The Pro Bono Wire
June 27, 2013
A May 30 program in Minneapolis presented by the Twin Cities Chief Legal Officers Group (CLOG) and hosted by Target Corporation** exemplifies the growing engagement of corporate legal departments in pro bono and the increasingly collaborative and strategic approach that major firms and in-house departments, working closely with public interest groups and the courts, are bringing to the “justice gap” crisis.
Upon returning to Minnesota after attending the 2013 PBI Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., Target’s Senior Counsel, Commercial Transactions David March was inspired to propose a continuing education program designed to bring together legal departments to advance in-house pro bono practice in the state. With the enthusiastic support of Tim Baer, Target’s executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary, and in conjunction with Target’s Consultant, Strategic Initiatives Stephen Lee and other Target volunteers, March worked with Minnesota law firms, other legal departments, public interest/pro bono providers, and the courts to produce a program, Here For Good: Trends and Best Practices in Corporate Pro Bono. The program attracted 250 participants, the largest attendance ever at a CLOG CLE event.
The program title sends an important message. In-house pro bono is not a fad or flavor of the month. It has become an integral aspect of the values and culture of legal departments. The participants included in-house attendees, general counsel, and key staff from U.S. Bancorp**, General Mills, Inc.**, Imation, 3M**, Target, Ecolab, Andersen Corporation, Mayo Clinic**, SUPERVALU, Hormel Foods Corporation, Cargill, Incorporated; Medtronic, Inc.**, Ameriprise Financial, Best Buy Co., Inc.**, and UnitedHealth Group Incorporated**, who came to share their commitment to pro bono service and to learn how to do more sustained and effective pro bono work.
The five-hour program featured a general counsel panel, moderated by Baer and included Jim Chosy of U.S. Bancorp, Jon Oviatt of the Mayo Clinic, and Laura Stein of The Clorox Company**. Next up was a panel of judges including Michael Davis, chief judge of Minnesota’s U.S. District Court, Wilhemina Wright, associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, and Jay Quam, a long-time pro bono champion while in practice and on the Hennepin County bench. Two additional panels featured the leaders of several Minnesota public interest groups, including the Immigrant Law Center, Volunteer Lawyers Network, and LegalCORPS, a transactional pro bono provider, moderated by Jodie Boderman of Faegre Baker Daniels LLP*† and a group of in-house pro bono leaders from UnitedHealth Group, Cargill, and General Mills who provided guidance on the nuts and bolts of launching an in-house program. Although the vast majority of participants were from legal departments, Minnesota’s law firm and public interest community were also well represented. I was honored to deliver the kickoff remarks, focusing on the factors underlying the dramatic increase in organized in-house pro bono as well as the trends and best practices that are shaping the future of in-house pro bono.
Why was this such a historic event? The sheer number of participants was notable, but, for me, the program was striking and forward-looking for several reasons.
First, it underscored the growing movement toward multi-party, collaborative efforts to address legal needs. Minnesota’s legal community has a long history of enthusiastic collaboration, but the environment and discussion at the CLOG program signaled a deeper and more strategic approach to collaboration. There was a recognition that no one entity or segment of the legal profession has the capacity on its own to fully and systemically address the legal problems related to poverty and inequity. Working together, however, law firms, legal departments, public interest organizations, and the courts can create the fairer and more accessible justice system to which we all aspire.
Second, it signaled that although legal departments are, for the most part, new to pro bono and often have fewer potential volunteers and resources than their colleagues at major law firms, they are not “junior partners” in these endeavors. Rather, just as severely resource-limited public interest organizations are essential to pro bono as they bring unparalleled expertise and community contacts to collaborative pro bono work, legal departments and their staff bring new skills, perspectives, and different approaches to pro bono work. As Laura Stein noted, in-house lawyers are problem solvers. Operating at the intersection of business and law, they add value by streamlining and continuously simplifying and improving existing systems and quality of work. They are not only addressing problems and legal needs as they arise but also planning to better address those problems systemically, helping their clients to identify new opportunities, redesigning legal work flow, working smarter and better, focusing on metrics and assessment, and bringing discipline, rigor, and structure to processes rather than randomized approaches.
The larger social justice and social welfare community is increasingly coming to understand the value of collective impact – creating a collaborative effort to address long-standing problems by not only serving individual clients but addressing systemic problems so that resources are leveraged, more clients are served, and the effort “moves the needle” with respect to the issue/problem targeted. Based on the response to the CLOG program, what better place to test this approach to pro bono than Minnesota?
*denotes a Signatory to the Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge®
**denotes a Signatory to the Corporate Pro Bono ChallengeSM
† denotes a Member of the Law Firm Pro Bono Project