Expanding Access to Justice

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:02 -0500

by Marcos Fuchs

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Until a few years ago, there were no legal firms in Brazil that offered free services to people in need. The Pro-Bono Institute has created a new legal tradition in São Paolo, convincing major law firms to donate their legal services and connecting them with NGOs in need of legal services. The Institute has recruited about 140 lawyers and is offering a variety of free services to all kinds of NGOs, including support for important human rights cases. It has achieved a rapid change in attitude in the legal community and pro bono work has become steadily more popular. This workshop demonstrated how to develop pro bono services in the professional legal community to give NGOs and victims of human rights abuse access to more frequent and better legal services.

The expression pro bono publico is Latin for "for the public interest." The expression is now most commonly used to refer to lawyers or other professionals who offer free services to assist people in need or to promote the public interest. By institutionalizing mechanisms to facilitate such public service, the basic human urge to volunteer time to help those in need can become an integral part of the ethic of an entire profession. The pro bono relationship provides a great benefit to both parties: The clients receive services they might not otherwise afford, while the lawyer receives the satisfaction of using his or her skills for a good cause. As a result of this mutual interest, in some countries special institutions have been created to promote free legal assistance for poor people and charitable nonprofit organizations.

Institutionalized pro bono activities are very strong in places like the United States, Australia and Europe, where most of the top law firms have their own pro bono projects providing assistance to the poor, to immigrants and to NGOs. The institutionalization of pro bono services has a direct benefit for human rights. For one thing, human rights NGOs themselves can benefit from such free services. Secondly, the pro bono movement is responding directly to an often-denied human right: the right to a lawyer. Volunteer lawyers are often interested in providing assistance to victims of abuses. In Brazil some of the most respectable NGOs started their activities during the dictatorship (1964-1989) by assisting victims of the repressive government. Many lawyers were providing free legal support to people detained for political reasons.

Unfortunately, there is huge potential being lost. There is a general openness in the legal profession to offering free services to those who need it most. Yet a great many countries with significant and strong legal establishments have no institutionalized process by which people in need can be linked to volunteer lawyers. Despite the Brazilian experience of legal support to victims of repression, until we created the Instituto Pro Bono in 2001 there was no institution with a mandate and capacity to bring together lawyers offering their services with organizations who might need them. More importantly, there was no built-in ethic or professional expectation that lawyers should offer such services. Unlike in the United States, where it is a basic assumption of the legal profession that a firm will offer a certain percentage of its time pro bono, in Brazil and many other countries this is unheard of.

Voluntary service is a purely personal matter, not related to the firm or to the profession as a whole. The Instituto Pro Bono was created to change this reality: to institutionalize the ethic of pro bono service within the Brazilian legal profession and to create an efficient system for bringing together pro bono lawyers with clients in need. In the long run, we believe that this step will increase access to justice for all Brazilians and assist many worthy NGOs. We want to share this experience with you, as we believe the institutionalization of pro bono services is a step that could have a similarly positive effect in many other countries where it is not yet common practice.

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Expanding Access to Justice