Lawyers donate millions of hours to work for those in need

Las Vegas attorney Bill Curran is tired of people thinking every attorney is a scumbag, and those who work for big firms are only concerned with making money and little else.

To prove his point (lawyers always come prepared to prove their point) he told me about the Pro Bono Institute's Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge.

Under this project - and Curran's firm, Ballard Spahr, is one of the Las Vegas firms involved - law firms with 50 attorneys or more pledge to provide 3 to 5 percent of the firm's billable hours to work for free for the less privileged and the organizations designed to help them.

Other large national firms with Las Vegas offices engaged in the challenge project include Armstrong Teasdale, Holland & Hart and Snell & Wilmer. These big firms can handle more complex cases, Curran said.

Ballard Spahr accepts cases from a variety of referral agencies, explained Mary Gay Scanlon, head of the program for Ballard Spahr.

"It's not mandatory but we strongly encourage each of our attorneys to do 60 hours of pro bono work each year, and that amounted to about 30,000 hours last year," Scanlon said.

When the statistics show that 80 percent of the people who need a lawyer can't get one, this kind of commitment from large law firms ends up helping, she said.

The Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, Nevada Legal Services and the Senior Law Project all screen and refer cases to major law firms willing to take pro bono cases.

Ballard Spahr helped United Way of Southern Nevada with the legalities of buying a new building and selling the old one. The firm has provided lawyers to the Las Vegas Rescue Mission to answer legal questions from the homeless, questions which rarely have simple solutions. Curran, who serves on both boards, suggested these ideas.

A report just released by the Pro Bono Institute showed that attorneys from 134 large law firms completed more than 4.45 million hours of pro bono service for the 2011 calendar year. That's the third highest year since the project began in 1996.

"Although the headline-grabbing news about lawyers tends to focus on conspiracies, arrests and questionable circumstance suicides, I think this report gives evidence that professionalism is alive and well," Curran said, referring to lawyers in Las Vegas.

"Not to denigrate the outstanding efforts made by lawyers in smaller-sized firms, but the big firms can take on matters that sometimes are bigger than typical referrals from local legal services agencies," Curran explained.

"Our firm benefits as well. Young people get trial experience and opportunities that they wouldn't otherwise get in big commercial firms."

Remember the Pennsylvania judges who were sending kids to detention centers in exchange for kickbacks, the so-called "cash for kids" case? Ballard Spahr represented some of the children pro bono, Curran recalled.

Ballard Spahr lawyers are representing a client on death row in Pennsylvania and a case involving rights for deaf prisoners. They've advocated on behalf of equal rights for women athletes and disabled homeowners. Other cases involved low-income inventors needing help with patents and food trucks needing help negotiating regulations.

In Las Vegas, Ballard Spahr represented the principal at Foothill High School who in 2006 cut off Brittany McComb's valedictorian speech after it turned into religious proselytizing. She sued and the case went to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where it was dismissed.

That case came to Ballard Spahr via a former partner's mom who knew the principal, a testament that pro bono cases come from all kinds of sources.

The next time a Las Vegas lawyer is convicted of some wrongdoing or does something unethical or just flat out disgusting (and you know that's inevitable), don't tarnish all the lawyers in town.

Just disrespect the ones who deserve it.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Email her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call her at 702-383-0275. She also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/Morrison.