Training Matters - March 2010
College of Law pro bono
10 years and still going strong
This year The College of Law celebrates its 10th year of providing award-winning pro bono services. We offer a strong programme of activities across our centres, educating students through practice and providing a high quality service to clients in areas of need. This is in line with the commitment to pro bono from the UK’s largest law firms who increased their pro bono hours in 2008/09, as reported in The Lawyer, November 2009.
A qualified solicitor is employed at each of our centres to supervise the pro bono programmes. These range from projects in which students will advise and represent an individual client, to ‘Streetlaw’, where students present a legal topic to a community group or school. As you’d expect there are local variations between centres, for example students attending our London Moorgate centre requested commercial pro bono and now advise on intellectual property through a scheme run with Own-it, an advice organisation for start-up creative businesses.
Students learn a lot from pro bono and the College encourages them to reflect on how they have developed. This may be through using a specific legal skill such as drafting or a more general skill like using supervision effectively. And of course both the College and its students are keen to ensure that their pro bono experience improves their employability. A recent survey of HR directors for Roll on Friday supported this approach, finding that pro bono was the most important factor when considering training contract applications.
Pro bono is an increasingly important aspect of corporate social responsibility for law firms and the College recognises the benefit of providing future trainees with early experience of this area. The quality of our pro bono has a long history of being recognised at the Attorney General’s Pro Bono awards. This year our Birmingham centre’s innovative partnership with the local TUC centre for the unemployed won the prize for best new pro bono activity and Camilla Graham Wood, one of our London Bloomsbury students, won in the individual student category.
Perhaps though the final word should go to the clients who use our services. In 2009, students at our York centre assisted 224 individual clients, one of whom commented,
‘…this has given me hope for the future. I feel at all times very vulnerable. Your help and professional advice gave me a lot of confidence. Brilliant!’
Please visit our website to read more about our award-winning pro bono programme.