A&O Loves Pro Bono
updated on 11 November 2008
National Pro Bono week (10-14 November 2008) is now in its seventh year. During this time, the way in which law firms volunteer free legal advice, and the impact this work has around the world, has changed dramatically. Now, the pro bono work that law firms do involves the sharpest and most innovative legal expertise, conducted at an international level, and its impact is reaching far beyond the legal sector.
The way in which pro bono and community affairs work has evolved is testament to the importance that law firms like Allen & Overy (A&O) place on it. In the last year, A&O's lawyers have donated over 55,000 hours of their time worth over £16.5 million.
It is important to re-emphasise, in the current financial climate, the major commitment that firms like A&O make to pro bono and community affairs work. Senior partner David Morley comments: "Volunteering our legal expertise for free, to those who would otherwise not have access to justice, goes right to the heart of our business. It's not something we only do in the good times - it's something that makes good business sense and has long been part of our culture."
To mark the start of Pro Bono Week, A&O is highlighting via four flagship projects how pro bono work has evolved over the years: from lawyers donating their time at local law centres, to long-term management commitment to community projects, and now to complex, innovative work at an international level to help fight organised crime and promote greater prosperity across the developing world.
David Morley continues: "We're a big international business so we absolutely have to behave in a responsible manner. If we don't, we lose the trust of our clients and our people - and then we don't have a business at all. The way in which pro bono and community work has progressed is really impressive and I'm not sure that, 10 years ago, we could have predicted how far reaching its impact would become. It shows that our people want to give something back, which means we have succeeded in making it part of our culture."
The four projects that follow show how Allen & Overy's pro bono and community affairs work has developed.
Celebrating 10,000 clients at Battersea Law Centre
The oldest of the four projects, and one demonstrating huge success within the traditional model of providing free legal advice to people who couldn't otherwise afford it, is Battersea Law Centre. The centre has just reached the milestone of advising its 10,000th pro bono client, and A&O has supported it for 17 years, donating a total of 27,000 hours of lawyer time worth over £6 million.
For the most vulnerable people in society, good legal advice is very hard to access. Law centres play a vital role in providing legal help for people who do not have the means to pay for it. Michael Ashe, the chief executive of South West London Law Centres (the parent organisation for the Battersea centre) explains: "Law centres' work is rarely glamorous - helping the hardest to reach, most chaotic clients - but the most vulnerable people's problems often take longest to solve."
One of the people helped by A&O lawyers at Battersea Law Centre was a young woman who had been brought to London when she was 12 as part of a human trafficking ring and subjected to horrific abuse. She eventually escaped and went to the police. They issued an Interpol arrest warrant for her abuser, who had fled the United Kingdom. They also supported her claim for asylum because she would have been in danger in her country of origin. However, when she attended the immigration offices she was detained and imprisoned. The Battersea Law Centre gained her release, and eventually her right to remain in the United Kingdom.
A&O lawyer Suzy Hardman has been a volunteer for four years. She says: "I feel very fortunate in the high-quality training and other opportunities afforded to me through working at A&O, so it's really important for me personally to try to make a difference to those that don't have access to legal advice. It's something that many people take for granted. Every time we go down to the Battersea Legal Advice Centre, the difference that the centre is making to people's lives is obvious."
A unique partnership with East End school
A&O has a relationship going back 10 years with the Bethnal Green Technology College, a school in an area where 52% of children come from families on unemployment benefits and 88% have English as an additional language. The connection started with mentoring sessions for pupils and was strengthened in 2005 when the firm helped the school to avoid closure. It has now signed a three-year partnership with scope to help with the governing body, the management team, finance, human resources, premises management, marketing, funding, training for students in employability skills, work placements and lessons in discrimination law, human rights and the youth justice system. This support comes from many different departments across A&O, and this whole-firm commitment shows a new, multi-disciplinary approach to community engagement by a law firm.
The partnership is also a two-way relationship, with pupils from the school helping A&O to promote better access to education and to the legal profession. Pupils from the school created a diversity training programme for A&O, including a fashion show and a cookery exhibition. "It was a huge celebration of diversity," says the school's head teacher Mark Keary. "But it was also about raising expectations. The students spent time in A&O's offices rubbing shoulders with the people who work there and they went away thinking, 'I want some of that'."
Student Tamanna Yasmin, aged 15, now hopes to study law. She said: "The work experience at A&O was really useful. I moved around different departments and met senior lawyers. I was able to ask lots of questions and find out what the job was really about. We also had an Achievement Evening at A&O, which my parents came along to."
New legal tools to fight online child exploitation
The commercial sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is large and growing, but shutting down the illegal websites is extremely difficult. A&O lawyers recently conducted research across 11 European countries (together with White & Case lawyers in Moscow) for the charity Missing Children Europe. This research showed for the first time how payments to these websites can be legally blocked or traced back to the criminals operating them.
Until A&O's work on this, the many stakeholders - banks, credit card companies, internet service providers and law enforcement agencies - faced a legal minefield in disclosing information to the authorities. It was not known whether tracing or blocking the payments would breach the complex web of contract law, data protection law, privacy law and banking secrecy rules in different countries across Europe.
A&O's work has shown that there is a legal basis for doing this, so Missing Children Europe is taking the first steps towards creating a European Financial Coalition of stakeholders against the online sexual exploitation of children. A steering group of financial companies, police authorities and NGOs is now in place and is expected to be supported by funding from the European Commission. Members of the steering group include Visa Europe, MasterCard Europe, PayPal Europe, Microsoft and Europol.
Francis Herbert, president of Missing Children Europe, said: "Financial institutions were poised to take action, but their efforts had been frustrated by complex legal issues. Partnering with A&O gave us access to the expertise we needed in multiple jurisdictions to tackle these issues. Ultimately their report enabled us to start taking action to stop the exploitation of children on the internet."
Microfinance for individuals in developing countries
At the start of Pro Bono Week, A&O announced the launch of an international microfinance group made up of 100 lawyers from 14 offices around the world. The launch of the microfinance group comes after a firm-wide appeal to lawyers with experience and an interest in microfinance to come forward to progress and coordinate the leading work the firm has done in this area.
Microfinance is the provision of loans (known as microcredit) and other basic financial services to individuals in the developing world. The poorest people in developing countries are often denied access to mainstream banking services either because they are deemed too expensive or too risky for the banks to provide.
Microfinance institutions provide loans (sometimes as small as $25) to very poor people, often on the basis of 'group lending', where if one person in the group defaults, the rest of the group has to make up the shortfall. This ensures there is sufficient social pressure to ensure a high level of repayment - 97% on average.
A&O has led the way in this complex area having worked on numerous microfinance deals, including the two landmark BOLD microfinance deals, which together provided over $200 million of loans to microfinance institutions in 17 countries.
The firm has now brought together over 100 experts from 14 offices to launch a dedicated microfinance practice and to progress its work in this area (much of which will be pro bono but some will be commercial fee-earning work).
For more information on all A&O’s pro bono efforts, please contact Jane Sandilands ([email protected]), Guy Nicholls ([email protected]) or Sarah Fitzpatrick ([email protected]).
