by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
If you ever find yourself in the lobby of Holland & Knight’s Jacksonville office browsing through Equitas, a newsletter about the firm’s pro bono work, you might wonder when the silk stocking firm finds time for its corporate clients. Headlines like, “Thirty-One H&K Lawyers Work to Prevent Deportation of Immigrants to Haiti,” and “H&K Lobbies for Technology Funding for Homeless Shelters,” buttress pictures of guys in suits with inner city kids.
One of the first articles in the most recent issue talks about Jacksonville and the work Holland & Knight does to “make a difference in inner-city neighborhoods.” It’s a story about the legal (and other) work that firm’s lawyers are doing to help FreshMinistries, the ecumenical organization whose mission is to repair broken communities.
While Holland & Knight and other firms get plenty of marketing mileage out of the work they do free of charge, most attorneys are committed to giving back to their communities and look for creative channels where they can apply their specific skills to specific problems.
“And I’d venture to say that most of them are pretty quiet about it,” said Tom Bishop, who runs the Pro Bono team in Holland & Knight’s Jacksonville office when he’s not handling general civil trial work for paying clients.
Holland & Knight has an entire practice group, called the Community Services Team, devoted specifically to pro bono. The group is run out of Washington, D.C. and each of the firm’s other offices has an appointed pro bono partner.
According to Bishop, he sets a goal for every lawyer in the firm and keeps a record of total hours devoted to pro bono.
“There are really two kinds,” said Bishop. “One is a project or area of interest that one of the lawyers might be passionate about. The other is more formal, usually involves teams of lawyers and might filter down from my office or from Washington.”
And Bishop, who was recognized by Holland & Knight as the premier pro bono partner worldwide last year, said that the cases can get pretty complex.
Holland & Knight handled the famous South Florida Church Women case, in which four families were murdered by guerrillas in El Salvador in the 1980s, that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Because Bishop has an interest in international law and human rights, he coordinated much of the effort. Bishop said Holland & Knight spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on that case alone.
According to Circuit Court Judge Jean Johnson, who chairs the 4th Judicial Circuit Pro Bono Committee, a function of The Florida Bar meant to coordinate and monitor pro bono work, lawyers are encouraged to spend a minimum of 20 hours per year on pro bono work. And while everything is voluntary, she said Jacksonville lawyers are enthusiastic.
“This committee is designed to help find projects for lawyers who want to contribute,” said Johnson. “We can arrange for attorneys to help Legal Aid, with criminal defense work, volunteering at places like the Sulzbacher Center or teaching at Florida Coastal Law School.”
The Florida Bar established the pro bono committee two years ago with the goal of identifying and recruiting worthwhile projects.
“We also want to help make the community aware of the kind of work that is being done,” said Johnson, whose 20-person committee meets bimonthly. “And we have about five subcommittees, so there’s always a lot going on.”
Johnson said at their last meeting, the committee decided to create a perpetual pro bono trophy that would go to the law firm that dedicates the most hours to community service, per capita each year. Johnson said based on the reports that every circuit in Florida files annually, Duval County does as well or better than the rest, in terms of total hours dedicated to pro bono.
“Our system is not quite as rigid,” said Joe O’Shields, a shareholder at Rogers Towers Bailey Jones & Gay who was a recipient this year of the “12 Who Care” award given by Ch. 12. “Certainly, all of the lawyers are encouraged to give back, but we don’t really track that stuff because we see it happening every day.”
O’Shields also serves on the board of the Urban League but spends most of his pro bono time handling real estate transactions for the Clara White Mission. The Mission, which has grown from a one-room soup kitchen to an entire downtown block in the last 10 years, grew in part because of the efforts of O’Shields and the real estate team at Rogers Towers.
“I’ve got a list here of over 80 charitable and philanthropic organizations that Rogers Towers has a hand in,” said Tom Helm, a marketing director for the firm. “Whether that means attorneys are serving on the board or the firm has allocated corporate sponsorship dollars or regular pro bono hours.”
Crystal Adkins, a senior council at Holland & Knight, who has been working on the FreshMinistries project, said that lawyers are sometimes frustrated when they can’t find projects that fully utilize their skill sets.
“What FreshMinistries did was create create a program called Building For Life that was a partnership between Operation New Hope, the Fanny Landwirth Foundation and FreshMinistries,” said Adkins. “So the transaction attorneys were really putting together a partnership, like they would for a private company.”
Because Bank of America was also involved, she said, there was finance and title work for the financial services attorneys. And there were complicated grant applications that were filled out by the tax lawyers.
“I never really intended to one of those lawyers who just stayed at the top of a glass tower,” said Adkins. “The fact that Holland & Knight makes it worthwhile, means we enjoy our work.”
Tim McDermott, the managing partner in the Jacksonville office of Akerman Senterfitt, said some of their attorneys sit on boards at Hubbard House, the Pace Center for Girls, the Jacksonville Housing Partnership, First Coast Family & Housing Foundation, the Duval County Housing, We Care of Jacksonville, Inc., Independent Living Resource Center and the Independent Living Foundation and the Sulzbacher Center.
McDermott also said one of their attorneys routinely serves as a judge for Teen Court and Akerman lawyers regularly defend the indigent in custody battles.
Suzanne Downing, the communications director for FreshMinistries, said that non-profits in Jacksonville would not be able to do the work they do for the community if it weren’t for the pro bono legal services that local firms provide.
“It’s often an unseen form of charitable work,” said Downing. “Without it, the programs people count on would be gone.”