Attorneys fulfill ideals by donating time, services

She had been physically and sexually abused, had fallen into a deep depression and had been rendered incapable of caring for herself. But she had slowly put her life back in order, and Hamburg, an estate planning lawyer and partner at Hamburg & Lyons LLC, helped her legally by filing the paperwork that allowed her to emerge from guardianship.

“Ever since then, this lady sends me a letter every year thanking me,” Hamburg said.

Or maybe he’ll tell you about the elderly woman he helped fight an insurance company after her husband died and the company refused to pay on his life insurance policy. With Hamburg’s help, however, the company paid.

“There’s people all the time who are seeing the short end of the stick and don’t have access to legal help because they don’t have the money,” Hamburg said. “Lawyers can help so much with so little time.”

Most lawyers are involved with some sort of pro bono work, whether it’s representing a needy senior citizen in court or a nonprofit’s interests in the community. In part, that’s because the Rules of Professional Conduct, a code of ethics that all Missouri lawyers must follow, recommend that attorneys give back to their communities. Doing so, however, also is a way for attorneys, who typically enter law school as idealists and exit with staggering student debt, to tap back into that idealism, said Brent Green of Evans & Green LLP.

“Instead of just purely working to pay the bills, you get to wear the white hat,” Green said.

Either way, it’s a side of lawyers that gets short shrift in popular perception.

“Lawyers are, as an industry, very philanthropic,” said Crista Hogan, executive director of the Springfield Metropolitan Bar Association. “People don’t expect that because they have the wrong idea about lawyers.”

In 2006, Springfield’s lawyers became even more philanthropically inclined than usual due to a simple, but effective, program instituted by the Springfield bar.

At each monthly lunch meeting, Hamburg, who won the Missouri Bar Association’s Pro Bono Award in 2006, presented several potential pro bono cases that had arrived at Legal Services of Southern Missouri, an entity whose mission is to provide legal assistance to low-income and elderly individuals. Then he asked for volunteers from the group of lawyers to take on the cases, and results were positive.

In 2006, the number of pro bono cases taken on by SMBA members doubled to more than 100, and the number of new attorneys volunteering with Legal Services tripled to 30, said SMBA’s Hogan.

The need, however, is even greater.

Each year, Legal Services of Southern Missouri, which only considers civil cases from individuals whose income is at or below 125 percent of the federal poverty level – $25,000 for a family of four – receives about 12,000 requests for assistance throughout its 43-county region. Legal Services is only able to take on about 5,000 of them.

That caseload is divided among the nonprofit organization’s 14 staff attorneys, its cadre of Judicare lawyers – who take cases at a significantly reduced pay rate, typically in rural counties– and volunteer lawyers such as those who took on cases pitched at SMBA meetings.

“In the end, it’s a fairly small percentage (of cases that are done pro bono), but it’s a big help,” said Doug Kays, executive director of Legal Services of Southern Missouri. “Local lawyers are really, really good about being willing to take them, but there’s a lot of people we’re turning away and if we could get more lawyers doing more pro bono work, that would help.”

Legal Services culls the cases and usually asks for pro bono help on those that won’t require too many hours and that tap into an attorney’s particular expertise. A guardianship case, for example, is a matter of a few hours of work for an estate-planning attorney.

Fired up

Sometimes, attorneys find themselves fired up by the cases they take on. Kays remembers a particularly exciting example from several years ago that led to an unexpected result.

The case involved an elderly woman who had contracted with a plumbing company for some work and had paid for half the project up front. The plumbers did a shoddy job, and she refused to pay the balance. The company sued.

The elderly woman was assigned a pro bono attorney through Legal Services and won. Legal Services also alerted the Greene County prosecutor’s office and the Attorney General’s office, Kays said, and got the ball rolling “to shut down a fraudulent company because of a pro bono case,” Kays said.

According to Springfield News-Leader coverage at the time, the owners and one employee of Advanced Plumbing and Electrical in Nixa, which operated in Springfield as Alert Plumbing and Electric, were charged with several counts of stealing by deceit and unlawful business practices in relation to several cases involving five southwest Missouri seniors. The owners later received probation and were ordered to pay restitution, and ultimately left the Ozarks.

Of course, that case ended up taking far more than a few hours, but the satisfaction was immense, he added.

In other cases, lawyers take on projects far outside their field of expertise because they want to learn something new or because the situation demands it.

Green normally focuses on commercial litigation and bankruptcies, but when a friend who teaches at an alternative school in Marshfield approached him on behalf of one of her students, he couldn’t say no.

“I did a pro bono divorce, which is way out of my league,” he said. “It was a learning experience, I’ll tell you.”[[In-content Ad]]