If you are interested in law either academically or as a career option, you may have heard the term ‘pro bono’, and you may have looked into what it involves. Pro bono work involves the provision of free legal advice, usually delivered by law firms and charities. However, universities are also starting to offer pro bono services, with some institutions opening legal advice ‘clinics’ to the local community and encouraging students to get involved. If you have not considered taking part already, this article will present some key reasons why you should.
Helping People
The most important thing about doing pro bono work is providing an invaluable service to people who need it. This need for free legal advice is particularly crucial at this point in time, given the current socio-legal landscape. In recent years, access to justice has been massively hindered by the Legal Aid, Sentencing, and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO). The LASPO brought about significant cuts to legal aid, narrowing the bracket of people eligible for legal aid, and making it harder for those eligible to know how to access it (read more about this here). To make matters worse, the pandemic has created large backlogs in the justice system and made legal aid even more difficult to access. These factors, among many others, mean that many vulnerable individuals often fall through the net.
By working pro bono, you can actively make a difference to some of these people. Once trained, you will be able to use your knowledge of the legal system and various specific areas of law to provide tailored advice that will help each client with their unique problems. Through this, you may be able to open up options and avenues that your clients have not thought of yet, improving their chances of finding viable ways to address their legal issues. The advice that you give can make a significant difference to clients who have little to no legal knowledge, or whose lives have become dominated by their legal troubles. Your work will help you make a tangible positive impact on the lives of your clients and provide some relief to those who have been left out by the LASPO and the pandemic.
Improving Skills
To provide a quality service to your pro bono clients, you will need to develop and hone some crucial skills which will prove very useful should you decide to pursue a career in the legal profession. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, you will improve your client-facing skills. Legal issues are stressful and complex, so your clients will likely be distressed and confused by the problems that they bring to you. As such, a key aspect of pro bono work is learning how to listen to and empathise with your clients so that you can fully understand their problems. By doing this, you will quickly learn how to build trust with your clients, making it easier to obtain relevant information and use this to provide effective advice. These client-facing skills are extremely useful in any role that requires you to talk to clients and, in the context of pro bono, they make your clients feel valued and heard when they come to you for advice.
Another extremely useful skill that you will develop is the ability to research new areas of law under time pressure. When providing a client with advice, you must make sure that you are providing an accurate and up-to-date account of the current state of the law surrounding their legal issue. This becomes more difficult when you remember that each client you meet may have a unique problem relating to a completely different area of law, requiring you to do a significant amount of detailed research. To complicate matters even further, you also need to make sure that any advice you offer is delivered promptly to avoid missing deadlines or letting your client’s situation devolve further. Balancing these two priorities can be difficult, but doing so will encourage you to become an adaptable and resourceful problem-solver. As you work with more clients, you will become more comfortable with quickly identifying useful resources and extracting the key points from them that will inform the advice you offer. These skills are invaluable in any line of work, but they will be particularly relevant should you decide to pursue a legal career.
Opening New Avenues
Pro bono work also offers some excellent opportunities to determine and build your career path. One interesting aspect of pro bono work is that it encompasses aspects of many different professions. Throughout the course of a few months, you may find yourself working cases about government procedures, healthcare, diversity and equality, human rights, the environment, or any number of areas of law among other things. This degree of variation allows you to experience a range of real scenarios that you may not have encountered otherwise, broadening your perspective on the career avenues available for you to pursue. Furthermore, this varied workload will push you to work with other charities and organisations to find solutions to your client's issues. Through working with these organisations and signposting your clients to them, you will gain a better understanding of the work they do and whether this work may be of interest to you.
Another unique facet of pro bono work is the opportunity to directly contribute to causes that matter to you. As you work with clients and the organisations that help them, you may find that some cases resonate with you. Pro bono work can be emotionally challenging and, through doing work of this nature, you will not only experience a great deal of personal growth, but you will also identify how you can make a change. Many pro bono organisations are heavily involved in campaigns and activism, so you can get involved by contributing your experiences and efforts toward these projects. You may even decide that some of these causes become so important to you that you wish to build a career around them. Whatever the case, pro bono work will allow you to positively influence the lives of your clients and, in doing so, it may reveal ways that you can extend this influence to the wider community too.
How to Get Involved
If any of these reasons sound interesting, useful or important to you, then you should certainly consider participating in pro bono work. The only thing you need to do is find a project that suits you. For example, you may find that your university law school runs a pro bono clinic that you can get involved in. These projects are usually advertised by the law school itself and, sometimes, they can contribute credits toward your degree. Alternatively, you may want to branch out and volunteer for a well-known legal charity such as Citizens Advice. Once again, your university may have links with specific legal charities but, if they don’t, you can always search for one in your area that is looking for volunteers (you can find lots of different pro bono initiatives here). However you choose to get involved, your pro bono work will have a positive impact on your community while providing you with some truly unique experiences.
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