The PBEye
November 27, 2012
While in New York for PBI’s National Leadership Convocation and Annual Dinner, CPBO hosted a meeting for pro bono leaders from legal departments in the greater New York City area and met individually with representatives from both local and visiting departments.
CPBO’s in-house pro bono meeting was generously hosted by Citigroup Inc.** Attendees included representatives from Citigroup, International Business Machines Corporation, Time Warner Inc., UBS Wealth Management Americas, and Verizon Communications Inc.**, as well as PBI President and CEO Esther F. Lardent. CPBO Director Eve Runyon led the discussion, which among other points, touched on:
- the benefits of integrating pro bono and corporate social responsibility,
- increasing department-wide participation,
- developments with multijurisdictional practice rule restrictions, and
- crisis response efforts with a specific focus on assisting victims of Hurricane Sandy.
The meeting provided an opportunity for attendees and CPBO to learn from each other and better understand the pro bono landscape of the New York City area. CPBO hopes that this will be just the beginning of the conversation and looks forward to working with local legal departments to increase communications and collaborations across departments.
CPBO also met with representatives from a number of legal departments, including The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Metlife, Inc.**, Nike, Inc., Pfizer Inc.**, and Prudential Financial, Inc. While the conversations varied across departments, CPBO provided recommendations on a number of topics, including how to build a strong foundation for a pro bono program, increasing and maintaining participation, developing signature projects, increasing the impact of the department’s pro bono efforts, global pro bono, strategic pro bono, and collaborations.
If you would like for CPBO to visit your city and meet with your legal department, please let us know by contacting Eve Runyon. CPBO is ready to assist with consulting services whether your pro bono program is just getting started or is a more mature program that has been around for years.
**denotes a Signatory to the Corporate Pro Bono ChallengeSM