Society of Women Lawyers partners with i-Probono Conversation with Swathi Sukumar

With a vision to develop and promote pro bono culture among Indian law firms and lawyers, the Society of Women Lawyers, India (SOWL) has entered into a partnership with international non-profit organization, i-Probono. i-Probono matches civil society organizations that require legal support with volunteer lawyers who can offer that assistance.

With a vision to develop and promote pro bono culture among Indian law firms and lawyers, the Society of Women Lawyers, India (SOWL) has entered into a partnership with international non-profit organization, i-Probono. i-Probono matches civil society organizations that require legal support with volunteer lawyers who can offer that assistance.

SOWL has launched this partnership to facilitate and provide pro bono legal assistance to people and non-profit organizations working towards empowerment of women, welfare of children and public health issues.

According to the press release, individuals and non-profits working on women’s empowerment and children’s issues can now approach SOWL for legal assistance. SOWL will review the requirements and formulate the best strategy to enable these organizations to access free legal help. SOWL, along with i-Probono will identify the most suited lawyers to deliver this assistance and assist the non-profit or the individual through the entire process until delivery of results, if necessary.

The core members of this initiative are Pooja Sinha and Priti Suri from SOWL and Swathi Sukumar from i-Probono.

Speaking to Bar & Bench Priti Suri, President of SOWL said, “We are thrilled that the SOWL Pro Bono initiative and the partnership with i-Probono have finally taken-off. The credit goes to the painstaking efforts of Pooja and Swathi who have done an outstanding job in relentlessly pursuing the idea and finally launching it”.

SOWL, for the last two years, has been focusing on developing pro bono projects and encouraging lawyers to take them up. Pooja Sinha (pictured) Co-Convenor of SOWL Pro Bono initiative explained the nitty gritties of the alliance to Bar & Bench. She said, “We had been exploring opportunities to get SOWL members involved in this initiative. While exploring these opportunities, we got in touch with i-Probono and realized that there is a bit of overlap in what SOWL and i-Probono are doing. i-Probono is working with the same objective of encouraging Indian law firms and Indian lawyers to take up pro bono projects.”

i-Probono has a website where they publicize the projects. It has it's own database and so already has a set mechanism to find the right match. Pooja  added, “We met more than a year back and slowly developed a framework as to how both the organizations can work together since i-Probono already had a mechanism in place and now we have formally launched our partnership”.

The SOWL Pro Bono Initiative has already matched a pro bono project in October 2011. Mobilizing Health, a non-profit working in India, aims to increase access to emergency and preventative health care for rural populations through the use of mobile technology. The organization approached SOWL in October 2011 seeking legal help and was connected through i-Probono, with a law firm, PSA in less than ten days.. “I am impressed by the efficiency and support offered to our work of the SOWL Pro Bono Initiative. It has enabled us to confidently expand our operations in rural India and provide better access to healthcare in these areas”, says P.  Upadhyaya, Mobilizing Health.

While talking about the partnership, Pooja told Bar & Bench that both the organizations will continue working on aspects that they were originally working on, which is connecting with Indian lawyers and law firms and encouraging them to take up pro bono projects. The organizations will help the law firms in setting up a framework in which lawyers can undertake pro bono work.

The framework will include activities like drafting internal policy for associates in law firms to take up pro bono work, client engagement letters between the donee organization and the law firm, scope of services, general best practice advice on running pro bono projects and so on. She further added that members of both the organizations have enough experience of how pro bono projects are run as a matter of practice.

“With that objective, we will continue to work together and separately”, Pooja elaborated. The real focus of this partnership is “having effective mechanism in place to actually match interested people with projects”. SOWL will essentially act as a clearing house for these projects where it will receive requests for pro bono help throughout the year from India and abroad.

SOWL has already set up a clearing house involving an intern from the Jindal Global Law School because there is a fair bit of leg work involved in terms of articulating the exact legal service required. SOWL remains the primary contact for that particularly through this intern and other volunteers.  It will reach out to these people, liaise with them and set up a request as to what kind of legal help they need. It is then that i-Probono comes into the picture.  It will work with i-Probono to publicize the project through their website and to find the right match.

Basically, there are two main aspects. One is to act as a clearing house and helping to match the people to resources and second is to have a broader qualitative framework to undertake the probono work.

Priti remarked, “While the principles of doing pro bono work are enshrined in our Constitution and despite the strong legislative support, its implementation definitely needs a large boost and a change in the mind-set of the legal community. Several law firms are certainly engaged in pro bono but far more buy-in is required. It is our hope that SOWL Pro Bono Initiative, together with i-Pro Bono, will bridge that gap”.

SOWL has many exciting initiatives lined up. The Pro Bono Initiative will be one of the key areas of SOWL’s work, and will be accompanied, in 2012, by other pioneering projects including employability workshops for law students and Continuing Legal Education (CLE) programs on current legal issues for lawyers.

Bar & Bench spoke to Swathi Sukumar, India Operations Director for i-Probono on the partnership, her passion to develop probono culture and various challenges faced by i-Probono.

Bar & Bench: How did the partnership between SOWL and i-Probono come about? How will the two organizations work together?

Swathi Sukumar: SOWL has a Pro Bono Committee that was actively looking for organizations to partner with, to develop its pro bono work, especially in relation to legal issues pertaining to women and children. i-Probono facilitates the interaction between civil society organisations (CSOs) in need of pro bono legal assistance with lawyers, academics and students who want to contribute their skills to the public good. i-Probono also operates a free website that enables civil society organizations to post projects and allows legal professionals to connect with these organizations. SOWL and i-Probono’s mutually complimentary goals catalyzed the partnership between the two organizations.

SOWL’s Pro Bono Committee will act as a mentor to organizations that require legal assistance, and will help them articulate their legal requirements, as NGOs often don’t know exactly what kind of legal assistance they require or the expertise they should be looking for in their lawyers. SOWL will then post the project under its banner, on i-Probono’s website. SOWL will also circulate the link to the project to its membership base. The members of the SOWL Governing Council have several contacts in the legal profession, and SOWL will leverage these contacts to ensure that a project posted on i-Probono is matched with an appropriate lawyer. Once the project is matched with a lawyer or a law firm, SOWL’s Pro Bono Committee will monitor the progress of the pro bono project.

Bar & Bench: Can you share with us your passion for instituting pro bono culture in India? How and when did you join i-Probono?

Swathi Sukumar: I am currently a litigating lawyer in Delhi, and I have my own practice. I have worked with a law firm for a few years. Since my graduation from law school, I have found that I needed a purpose to strive towards apart from making a profit.  I continue to feel a certain compulsion to use my professional skills as a lawyer to assist people who may not otherwise have ready access to legal services. After graduation, I was disappointed to find that the legal community is polarized between “for profit” law firms and “public interest” lawyers.

I found that several of my friends and colleagues felt a certain lack of purpose in their work at law firms, even though they were being paid very well.  This often led to frequent job changes and more importantly, an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction with the work they were doing. I felt that there was definitely some, if not many, things missing in the professional options available to us as lawyers and law students.

When I was doing my LLM at Columbia Law School in 2009, I was introduced to Shireen Irani, the Founder and Executive Director of i-Probono. At that time, i-Probono was about a year old. Notwithstanding the fact that it was such a young organization, it was already being recognized by the legal and the non-profit communities to be a very effective platform to enable access to pro bono legal services.

Shireen and I began discussing how we could work this concept in India, and we began formulating a strategy for the India operations of i-Probono which would include the various stakeholders in the legal community in India. I have been closely involved with i-Probono’s work in India since then, and am now in charge of the India Operations of the organization.

Our short-term goal is to give all lawyers, irrespective of the kind of law they practice and the nature of the institution they work within, an opportunity to engage with the social sector and to contribute their skills for the public good. Over the long term, i-Probono aims to institutionalize pro bono culture within the legal community in India.

Bar & Bench: Tell us more about i-Probono's presence in India.

Swathi Sukumar: We began speaking with CSOs and lawyers in India in 2010 and as of November 2011 we have matched 33 projects across India. This pro bono help represents a value of over $260,000 for Indian CSOs.

In July 2011, i-Probono co-hosted a Roundtable with Indian law firms to determine the appetite and challenges to having a structured pro bono policy. At the Roundtable, i-Probono circulated a draft policy which creates an institutional framework for pro bono matters, including prescribing a number of hours to be set aside for pro bono work and the establishment of an internal Committee within each law firm to monitor the allotment and progress of pro bono projects. The aim is to have as many law firms as possible adopt and meaningfully implement an internal pro bono programme. We have already begun to work with key law firms to adapt the draft pro bono policy to suit their resources and requirements. The long-term goal with respect to law firms is to make pro bono work accessible to legal professionals situated in all kinds of law practice, and to dilute the polarity between corporate and social justice lawyers.

We have spoken to several Indian law firms and are in the process of helping them frame pro bono policies that would legitimatize and institutionalize pro bono legal work within the firm. The projects that have posted on i-Probono and matched involve a diverse range of causes from climate change to LGBT rights. There is also significant diversity in the nature of the projects ranging from litigation and advocacy on behalf of the NGOs, to short-term transactional assistance or review of commercial documents that NGOs require for their day-to-day functioning.

We are also working with in-house counsel at various leading corporate houses in the country. In-house counsels are well placed to provide legal advice directly or to act as legal mentors. In the latter role they can broker the relationship between the CSO and the law firm and from our experience this has led to enhanced delivery of pro bono work. Another model that works well is when in-house lawyers are teamed with law firms to deliver a pro bono project. The CSO then gets the benefit of two legal teams, and the pro bono work is delivered to a more professional standard.

We are in the process of expanding our reach to law firms in smaller cities and to independent litigating lawyers all over the country.

Bar & Bench: What are the challenges that you face to get Indian law firms involved in pro bono projects? Do Indian law firms have structured pro bono programmes or a pro bono policy?

Swathi Sukumar: Due to the lack of pro bono infrastructure in India, we find it far more difficult and time-consuming to match projects, with a lower match rate than elsewhere. We now want to focus our energies on building a culture of pro bono in India to make it easier for more CSOs to access legal help.

Unlike law firms in other countries, Indian law firms do not have structured pro bono programs. It would be incorrect to say that corporate lawyers in India do not contribute at all. There is a significant amount of pro bono work undertaken on an ad hoc basis, but often as a personal favour to an acquaintance or client.  Very few of the top firms have pro bono policies in place. Whether or not a pro bono project is undertaken by a firm largely remains a matter of personal discretion. Junior members of the law firm feel that they are actively and tacitly discouraged from taking on any non-billable work, and if they did, it would impact their evaluations.

Against this background, it has been challenging for us to change the prevailing mindset within law firms and to introduce pro bono work as an institutionalized obligation. Lawyers, especially in law firms and those holding in-house positions do not see pro bono legal work as something that they can readily engage in, even when they have the desire to do it. Many corporate lawyers wonder what they can contribute. It is not commonly appreciated that as lawyers within firms they have a wealth of resources and experience in corporate work so they are in fact best placed to provide transactional pro bono assistance to CSOs.

Despite these challenges however, leading Indian law firms and lawyers have been enthusiastic about adopting the pro bono policy drafted by i-Probono, and are taking steps to introduce the policy formally.