Editor's Comment: The human league

Personally, I'm ambivalent about pro bono and the wider concept of the legal profession doing charitable work. Partly, that is, because I tend to think the primary job of commercial law firms is to make money and provide an outlet to competitive professionals. There are also grounds for cynicism regarding the supposed commitment from clients that say they want to instruct pro bono-heavy firms and junior lawyers that claim they want to join them. More importantly, it's hard to get that comfortable with the idea of businesses offering services that ought to be, in many cases, provided by the state. Even so, on balance, it's very hard to make a case that extremely wealthy businesses driven by socially-advantaged individuals should not give something back to society.

The point I'm making is that even as an observer of the legal world with a somewhat jaded view of the pro bono bandwagon, it strikes me that it's high time the UK profession stopped fiddling at the edges and committed to the next logical step. That step would be to create a formula, however rough around the edges, to codify, standardise and disclose the pro bono commitments of individual law firms.

The logic for this is obvious: by disclosing and ranking pro bono efforts, law firms get a chance to benchmark their efforts and prospective recruits get something more substantive to judge their potential employer on than a glossy brochure. More importantly, injecting some transparency into the process would, for the first time, give law firms a powerful incentive to commit to the cause out of enlightened self-interest.

It's already worked with financial results, it's beginning to work with diversity and it will work with pro bono if anyone would put together a model and table. Transparency, however imperfectly, delivers - as it has in the US, where such rankings have been widespread for years. There have been a few faltering efforts to try something in this vein in the UK but it always hits the long grass thanks to resistance from individual law firms.

So at the rate we are moving, someone will probably come up with a carbon footprint league for law firms before pro bono gets a look in. Given that pro bono should surely speak to the heart of the profession, this is an odd state of affairs. There's no need to take a melodramatic view of these issues - the future of the profession is not at stake here - but if lawyers collectively want to take the next step, this is it. If not, perhaps law firms should keep their pro bono efforts to themselves.

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