We sat down with Caitlin McLean (solicitor and pro bono coordinator) and Steven Graham (solicitor), Scottish Power to discuss how they started co-ordinating their pro bono output.

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How long has your organisation had a pro bono committee?

We’ve been doing pro bono work for three years but really focused on it for the last two. It really started from our parent company, Iberdrola, at a global level and then filtered down to the different jurisdictions. Originally, there was a single point person, which was one of the lawyers in the team, but it became clear that it was too much for one person to do a top of their day job, so we now have a co-ordinator for each jurisdiction, and a committee of people who divvy up the work between us. We’re all volunteer lawyers doing this in addition to our day jobs.

How are you organised? 

There are six of us and we called for volunteers who wanted to be on the committee. We are an in-house legal team, but we have different legal functions in each of our areas of business. We have volunteers for the committee from each of those business functions, so it’s a good split across the various teams, which also gives you different expertise in terms of skillsets.

 

The UK committee has fortnightly meetings and then there are also fortnightly meetings within Iberdrola, which has a global pro bono committee and representatives for the UK and the US. We have fortnightly calls with them to keep up with what they're doing from a global perspective and update them on what we're doing in the UK.

 

How do you define “pro bono”?

We do have a company definition but we've tried to partner with various different law firms on projects so it's all defined in that agreement with the firm.

 

Basically, as far as legal business is concerned, we're encouraged to provide on a voluntary basis and free of charge, sustainable legal advice of the highest quality contributing knowledge and experience to non-profit entities that pursue purposes and who do not have the resources to meet the costs of that advice.

 

How do you source projects?

We have understandings with various law firms where we take ideas about pro bono to each other and it’s definitely a two way street. So there will be some initiatives that the law firm may have set up already, or some things that they set up with us. Scottish Power also has its own relationships with charities through its grant-giving foundation and we saw an opportunity there to speak to them and offer pro bono free legal advice to those charities that we already have relationships with. In addition, we are also signed up to receive TrustLaw alerts, so we also use cleaning houses like that.

 

Do you have an internal approval process for projects? 

Nothing official. A project comes to the committee and we may speak to our (very supportive) General Counsel for general oversight. We are well established now, so can do repeat projects.

 

How do you guarantee employee engagement?  

Everyone on the team has done pro bono work because it’s built into everyone’s objectives which then feeds though to performance ratings at the end of the year in terms of meeting those objectives.

 

Do you track data around your pro bono hours?

Everyone who does pro bono work records their hours on a spreadsheet that’s based on a global template and we report that up to the global committee. We send out regular emails to remind people to record their hours.

 

How do you reward pro bono within your organisation?

Although pro bono work is mandatory, at the end of the year there tends to be a bit of a celebration of how many areas we've covered and how many projects we've been involved in. Naturally there's always a bit of comparison between the different jurisdictions, which helps to keep everyone most of us motivated!

 

What’s the biggest challenge to doing pro bono work?

Similar to all other in house teams, it’s around insurance and being able to do things ourselves. We rely on partnering with external law firms to carry out work, but in smaller organisations who don't deal with as many law firms, there will be difficulties around finding projects