Te TBA Corporate Counsel Pro Bono Initiative Turns Eight
by Jim Barry S
ince the inception of the Corporate Counsel Pro Bono Initiative (CCPBI) seven years ago, the Initiative has raised over $350,000 and tallies from this spring’s Eighth Annual
Gala held on March 1st at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville are not yet final. Each year at the Gala two awards are presented based upon nominations from the Tennessee Legal Community recognizing outstanding Law Firm Pro Bono work and outstanding Corporate Law Department Pro Bono work. At its inception, the CCPBI was intended to foster the ability of Corporate Counsel to perform various kinds of necessary pro bono work to help meet the tremendous need for these services across the state. Te single biggest obstacle to in-house pro bono participation is that most corporate lawyers are specialized in specific areas of law and have not practiced in the areas having the most critical needs since very early in their careers. Te Initiative quickly expanded beyond simply funding training programs to providing funding to programs that established clinics and other programs to utilize that training. In the first seven years of the CCPBI, over $160,000 in grants
have been awarded supporting a wide variety of programming across the state. Tese grants have supported organizations with programs that include: Legal Aid of East Tennessee’s Veteran’s Benefit Clinic; Legal Aid of Middle Tennessee’s Senior Adult Legal Clinic; and various CLEs teaching Pro Bono skill sets across the state. Te Tennessee Justice Center’s TennCare Administrative Appeals Program received a $10,000 grant that helped leverage upwards of $100,000 of pro bono representation. Additionally, grants from this Initiative have supported the ground-breaking website OnlineTNJustice. org which provides free legal advice and counsel to low – income Tennesseans through a straight forward web site staffed by volunteer attorneys statewide. Tis model is now being adopted in many states across the country as a best practice enabling provision of legal services in a convenient and easy way to rural areas statewide. Baker
Donelson was instrumental in setting up and designing the website. Closer to home, the Initiative has awarded grants to Memphis
Area Legal Services for the Monthly Saturday Legal Clinic held at the Benjamin Hooks Central Library as well as the Attorney of the Day Program at the Shelby County Courthouse. Both of these programs provide invaluable service to the greater Shelby County community and provide an excellent opportunity for attorneys individually or in teams to help clients. Another grant recipient for the last several years here in Memphis is the Community Legal Center (CLC) which established Te Immigrant Justice Program (IJP). Te IJP used the funding from the CCPBI to increase its pro bono legal services capacity by training attorneys who don’t normally practice in the immigration field and adding those attorneys to its work force. Te immigration staff attorney at the CLC assigns the cases to attorneys in the program according to their skill and experience level in the field.
Cases
handled through this program include Special Juvenile Immigrant Status cases, asylum cases and other cases involving humanitarian relief. If you would like to learn more or get involved with the IJP, please contact Emily Stotts at the CLC 543-3395 or emilylstotts@
gmail.com. Anyone who would like to help the CCPBI or is just interested
in knowing more can go to the TBA CCPBI website at http://
www.tba.org/corporate-counsel-pro-bono-initiative. For additional information on any of the programs described above including upcoming training opportunities, you can also contact me through the TBA.
Community Legal Center is a non-profit, legal services agency incorporated in 1994 to provide legal services to people of limited means in Memphis and Shelby County and to educate them as to their rights and responsibilities under the law.
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