Pro Bono As a Second Career for First Wave of Baby Boomer Retirees
By: Steve Grumm
It makes perfect sense. The civil legal services community can not keep up with swelling demand for services. Meanwhile, the Baby Boomer exodus from the practice of law has begun, as the oldest Boomers are at retirement age. This being the case, what about providing opportunities to represent the poor for those lawyers who wish to leave fee-generating practice but also want to remain in practice?
The National Law Journal looks at D.C.’s Senior Attorneys Initiative for Legal Services (SAILS), a program which matches attorneys in or near retirement with pro bono cases (password-protected).
Last October, the District of Columbia Access to Justice Commission and the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program created a program to better engage firms with pro bono work called SAILS — Senior Attorneys Initiative for Legal Services. The program included 11 founding D.C.-based law offices.
“The point of SAILS was to institutionalize pro bono work among partner and senior lawyers,” said Marc Fleischaker, Arent Fox partner and chair of the SAILS working group.
Maureen Syracuse, outgoing executive director of the D.C. Bar’s Pro Bono Program, also is working to have senior attorneys spend their last several years as devoted to pro bono work as possible. “We are trying to tap all the resources of the firms,” Syracuse said. Funding for legal service providers has always been scant, and the prolonged harsh economic times have compounded the issue. It has also made some lawyers more leery of hanging up their hat, even as more approach retirement age.
But she argues that, in their last years at their firms, some senior attorneys have an increasing desire to give back. “These are the people that went to law school to change the world,” Syracuse said. “When they hit the last stage of their career, there will be a sizable number that want to do something more. We think we will find a number of lawyers with that mindset.”
SAILS isn’t the only program harnessing the experience and expertise of the gray-hairs profession’s elder statespeople. In New York State, the Attorney Emeritus Program does something similar. On the national level, the Pro Bono Institute’s Second Acts project facilitates the movement of retiring attorneys into volunteer work.
