Why do Pro Bono? It’s good for the soul
Earlier this year – and following 15 years in a law firm – Fred Banning took the plunge and decided to establish his own non-profit organisation. Why? Well, it’s a long story. It’s also an inspiring one.
For 15 very happy years, I worked in marketing within the legal sector, most-recently spending ten years at Pinsent Masons where I was head of communications.
That was up until January 2020, when I was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer. I was told upon diagnosis my cancer was inoperable, and incurable. I have been on chemotherapy ever since.
Many reading this will have been touched by cancer, directly or indirectly. And you don’t need me to tell you that it causes one to reflect on one’s life and priorities.
Some time after diagnosis, I did an interview with a legal magazine in which I reflected on my career and said that while I loved my firm and the job I did there, my one slight regret was that I hadn’t found a way to combine doing well with doing good.
In the days and weeks that followed publication, I was genuinely astonished by the number of people who saw the piece and got in touch to say they had the same feeling.
Many highly skilled people within law firms - from the worlds of IT, finance, business development and more - told me that the volunteering opportunities at their firms tended towards painting a wall or rattling a bucket. It struck me that such arrangements, while undoubtedly worthy, sell both the volunteers and the charitable partners short.
As an aside, a responsible business partner at one firm told me recently that, having dispatched a team to do one such paint job, the firm ended up paying thousands for remedial works in the aftermath!
Many organisations exist to connect lawyers with pro bono opportunities. But nothing existed for the 77,000 professionals who work in the UK top 100 law firms who are not lawyers.
This is all the more remarkable given law firms are great at this stuff. They recognise the benefit that pro bono work brings to their lawyers in terms of creating more skilled, more rounded professionals, and dare I say it, more innovative lawyers.
That is why, earlier this year, I established Fifth Day. We are a non-profit organisation. Our mission is to create a movement that makes pro bono as valued and accepted among business operations specialists as it is among lawyers.
We connect people with roles generated by our collaborators, Reach Volunteering. As importantly, though, we seek to remove some of the barriers which might prevent individuals from undertaking skills-based volunteering at a time when the third sector is taking on much of the strain in our society. We need to make ‘non legal’ pro bono the norm, not the exception.
I’m pleased to report we’re off to a good start. In just a few short months, we have helped to make placements into roles at the social mobility charity the Shaw Trust, menopause support organisation Over the Bloody Moon, and Uganda Lodge Projects.
So far, 12 leading firms including Freshfields, Pinsent Masons, Eversheds Sutherland and Reed Smith have joined our corporate membership programme.
In so doing they have committed to promoting ‘non-legal’ pro bono within their own organisations and among their charitable partners. They have also agreed to reflect the skills and experience gained through skills-based volunteering in their career progression processes.
But we want to go further. And we need you to do it.
If you are a business operations specialist: please, check out www.fifth-day.org and see if you can find an assignment – or even a trustee position – that works for you. There’s a world of opportunities out there.
If you are a vendor to legal services businesses, please, consider if your organisation might be able to fulfil some of the available assignments. We would love to have you join our corporate membership programme, which does not require any financial contribution.
If you are a leader of a business development function, please consider the benefits that skills-based volunteering might bring to your own teams in terms of developing greater commercial awareness, new skills, new contacts and new approaches.
“Some time after diagnosis, I did an interview with a legal magazine in which I reflected on my career and said that while I loved my firm and the job I did there, my one slight regret was that I hadn’t found a way to combine doing well with doing good.”
Why do Pro Bono? It’s good for the soul
Professional services firms are great places to work. Typically, you work in pleasant surroundings with very intelligent and driven people and are well looked after. Often, though, many of us know this is a different world to those who need our help and feel the need to make a wider contribution that goes beyond helping to generate profits. There’s no shame in that. Lawyers often feel that way too, having gone into the law for that reason. In a business operations role, it can be hard to access projects and assignments that do that in a way that utilise your professional skills. Hence why we founded Fifth Day.
Rediscover your skills
It is a truism that, the further you go in your career, often the further away you become from the work that got you into it in the first place. So, whether you’re a comms guru who wants to get back to working with the press, or an IT aficionado who wants to remember what its like to write code, pro bono can help you rediscover old skills - and build new ones.
Grow new skills
Another challenge working in large professional services firms is that it can be hard at junior and mid-level to gain access to the sort of multidisciplinary projects that help you to move your career to the next level. Pro bono work can expose you to areas such as finance, IT, knowledge, business development and marketing, HR and facilities in a way that may not be possible within the confines of your current role.
Develop your network and your creativity
Pro bono projects can help you build your professional network, introducing you to new people and fresh ideas. This in itself can lead to greater innovation and creativity; often the best ideas aren’t completely ‘new’ but come from cross-fertilising practices from other industries and introducing them to your own organisation.
Because you can
Often there is a sense that lawyers can do pro bono because their skills are ‘in demand’. Sometimes we might lack confidence that the same is true in our own area of expertise. That’s not the case! Many organisations require just as much help writing the winning bid for grant funding or scaling up their IT as they do legal advice. Don’t believe me? Check out these opportunities.
You have the time!
People can often be put off by concern that pro bono projects or roles are too time consuming. That need not be the case - you can really make it work for you. Many of the opportunities we see ask people to contribute as much time as they can spare. Further, most law firms recognise the value of volunteering work and allow employees a certain number of days for voluntary work.