The following is an excerpt from 'Pro Bono 2010: Success Stories' that features the collaboration between Community Legal Services, Dechert, and University of Pennsylvania Law students.

How participation goals and signature projects helped five firms ramp up their pro bono programs.

The American Lawyer
By: Claire Zillman
July 1, 2010

NOTE: The results of this year's Pro Bono ranking will be available online at www.americanlawyer.com/probono on July 7.

A law firm isn't the easiest place to change. Just ask the five firms listed below. About five years ago, each initiated a more formal, rigid approach to its pro bono work. The firms replaced weakly implemented, often unspoken, annual performance expectations with clearly defined, emphatically stated hours-per-lawyer requirements. They created signature pro bono projects that would attract--or at least not frighten--transactions lawyers, and they established committees and hired personnel to support their lofty goals.

They got results: When we compared this year's pro bono score for each Am Law 200 firm with its score five years ago, these were the five firms with the biggest increases. (The score is based on two equally weighted factors--average number of pro bono hours per lawyer and the percentage of lawyers with more than 20 hours of pro bono work.) Here's how they did it:

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Dechert

This firm used to have a free-rider problem: Forty percent of its lawyers did 85 percent of its pro bono work. Not anymore. Three years ago, the firm made pro bono work mandatory. Every lawyer must now complete at least 25 hours of pro bono work, says Suzanne Turner, Dechert's pro bono practice chair. In 2005 Dechert was number 56 on our rankings, with a pro bono score of 46.8. This year, it's number three, with a score of 118.5.

"This was not a grassroots effort," Turner says. "This was embraced from the top down. Making the work mandatory forced some lawyers to do pro bono work for the very first time." (In 2009 Dechert lawyers tallied 125.7 pro bono hours on average.)

Although Dechert has high pro bono numbers, Turner says the firm doesn't depend on high-profile cases. "Seventy-five percent of our hours come from small cases for poor people," says Turner. The firm's pro bono bread and butter are landlord-tenant, domestic violence, and educational access and discipline cases, where the biggest gaps in representation exist, Turner says.

A mainstay of the firm's pro bono program is its work in the Philadelphia Municipal Court, where lawyers from the firm's Philadelphia office team with University of Pennsylvania Law School students and Community Legal Services, Inc. (CLS) staffers to represent tenants in landlord-tenant disputes. Approximately 20,000 landlord-tenant matters come through the municipal court each year; about a third of them end up in default because tenants fail to appear in court or lack representation.

The program began in late 2006. Penn law students broached the idea after seeing similar programs work in other cities. The students reached out to CLS, which in turn contacted Dechert. CLS receives cases from the intake sessions it holds every week. These cases are then passed on to Dechert lawyers who have volunteered for the firm's on-call assignment system. Lawyers receive the cases about a week before the trial date and are teamed with one Penn law school student. Dechert lawyers who are new to the program are paired with a more experienced attorney for their first case, but are able to go solo, except for the student, on subsequent disputes.

The growth of the project has been a "slow but steady progression," says Ethan Fogel, a bankruptcy and mergers and acquisitions lawyer who chairs the pro bono committee in Dechert's Philadelphia office. In the project's first full year in 2007, Dechert lawyers handled 70 landlord-tenant cases. They took on 142 cases in 2008 and 100 in 2009. Last year the firm devoted about 3,118 hours to this project.

In conjunction with the Philadelphia Bar Association and the local Court of Common Pleas, Dechert also expanded the project last year through the creation of the Landlord-Tenant Appellate Mediation Program. The program is intended to garner the participation of transactional lawyers, who mediate appeals from the municipal court. Transactional lawyers are interested in it because it requires them to negotiate with the two parties to reach an agreement, which they're accustomed to doing in their everyday practice, Fogel says. In 2009 the firm's lawyers handled 32 mediations.

Dechert is also in the process of adding other law firms to its housing court program. Pepper Hamilton signed on to the program in 2009, Cozen O'Connor has handled a few cases, and Blank Rome and Duane Morris are preparing to take on cases, says Fogel.

"This program has been a hallmark of collaboration right from the start," Fogel says, "The need for representation in these cases is always there."

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