Pro Bono Publico: Frank McNally is featured in law school article
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Frank McNally is featured in an article that appeared in the March edition of Inter Pares, the University of Ottawa Law school student newspaper for his pro bono work.
PRO BONO PUBLICO
The New Mantra: Lawyers Gone Good
Much has happened over the past two years. North Korea made concessions on its nuclear programs. The “Yes We Can” campaign took the United States by storm. Facebook launched its redesign to the uproar of millions of users. The summer games came to Beijing, China. And who could forget about the economic downturn, or the Brangelina-Aniston fiasco. However, it was on 2 August 2007 that a key event marked the legal profession. It was on this day that Penguin Canada released Philip Slayton’s Lawyers Gone Bad.
Lawyer Gone Bad spread havoc and chills along Bay Street’s spine. The national magazine Maclean’s took this as an excellent opportunity to promote its lawyer-bashing agenda in a cover story, duly named “Lawyers Are Rats”. When the issue hit newsstands, lawyers nationwide were quick to point out that the Maclean’s editors made little attempt to question Slayton on his tactic of cherry-picking the worst case scenarios to tarnish the reputation of thousands of lawyers. Instead, the article had the opposite effect. Although it did serve as an excellent tool to sell copies, it was also hard not to notice how Maclean’s had thrown its support behind Slayton and galvanized his authorial efforts.
The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) was quick to publicly condemn the article, which pegged lawyers as profit-hungry unethical defrauders and attacked the Canadian legal profession on many fronts. However, alongside the CBA’s denunciations, we as law students at the University of Ottawa, can easily look around us to see that lawyers and soon-to-be lawyers are indeed not rats. This is especially true when one considers pro bono work.
Compared to other countries, like the United States, Canada does not have a strong pro bono culture. As affirmed by Professor Adam Dodek, if anything, pro bono in Canada is still in its “adolescence”. Dodek suspects that a fundamental reason why some Canadian lawyers neglect to include pro bono work in their practice, and thus earning their stripes as ‘rats’, is that they are simply too busy. With the changing nature of the profession, as compared to twenty years ago, the pressures are immense regardless of city or firm size.
But within all this busyness, Dodek is calling on legal professionals to get out there and tell the many stories about leadership and pro bono services that are found in the profession. So far Canadian lawyers have not done that good of a job in this area, and as such, I have chosen to highlight the stories of Paula Agulnik and Frank McNally of Reach Canada.
As a partner to the Faculty of Law’s Pro Bono Students Canada program, Reach Canada is a not-for-profit charitable organization whose primary mandate is to provide services for persons with disabilities. Along with monthly seminars, Reach Canada is continuing to develop its extensive education program about, for, and on persons with disabilities. The organization also provides family services and hosts a lawyer referral service. Paula Agulnik has been the executive director for over twenty-three years, and as such, she describes her job as having found “a very empowering and fulfilling role” that enables her to channel her passion for human rights.
While Reach Canada conducts two major fundraisers per year, as an organization they are completely self-funded and generate most of their interest and revenue through the community. Specifically, Reach Canada relies on volunteer lawyers to make the most of what they do.
For almost twenty-five years pro bono lawyers have been working with Reach Canada. What started off as just a handful of volunteers, snowballed and produced a ripple effect, whereby volunteer lawyers started inviting their colleagues to join Reach Canada as pro bono lawyers. Today, well over two hundred lawyers volunteer and donate up to three hours of pro bono time for each disabled client that has a legal issue. Even lawyers from the public sector who cannot provide legal services contribute to the initiatives of Reach Canada. Either by serving as members of the board or committees, or serving as speakers in seminars or presentations, there are numerous ways for legal professionals to get involved.
But it is not just pro bono lawyers that make up the Reach Canada team. Pro bono students from our own Faculty of Law have had a long-standing relationship with the organization. In a recent discussion with Agulnik, she is nothing but supportive in having our students involved with Reach Canada, and in giving pro bono students the opportunity to get involved in real-life files as early as their first year of law school. For example, when a disabled client calls Reach Canada with a legal issue, a pro bono student will do what is known as the “client intake”, and then connect the client with a lawyer who deals with the appropriate type of law that the issue entails. Once a pro bono lawyer accepts the client, the student puts them in touch with each other. It is a very hands-on and client-centered experience for any law student.
Alongside this early practical experience, the benefits pro bono students gain from working with Reach Canada continues long after graduation. Consider this scenario: a young law student is just about to be called to the Bar, start their private practice and is wondering if, as a first year associate, they can afford to devote time to pro bono causes. What is our newly-minted lawyer to do? Having worked alongside many pro bono students at Reach Canada, Frank McNally has an easy answer to the above predicament:
I think a student should take advantage of all opportunities to get involved in pro bono files, but try his/her best to work alongside another lawyer. Pick and choose files. You may have to make the time and be sure that you are balancing. Even one case is better than none. Arrange tour time [in practice] to reflect what you value. One of the things that [young] lawyers have to learn is how to prioritize. The focus will be on doing the actual work files and developing your own practice. But in order to develop your own practice, its best to work on certain pro bono cases to get the experience and get your name out there. I have always been an advocate of the student experience. Even if you do it and fail, it is still the best way to learn.
Frank McNally is also keen on advising young lawyers on the challenges of balancing billable files with pro bono files. As a former family law lawyer, McNally knows firsthand of this challenge. Not only did he take on a number of pro bono files in family law, but he also volunteers with other organizations such as the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association. On the issue of balancing files, McNally provides the following insight:
I think the important thing in determining which cases to take pro bono rests on what [the client] wants to accomplish with the case. In some cases a person will have a particular cause to advance. [For example,] one person was hard-of-hearing and could not hear anything in the courtroom in a marriage dispute. The other lawyer took advantage of that fact, and although she complained, the judge took no accommodations for her. She was very dispirited, and I took on the case pro bono on the promise that I would be able to use the case and try and make some accessibility changes to stress the importance of accessibility. What I would advise other lawyers, if there is an issue to advance… if you have issues that you feel are important that you cannot access through your job, pro bono is a way to work with that.
Cumulatively, the efforts of Reach Canada remind all of us that pro bono work is alive and well. Yes, this profession demands a lot from us. Yes, lawyers can be adversarial, demanding and hard on themselves and others. Yes, we cannot escape from billable hours in private practice. But if Frank McNally is an example of the pro bono lawyers found at Reach Canada, then I have a hard time smelling rats in the broad context of this profession. Maclean’s may have earned royalties from profiling Slayton’s Lawyers Gone Bad, but along the way they neglected to acknowledge that Canadian lawyers have not forgotten to recognize the importance of doing pro bono work. The concept of pro bono may be young in Canada, but that does not negate the fact that it has found home in Canada’s legal profession.
As law students, legal professors, and lawyers alike, we can all agree that there are bad lawyers out there. Yet there are the ‘bad’ ones in every profession if you look hard enough. Hello? Can we say Enron scandal? So instead, we must take flight and charge in a new direction. As Professor Dodek states, together, as a profession, we need to do a better job in getting the message out. Therefore, I propose that as the graduating classes of 2009, 2010 and 2011, we define this message as follows: Lawyers Gone Good!
* Special thank you to Leah Simeone for her dedication and correspondence on this column.
Josephine L. Comegna
Pro Bono Students Canada Columnist
