Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2026

Abstract

Recent settlements between corporate law firms and the Trump Administration, consisting of donations totaling nearly $1billion in free representation, have brought law firm pro bono to the fore. Pro bono has been institutionalized in corporate law firms since the turn of the 21st century. Pro bono evangelists and corporate law firms contend that pro bono increases access to justice and protects individual rights. Scholarship on pro bono has not challenged these claims, focusing instead on managerial and organizational incentives that could increase the number of hours corporate firms devote to pro bono. Given the prominence of corporate law firm pro bono as a site of professional virtue, an examination of pro bono’s features and functions is long overdue.

This Article is the first to take on this challenge. It makes several original contributions: First, it shows that in the last three decades the hours of corporate law firm dedicated to pro bono have reached a stasis point that no amount of effort from pro bono advocates is likely to change. The article next turns to the claims that pro bono improves access to civil justice and safeguards individual rights. Corporate law firms’ proximity to the interests of their paying clients prevents them from taking cases that would equalize the playing field in adversary proceedings. Moreover, the challenges of ameliorating access to justice are rooted in systemic failures of the civil justice system that cannot be reached by providing lawyers to clients in routine cases. Turning to the claim that pro bono furthers civil rights, the Article notes that pro bono collaborations between corporate law firms and civil rights organizations are born of dependence on corporate law firm largesse and limited by pragmatic considerations.

The Article then interrogates the deep normative attachment that access to justice advocates, scholars, and corporate lawyers alike have to pro bono. It asks a simple question that is deceptively hard to answer: What is it about doing pro bono that is supposed to make lawyers more ethical? The answer it proposes is that pro bono, instantiated in the representation of vulnerable people and rights under attack, mobilizes a traditional professional ideology tied to the American’s lawyer’s starring role in the adversary system. In their pro bono cases, corporate lawyers can act as zealous advocates on behalf of the marginalized and the downtrodden and connect their work to longstanding ideals about the role of lawyers in the American justice system. Pro bono thus reinforces the ideology of neutral partisanship, which also informs the representation of paying clients. In the last section, the Article argues that neutral partisanship, legitimated through adversarial processes intended to yield a public realm of legality, is not justified in the context of current transactional practice, which focuses on designing transactions to assist corporate clients to opt out of public systems of accountability. The Article concludes by urging readers to reconsider the status of corporate law firms as elite exemplars of professional virtue.

Publication Citation

74 UCLA L. REV. (forthcoming 2027)

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