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Pro Bono Week: Celebrate Giving Back, Become Part Of the N.C. Pro Bono Honor Society

By Sylvia Novinsky

Lawyers, you have another reason to smile this week.

It’s National Celebration of Pro Bono Week, an annual initiative spearheaded by the ABA Standing Committee on Public Service to enhance and expand efforts to increase access to justice for all. The #celebrateprobono effort gives legal communities around the country an opportunity to recognize the good legal volunteer work being done. In North Carolina, we have much to celebrate in this regard.

In January 2017, the N.C. Pro Bono Resource Center established North Carolina’s first statewide voluntary reporting process. This process allows attorneys to report information about their pro bono legal service in 2016. What we heard through that process was encouraging: Attorneys reported more than 25,000 hours of pro bono legal service provided last year. Further, 89.3 percent of respondents reported providing some legal volunteerism, and 20 percent of respondents engaged in all the types of activity included in the rule: pro bono legal service, law improvement activity, non-legal community service, and financial contributions to support civil legal aid.

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Why Report? The Importance Of Sharing Your Pro Bono Engagement

As attorneys, we are tasked with the great and noble responsibility of defending the rule of law – case by case, client by client. While our system is not perfect, the law’s ability to right wrongs, to reconcile conflicts, and to resolve disputes peacefully is a measure of who we are as a people, and the rest of the world looks to our courts as the exemplar of fair and impartial administration of justice.

Nevertheless, this fairness and impartiality only truly exist when they are available to all members of our state, regardless of ability to pay. A failure to provide adequate legal services to those of modest means affects both the economic and social fabric of our society, and does not adequately represent the principles of the profession to which we have been called. It is our duty to fill the gap that exists between this challenging reality and the highest ideal of our profession – equal justice under law for all people.

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