Case study: Moral matters

Reed Smith Richards Butler LLP recently created the role of UK pro bono and community manager to handle the issue and harmonise operations in the wake of an international merger.

By Chris Marshall, pro bono and community manager, Reed Smith Richards Butler LLP

Pro bono and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are topics of significant interest in the legal profession, although neither is new. An important challenge faced by firms practicing internationally lies in harmonising the different concepts of each of these areas that have evolved around the world and which now contribute to the divergent cultural, social and professional contexts within which global firms routinely practice. Key to this are the questions of structure, autonomy, definition and the balancing of a firm-wide culture with regional autonomy.

The current marketplace

Pro bono is now seen as something at the core of most large law firms – increasingly on the wish list drawn up by clients, as well as being an important part of the recruitment round. It can also be a real factor in associate satisfaction. But while this may be the position in the UK and USA, beyond that the picture varies by region. Pro bono may be considered something that ‘we just don’t talk about’. Alternatively it can be seen as undermining fellow legal practitioners – doing work for free that would otherwise form the bread and butter of other lawyers.

Even across the US and UK a different emphasis has been given. Strong and emphatic support by the American Bar Association (ABA) through the Law Firm Pro Bono Project, together with development by the American Lawyer magazine, has seen pro bono take on a much more public profile. Many firms with offices in the US are signatories to the challenge, agreeing to perform the equivalent of either three or five per cent of billable hours for such clients. Technically this need only apply to offices in the US, but some, Reed Smith included, choose to make it a firm-wide goal.

The picture is slightly different in the UK. 2006 saw the tenth anniversary of the Bar Pro Bono Unit, and 2007 sees the same benchmark being achieved by LawWorks (formerly the Solicitors’ Pro Bono Group). Additional prominence was added with the creation of National Pro Bono Week in 2001 – an event that moves from June to November this year to enable students to participate more fully. Although professional bodies have played a role here, as yet there is nothing similar to the ABA Challenge with targets that firms all have to reach. On a slightly different note LawWorks’ Million Hours website does set a collective goal of logging a million hours of legal pro bono in the UK (www.millionhours.org.uk).

How does CSR compare? Certainly, it is not as well entrenched as pro bono. There may not be a UK pro bono definition, but there is a clear sense of what it looks like across firms.

The same cannot necessarily be said of CSR. While many will hold to the idea of being a good corporate citizen, not everyone will have the same idea of what this means. For some, CSR may be more external than internal, placing the emphasis on working with the communities where they practice or are based. Others will focus on the internal issues, stressing workplace health, safety and equality issues and concerns. Ensuring that suppliers (and clients) behave in a positive and socially-responsible manner may also figure, and in the current market environmental issues are becoming more of a given.

Overall CSR is a growing phenomenon. With firms starting to prepare CSR reports, and benchmarking their contributions, over time CSR looks set to reach an equal, or maybe even a more significant, footing than its longstanding cousin.

Defining the approach

As in any other multinational business, it is important for everyone in global law firms to have a sense of being part of a greater whole. There will always be differences between offices, but everyone should feel they are part of the same firm; that there are things that define where they work.
For clients too, there is a need to feel they are getting the same service delivered working with a lawyer in the Chicago office as if they were working with Paris or London. This must always be balanced against allowing local offices the freedom to act in their own ways, in their own job and work market.

The same challenges apply with pro bono. At Reed Smith Richards Butler it was decided it was important to draw together some core strands of the different programmes, while also allowing individual offices a lot of latitude as to how they worked within these.

The pro bono strands selected were:

Developing partnerships with students and/or clients;
Human rights;
International;
Supporting the vulnerable.

These were chosen to build on existing strengths from different areas within the firm. For instance, the pro bono team wanted to build on UK offices’ success working with students. Existing partnerships include a Liberty letter-writing clinic with the supervision of the legal-advice centre for Mile End run by Queen Mary, University of London, as well as a longstanding clinic for the homeless with the College of Law. A core focus across the firm is looking to reach out to local law students to see how they too can be integrated into pro bono practice.

Similarly, there is a desire to build on current client partnerships and see how initiatives can be rolled out on a more general basis. These include work with GlaxoSmithKline plc on providing legal assistance to the elderly, and with Tate & Lyle on working with those needing support with benefits. The team also saw great potential to draw together the existing international work done, particularly by the Washington and London offices, so that it could build up a firm-wide strength. This has seen opportunities with the United Nations, International Development Law Organisation and Advocates
for International Development across the firm.

The function of these strands is not to exclude pro bono work and local offices are encouraged to build programmes around them. The team’s goal is that practice in each office will gradually grow increasingly harmonised, but that new ideas will also continue to emerge.

Governing pro bono

Across the firm individual offices are at different stages of developing programmes and integrating CSR into their day-to-day work. Historically Reed Smith has worked very much with a committee model, pulling together full-time pro bono staff with local co-ordinators and champions in each office.

Following the merger there was significant discussion about how the new committee should look and what structure best suited the needs of US, European and Middle East offices. Much of this focused on the question of identity and the need to find a suitable mechanism to share best practice and foster new initiatives. An easy outcome was the expansion of the firm-wide committee to include each of the new offices. A more difficult question was whether something more was needed.

The view taken was that there was a strong case for a more targeted European approach and a key part of this would be the creation of a new full-time dedicated pro bono and community-support position. To date the focus of the European grouping has been to look externally, at regulatory reform, and to participate in local cross-firm pro bono round tables.

Working locally

Across the firm the role of the firm’s pro bono committees is not to dictate the work done by individual offices or regions, and they have no role in the selection of new matters. They also have no involvement on a macro level. Individual office or region pro bono coordinators take the lead.

What to do though when difficult cases arise? The nature of pro bono is that it can involve engaging with political and contentious causes. This can lead to attack, such as those made against the firms assisting Guantanamo detainees, which includes Reed Smith. In that instance the lawyers involved have received significant positive feedback from clients. There will be causes where that may not be the case, however, and a decision has to be taken on how to balance the moral and social need to engage with difficult causes with the strictures of a commercial business.

The Reed Smith way of doing this has been to draw heavily on full-time and senior pro bono staff. A small group, including the head of the firm-wide pro bono committee, the pro bono partner for Europe and the Middle East, together with the US and European full-time pro bono staff, acts as a touching point to review contentious issues and conduct due diligence. Much of the time the issue need go no further than that. If more is needed the firm has a dedicated pro bono brief within the global senior-management team as well as strong interest from firm-wide managing partner Greg Jordan.

The CSR brief

The CSR brief has been handled slightly differently. Many of the functions that form part of CSR – including diversity, HR and workplace issues, supplier management and community and pro bono - fall within different teams’ briefs. These include a mixture of global, local and regional teams depending on the area.

In part this has been as a result of the firm’s sense of what being a ‘good citizen’ entails, which has evolved over time in line with client perceptions and the extension of its global reach. As a result of always seeing a strong need to support and work with its local communities – a requirement
that is part of the partnership plan – there had traditionally been more ofa local focus. In a larger firm, however, would this still meet management needs? The sense was that something new was needed.

To ensure a consistent approach and to make sure the firm’s commitments are being met is a shared role between firm-wide management and the coordinating CSR committee. The committee pulls together the work already being done in each of these areas and brings in management, for instance the UK Managing Partner, to give a good overview. It acts as a forum for those officers who work in each of these areas to update people on what they are doing.

The committee’s work, together with real enthusiasm from lawyers, has also led to the development of a growing environmental brief with provision being made for local champions in each office who will play a key role in delivering local action plans. Again this has a global senior-management brief.

Creating a new role

For some time the firm had employed a full-time dedicated senior pro bono champion in the US. Chris Walters, the firm’s Senior Pro Bono Counsel, turned to the role from being head of the Philadelphia Litigation Group. Recently a part time West coast-coordinator role has been created, with Jayne Fleming, an associate in Oakland, taking on the role. These roles had demonstrated the benefits of, and need for, full-time positions, a rationale that was to be strengthened as the firm expanded. The question for management then was whether the merger necessitated a new post, and if so, where it should be located.

Harmonising pro bono had been an issue in the merger discussions, and the creation of a new role was one of the issues on which management focused in the run up to the 1 January 2007 roll-out date. With a strong firm-wide commitment and a desire that the whole firm should work towards a target of pro bono hours equivalent to three per cent of billable hours, the new role was given the go-ahead. As UK Managing Partner Tim Foster explained at the time, the decision reflected “Reed Smith Richards Butler and overall Reed Smith’s deep commitment to making a contribution to the world in which we live, including our local communities, and to enabling those who work at the firm to do the same”.

With a full-time equivalent in place in the US, it was decided the post of Pro Bono & Community Manager would be located in the UK with a brief to encourage, support and motivate people to do such work across the UK and the whole of Europe and the Middle East. The reaction to the new role has been positive from partners, practice-group leaders and management, and it has acted as a stimulus to boost pro bono interest across the firm.

Chris Marshall is pro bono and community manager at Reed Smith Richards Butler LLP. He can be contacted at cmarshall@reedsmith.com