Making a commitment.

The partner in charge of Holland & Knight's Community Services Team explains how expecting each of the firm's lawyers to perform 50 hours of pro bono service is good for the lawyers, their communities, and the firm

Our commitment to pro bono work at Holland & Knight began--as is true of most things at Holland & Knight--with the efforts of former ABA President Chesterfield Smith to motivate the profession and our firm to fulfill our historic obligation, originally articulated in what we used to call the canons of ethics, to provide free legal services to those who needed them and could not afford them.

In 1989 our managing partner, Bill McBride, building on that great tradition, made the decision to institutionalize and structure our firm's pro bono commitment. First, we created a firm-wide Community Services Team with a substantial annual budget to do major pro bono cases. Next, the firm's Directors Committee adopted a formal written pro bono policy for the firm.

Our firm's pro bono policy provides that the firm expects to contribute annually an amount of time equal to approximately three percent of the firm's billable hours to pro bono work. This expectation translates into an average of approximately 50 hours per year per lawyer. Stated in terms of the time value of that work, the contribution for this 800-lawyer firm now amounts to approximately $6.5 million annually.

The firm expects that a majority of both partners and associates will personally participate annually in pro bono work--and they do. Because every lawyer in the firm who does pro bono work does it pursuant to this formal pro bono policy, all approved pro bono work is considered in evaluation, advancement, and compensation decisions within the firm.

The Community Services Team is staffed by myself as the partner in charge of that team, along with a full-time lawyer who rotates through the Community Services Team on a multi-year basis. The Community Services Team has allocated to it a substantial fund for advancing the costs that are necessarily associated with major litigation and major pro bono projects.

There is a pro bono partner in each of the firm's 17 offices. Each pro bono partner, in addition to his or her regular caseload, is in charge of the approval process, budgeting, and ease management for the pro bono work in that office. The pro bono partners encourage a wide variety of pro bono work indigenous to each of our 17 offices, and ensure that pro bono work is, to the extent practicable, evenly distributed throughout the office and consistent with the firm's expectations with respect to both its financial goals and its pro bono goals.

Half of our pro bono commitment is allocated to the Community Services Team for major cases, and the other half is allocated to the individual offices for individual casework. We receive quarterly budget-to-actual reports. We have come in at or near budget every single year for the last nine years, with the exception of one year when, late in the year, we were asked to handle a death penalty case for Joseph Spaziano.

At that time, we knew that if we were to take the Spaziano case we would "bust the budget." Mr. Smith believed that the integrity of the Florida justice system was at stake in the Spaziano case and convinced Bill McBride that we should "bust the budget," if necessary, that year to do that case, and we did so, working together with James Russ, a remarkably talented criminal defense lawyer. Mr. Spaziano's conviction was reversed by a very courageous trial judge, and that decision was unanimously upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.

I believe that this kind of financial accountability, together with a structured, institutionalized pro bono program, working within the context of a budget, is what produces the political consensus within our firm. The great fear of law rims about pro bono work is that it is a deep, dark hole from which you can never return. On the contrary, if pro bono work, like any other legal work, can be annually budgeted and tracked, partner anxiety is greatly relieved.

This structure for pro bono work at our firm has allowed us to do major casework such as the Spaziano death penalty case, the Rosewood case involving the destruction of a small African-American town in 1923 and compensation to the survivors of that massacre, and major class action litigation including a housing discrimination claim on behalf of approximately 5,000 racial and ethnic minorities in Miami, a class of approximately 25,000 children in the custody of the state who need mental health services and are not receiving them, and a class of approximately 8,000 low-income, high-risk pregnant women who were subjected to medical experiments without their knowledge or consent. At the same time, our lawyers in each of our offices enjoy individual casework with all of its rewards.

How does such a commitment to pro bono work affect the culture of the modern law firm? During the decade of the 1980s, we witnessed the evolution of the modern law firm, which is a phenomenon distinctly and generationally different from the law firms that my father and Chesterfield Smith knew when they began practicing law in the 1940s. Such a law firm is highly structured; resplendent with modern technology; and highly computerized, with well-developed management information systems and data retrieval systems, all providing accountability and sophisticated methodologies for distribution of profits.

The modern law firm is perhaps the most capitalist of all enterprises in our modern American economy. An intricate system of accounting for revenues, profits, and distribution to partners marks every large law firm today. The modern law firm has been only half-facetiously described as a "lean, mean billing machine where you eat what you kill."

The American Lawyer annually publishes the "Am Law 100" report, detailing who is where with respect to gross revenues, revenues per lawyer, profits per partner, compensation per partner, profitability index, size, and, remarkably, pro bono work.

In our view, this modern law firm--this rather pure model of a genuinely capitalist organization--contains within its very nature the distinct potential to "crash and burn," if left unchecked. In our view, what we call the modern law firm, if it is to survive and pass something of value on to the next generation of lawyers, must find ways to contain and redirect its own potential for self-destruction. If the only goal of such an organization is in fact to "eat what you kill," and there is no higher ethos, the potential for "crash and burn," which we witnessed throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, seems to us to be foreboding.

I would like you to think today for a few moments about a new and somewhat different answer to the question: "Why should lawyers do pro bono work?" We traditionally answer this question with a host of very good reasons. We cite the critical unmet needs for legal services for millions of Americans who live at or below the poverty line. We insist that their access to the justice system is essential in a nation that proclaims a commitment to equal justice under the law. We tell people that this is very fulfilling work. We believe pro bono work will restore public confidence to a profession under public assault at almost every turn.

All of these reasons for doing pro bono work are good and even noble. But we have tended to focus much of our thought about an answer to this question from another perspective. We believe that given some of the disturbing tendencies of the modern law firm--this pure capitalist model--we need to seed our law firm with people who believe that there are things about the profession and things about the practice of law that are more important than making money For that reason, it is very important to us to get as many lawyers as possible in our firm to do pro bono work and, to the extent practicable, to see those lawyers rise to positions of influence within our law firm.

One can see this philosophy evident in the Am Law 100 statistics about our law firm. In July 1997, when we were a mere 477 lawyers and not the 800 lawyers we are now, we were the 17th largest law firm in the nation. Interestingly, we were also number 17 in pro bono work. But we had significantly lower ratings on the profitability index, in gross revenue, in profits per partner, in compensation per partner, and in revenue per partner.

On the other hand, during the last nine years--the same time when we structured our commitment to pro bono work--we grew every year and increased profit per partner every year. These last nine years have been the best economic years in the history of the firm. By any reasonable measure, our partners are very well compensated and so are our associates and our staff.

Like any other law firm, we want to improve our financial well-being by increasing (but not maximizing) profits per partner every year, but we are not distressed by the comparative Am Law 100 financial numbers.

On the contrary, those numbers send a clear message to lawyers who want to work with us, both those who join us out of law school and those who come to our firm as lateral partners or associates. That message is that we intend to--and we do--make a very good living here at the firm, but there are values in addition to making money here.

That is a message that we clearly and deliberately send to people whom we recruit to come with our law firm. That message affects the kind of people who come to work at our law firm. It is perhaps Bill McBride's best marketing idea that he would define our law firm in many ways by the firm's commitment to pro bono and other civic and charitable work in an effort to attract, retain, and promote to leadership within the firm like-minded--and, more importantly, like-spirited--lawyers. Lawyers, that is, who want a good professional life surrounded by other lawyers with values they share.

Our commitment to pro bono work is not the only way we develop and nurture this corporate ethos. All lawyers in our firm know that over and above each lawyer's financial contribution, values matter in our firm. Each lawyer is annually and anonymously rated by every other lawyer in his or her office--and by staff, including secretaries--for character, competence, and commitment in addition to financial contribution. (You would be amazed at how few lawyers scream at their secretaries anymore.)

The managing partner uses this character, competence, and commitment data in making compensation decisions. The managing partner also collects and uses data on pro bono work and civic and charitable work in making compensation decisions. The result is that, relatively speaking, there is very little talk or grumbling about compensation at our firm.

Everyone who has worked at more than one law firm knows that you can easily measure the quality of the professional life at a law firm by how much or how little talk there is about compensation.

If the culture of the firm can focus lawyers' attention on the quality of their professional lives--where compensation is just one aspect, albeit an important aspect, in the life of the firm--then we may be able to tame that pure capitalist beast that we call the modern law firm. Our experience is that pro bono work can be a very important part of that cultural revolution.

So I would suggest to you that pro bono work has the potential to save us from ourselves and from some of the more troubling proclivities of the modern law firm. It can help us shape the philosophy and the ethos of the law firm, help us find our future leaders, help us recruit the kind of men and women with whom we would like to spend the rest of our professional lives, and, most importantly, help us leave something behind--beyond a capital asset base--when we turn over our profession and our law firms to the next generation of lawyers who follow us.

Stephen F. Hanlon of Tallahassee has been the partner in charge of Holland & Knight's pro bono department since its creation in 1989. The firm's public service efforts earned Holland & Knight the 1990 Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice's Law Firm Commendation, the 1996 Robert F. Mullen Pro Bono Award from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the 1997 ABA Pro Bono Publico Award. This article was adapted from remarks made at last year's ABA Pro Bono Leadership Forum.