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45 - What Bar Associations Can Do to Improve Access to Civil Justice

from PART IV - CREATING A CULTURE OF SERVICE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2016

Lynn M. Kelly
Affiliation:
The Legal Aid Society in New York City
Samuel Estreicher
Affiliation:
New York University School of Law
Joy Radice
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee School of Law
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Summary

Bar associations continue to be a critical resource for engaging lawyers in pro bono work to help people who cannot afford to hire a lawyer. Lynn Kelly, the executive director of the New York City Bar's Justice Center, describes in this chapter how the Center has expanded its pro bono initiatives to help moderate-income Americans.

With 24,000 members, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (“City Bar”) is a large and prestigious voluntary local bar whose members include lawyers at many of the country's leading law firms as well as in-house counsel and the full range of the legal profession. Members may apply to serve on 160 committees, organized by subject area, that make legislative and policy recommendations. The City Bar Justice Center has a staff of 30 employees and a handful of full-time volunteers and matches 1,000 cases a year with pro bono attorneys it recruits, trains, and mentors as needed. The City Bar Justice Center leverages more than $20 million worth of donated legal time annually and helps 20,000 New Yorkers through staff and pro bono efforts. One of the distinctive features of the City Bar Justice Center is its rapid response to emerging areas of legal needs because it can recruit and quickly train hundreds of pro bono attorney volunteers and host the trainings and legal clinics in the large main meeting hall at the City Bar Association located in midtown Manhattan.

FROM THE POOR TO PEOPLE OF AVERAGE MEANS: AN EVOLVING ROLE FOR PRO BONO WORK

Starting in the 1960s, the City Bar was a forum for major discussions about the obligation of lawyers to assist the poor and was an early supporter of government-funded neighborhood legal services. This thrust was part of the growing attention to poverty within the legal field and society as a whole. It would take some twenty-five years after the City Bar began creating pro bono programs for the poor, for the bar to begin a program targeted to moderate-income clients who could not afford lawyers – now known as “Monday Night Law.”

Volunteer spinoffs from the bar

In the 1960s and 1970s, the City Bar underwent a shift away from its historical position as an elite professional association and toward the view that the profession should respond to unmet legal needs.

Type
Chapter
Information
Beyond Elite Law
Access to Civil Justice in America
, pp. 645 - 655
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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