider joining the housing practice
area of probono.net/dc.
Signing up is simple: log on to the Internet, point your Web browser to www.probono.net/dc, select "Housing" from the drop-down menu, and then click "Join this practice area." You will be asked to provide personal information, including your name, organization, address, business phone, and e-mail, and to create a password. All membership information is screened by the practice area host prior to activation.
Similar sign-up opportunities are available in other practice areas: asylum, civil rights, community development, death penalty, employment law, family law, and public benefits. Membership is free.
Once your membership is activated, you will be added to the practice roster and able to access the full range of resources available through probono.net/dc. In addition, as a member you are encouraged to help keep probono.net/dc as current as possible by submitting calendar listings, posting articles on the news page, and submitting materials to the online libraries.
Participants
The following legal service providers and law firms are responsible
for content development in the five local practice areas currently
available on probono.net/dc.
- Community Development
- Host and Content: D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program
Law Firm Partner: Latham & Watkins
Employment Law- Host: D.C. Employment Justice Center
Content: Whitman-Walker Clinic Legal Services Program
Law Firm Partner: Crowell & Moring LLP
Family Law- Hosts and Content: The Children’s Law Center, D.C.
Bar Pro Bono Program
Law Firm Partner: Piper Marbury Rudnick & Wolfe LLP
Housing- Host: D.C. Law Students in Court
Content: Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless
Law Firm Partner: Hogan & Hartson L.L.P.
Public Benefits- Hosts and Content: Whitman-Walker Clinic Legal Services
Program, AARP Legal Counsel for the Elderly, Washington Legal
Clinic for the Homeless
Law Firm Partner: Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering
Additionally, probono.net/dc offers content in the following three national practice areas: asylum law, death penalty, and civil rights.
Joan Indiana Rigdon wrote about technology in the legal workplace in the April issue.
