Laura Bergus

In celebration of National Pro Bono Week, I’m reminding law students to make a habit now of volunteering. As a student, when I learned about pro bono requirements, I was surprised. In Iowa, the Rules of Professional Conduct [pdf] require a lawyer to aspire to work at least 50 pro bono hours per year. That’s roughly an entire week, every year, devoted to volunteer legal service.  This surprised me because I doubt that many new lawyers, especially young associates at live-and-die-by-the-billable-hour firms can attain this goal. One way to improve the chances of living up to this professional obligation is to make a habit of volunteering now.

Law students are notoriously busy. But so are young lawyers. Making a habit of volunteering now will ease the transition to later professional public service. To prepare for dedicated pro bono work, law students should:

• Review current interests and hobbies to see how volunteer legal service could serve charitable causes in those areas.
• Realize that pro bono work can mean taking on individual clients or working on policy-level or organizational improvement.
• Use the resources at your school to find out what you can do to help. (Here are some examples of schools doing it right, from PSLawNet.)
• Make time to volunteer. Now.

I was recently faced with a state agency that wanted to conduct a rulemaking to help a small class of underserved people. But the issue was relatively rare and narrow, and the agency has much bigger fires to fight every day. I was told outright that the problem was one of priority, and this issue might never make it to the top of the list. When I asked what I could do to help, I was told, “Intern at our office.” This was said in jest, but it got me thinking. This is just the kind of project that I, as a future lawyer with a moral and professional commitment to volunteer legal work, could probably accomplish in about 50 hours…

Thanks to Kate Bladow for asking me to blog about pro bono this week.

This semester is kicking me, hard. But in an attempt to be positive, here’s a list of what’s good, or at least what could be so much worse:

• Having worked makes it much easier to work. I’m a research assistant to a professor who I respect very much. It’s tough enough fitting the work in between classes, other work and being a mom — but at least I know how to ask for a deadline, communicate openly about what I can and can’t do, and be efficient with my time. Serious thanks to my professional career for that one.
• Imagine what I could do if I commit myself this much to something I care deeply about. Every night I get less and less sleep, every day I slog through more and more pages and crank out ever-increasingly-efficient writing, and I think, “Wow, some day I could work this hard for a cause I truly believe in.” I’m pretty driven (who in law school isn’t??), but I didn’t know I could sustain this kind of output. It’s inspiring.
• I’m not writing for a journal, and I’m not doing OCI. These are probably the two best decisions I’ve made to date to safeguard my sanity. Enough said.
• I love copyright class. Ok, I know sooooo little about it, and there are a lot of IP-minded folks at my school (and in that class), but it’s really entertaining and informative. I’m grateful for at least one place where I feel really motivated to learn and participate.

Overall, it’s tiring, taxing, stressful and pushing me to the brink. But today I’m willing to say that the view is pretty good from the edge.

My adventures in helping my law school get real about social media are now being chronicled on socialmedialawstudent.com, a site by third-year law student Rex Gradeless (which is kind of an amazing name for a law student, no?). Rex is known on Twitter as Rex7 and has thousands and thousands of followers, topping mine by a factor of, um, over 100. So, here I’ll keep posting on other interesting minutia of school, and there you’ll find from me (hopefully) what will amount to a replicable model for a tiny gem of bureaucratic progress.