Law Review: Pro bono: Test cases for lawyers and ideals

Like thousands of his peers, lawyer Joseph Sullivan toils every day in a soaring Center City office tower for a firm that counts among its clients some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world.

Sullivan's firm, Pepper Hamilton L.L.P., generates hundreds of millions each year in chargeable hours for its work.

Yet Sullivan himself bills no clients for his time. Nor is he, like so many of his colleagues, under pressure to generate business for his firm.

Sullivan's sole task at Pepper Hamilton is to oversee the firm's practice of providing free legal services to people and institutions who cannot afford to pay the pricey, $600-plus-per-hour charge that top lawyers in Philadelphia command and that is the price of admission for clients into the world of Big Law.

In the last year, Pepper Hamilton lawyers have represented not only Guantanamo detainees seeking release, but also a U.S. Marine accused of war crimes in Iraq; they helped win the Marine an acquittal in a federal criminal trial in Southern California.

They defend poor tenants facing eviction. And Philadelphia homeowners in so-called tangled-title cases where houses have been passed from one generation to the next with little or no paperwork.

That can be a problem when the owners go to the bank for a loan, or have trouble getting government housing assistance because there is no paper trail of ownership.

And the lawyers have represented artists in copyright disputes with huge institutions in legal fights the artists wouldn't have a prayer of winning absent the services of some serious legal firepower.

"The legal system applies to everyone, and everyone should have access to it," Sullivan said. "Meaningful access to the system means having an attorney, but many people cannot afford one."

Sullivan began his career as a commercial litigator at Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis L.L.P. and over time took on more and more pro bono work. When a full-time position opened at Pepper running the pro bono program, he made the jump.

There has been a lot of handwringing recently that greed is ruining the practice of law.

But the substantial pro bono practice at Pepper Hamilton and other law firms suggests that the issue is a bit more complicated than that.

It is undeniable that at the biggest firms, law looks more and more like any other business with each passing day.

The biggest firms in Philadelphia have revenues of $1 billion or more a year, full-time CEOs, and far-flung empires that circle the globe. Because so many firms have overseas offices, foreign exchange rates have become key factors in determining firms' profitability.

On the biggest cases, they can assemble hundreds of lawyers to comb documents, depose witnesses, write briefs, and make oral arguments.

And when things turn sour, as they have now for so many law firms, it's hard to tell the difference between the legal industry and other financially strapped lines of business.

Bodies are quickly tossed overboard when the economy retreats and firms are under urgent pressure to make budget.

Yet for all their seemingly cold-blooded efficiency, the biggest firms persist in the highly uneconomical practice of representing penniless clients. Sullivan said that Pepper Hamilton lawyers last year devoted 34,800 hours to pro bono cases. Assuming that most of the pro bono work was logged by younger lawyers at the lower end of the income scale at Pepper, that is easily more than $3 million worth of legal services provided through the program.

It is certainly the case that there is some self-interest involved here and that the firms expect a fairly immediate payback. That is because pro bono programs provide excellent training for young lawyers in everything from taking depositions to writing briefs to making oral arguments. Clients increasingly are telling firms that they do not want inexperienced yet highly paid junior lawyers on their jobs, so putting them to work on a pro bono case has benefits all around.

Moreover, "it is sometimes nice just to get a short break from fee work and go out and help a tenant who is facing eviction," says Sullivan.

But the program also evinces some of the ideals of the profession, which have shown remarkable resilience in even these self-serving times. Sullivan argues, convincingly I think, that the chief value of pro bono work is that it serves to bolster the credibility of the legal system.

This is the same system, of course, that lawyers need to earn their, in many instances, very handsome incomes. But these are also times in which short-term thinking reigns supreme, and against that backdrop the still-large commitment by law firms to pro bono work seems surprisingly old-fashioned.

"We don't just get up every day and say how much money can we make today, although that is on the minds of many lawyers," Sullivan said. "This [pro bono work] is our version of the Hippocratic oath. We have a legal system that is our sworn duty to uphold and affirm."