Pro bono legal service is valued but also valuable, a Queensland Law Society forum in Brisbane was told yesterday.
Justice Unlocked: Supporting Pro Bono and Access to Justice in Queensland gathered five experts for a two-hour panel presentation and discussion at Law Society House in Brisbane.
Panel chair Elizabeth Shearer said the legal profession was recognising the significant personal and professional rewards of doing pro bono work.
“This is an important role for the profession and it’s useful to think about how much pro bono practice is a tradition and a hallmark of the legal profession,” she said.
The Legal Practitioner Director of Shearer Doyle Law said pro bono services had been “very much a ‘filling the gap’ across the service landscape” but this notion was being challenged by the “professionalisation of access to justice”.
Caxton Legal Service CEO Cybele Koning.
Caxton Legal Service Chief Executive Officer Cybele Koning said the relationship between community legal centres and pro bono lawyers was “a partnership of equals”.
“We see our role as directing pro bono efforts to where they are most impactful,” Cybele said.
“We think that we are the experts in intake and triage about that, and so we see our role as doing that job well for making sure that your engagement is meaningful and it’s reaching those who find it most difficult to access justice.
“We share our deep expertise in working with disadvantaged clients. That means we know how to work in a trauma-informed, client-led, domestic-and-family-violence-informed way and we share that with our volunteers and our pro bono partners in the hope that we are all working in those client-centred ways.”
She said pro bono work at community legal centres offered a range of benefits, including “lawyer development through diverse, meaningful legal work”, the “co-design of innovative legal responses”, and the enhancing of “service capacity, reach and quality”.
Katrina Smith, Executive Director, Information, Advice and Partner Services, Legal Aid Queensland, spoke about Legal Aid’s preferred suppliers, before Rose Mackay, Pro Bono Connect Director, LawRight, spoke about her community legal centre’s role in directing pro bono efforts.
Final speaker, Australian Pro Bono Centre CEO Gabriela Christian-Hare, said her centre encouraged, supported and equipped lawyers across the country to engage in pro bono work, which she said was growing.
Gabriela said a centre survey last year showed practitioners and firms were recognising that pro bono work delivered positives including skill development; workplace pride; improved reputation; and better attraction and retention of staff.
“The results evidence the fact that there is such a range of benefits for the individual lawyers that are involved in the work, and we all appreciate the impact that pro bono participation has on personal wellbeing, but also they really speak to the business case for pro bono as well,” she said.
“Certainly, through all of the conversations that we have with law students around the country, as no doubt many of you are so conscious of, students are graduating with an expectation that if they join a firm, particularly a more sizeable firm, that they will be able to participate in some way in pro bono work.
“We think this is a positive development.”
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