HOUSTON BAR FOUNDATION

Closing Thoughts

By WILLIAM K. KROGER

I have enjoyed serving the past three years on the Board of the Houston Bar Foundation, the last year as Chair. I would like to share a few reflections. My first observation: outside of the legal profession, few people care deeply about pro bono legal services. It is like air conditioning or car tires. It is a critical thing, and when broken, people feel the pain deeply. They suffer. But when our justice system is working, even if poorly, most people do not care much about it. There is no billion dollar grant from the federal government or the Gates Foundation heading this way to Texas organizations that provide pro bono legal services. If anything, funding is more likely to be cut in the years ahead.
My second observation: the exception to this apathy is found in our lawyers. I know—I saw 300 of them in our conference rooms the week after Hurricane Katrina hit. We care about the legal system, which is one reason many of us became lawyers in the first place. Concepts like justice, due process, protecting people who cannot help themselves, righting wrongs – these are things that have burned inside many of us since we were children. We wanted to fight these battles, be involved, be leaders, help people. And because we make our living at it, we know directly the importance of our courts and access to justice to the quality of our lives and the social fabric of the nation. So if the system needs to be fixed, lawyers will have to do the work.
My third observation: most of us received our legal education at about the same time we got our first credit cards, took out our first loans, and bought cars. There has always been this tension in Texas between fighting at the Alamo and speculating on real estate, between raising cattle and drilling for oil. And nowhere does that tension play out more than in the legal profession.
Some lawyers make a lot of money. Some lawyers work for non-profits and make no profits. Very few lawyers, including me, do both well. Many associates, when they have little money, routinely handle pro bono cases. Senior partners, who presumably have more financial security, tend not to take such cases.
Money has had the upper hand in the legal profession for some time. The more we make, the more we focus on it. The legal profession ascribes far too much importance to American Lawyer rankings of profits-per-partner. Lawyers leave their firms for more money, rarely for more time to devote to professional activities. Firms outside Texas open up Houston offices in order to get more of the local business, and not to start pro bono programs. If you like short conversations, talk to a legal recruiter about your pro bono work.
As a result, there is a growing gap between the legal needs of the poor and the lawyers and firms willing to do the work. About four firms, and one company, handle more HVLP cases than the next 20 or so firms combined. The number of people who need legal assistance is growing. The number of firms who are willing to provide it is flat, at best.
So, what do we need to do? Here are six things we should work on in Houston in the years ahead:

• We need more senior partners at major Houston?]based law firms to take a pro bono case. It is a difficult sell to get many partners to accept a pro bono matter, and yet the only way we are going to increase our pro bono hours is if our more senior partners start taking cases. The work cannot be done just by associates. Partners need to lead by example. Young lawyers look up to them for leadership and guidance, and for setting the priorities and values of the organization. A good starting place would be if each managing partner took an HVLP case annually.

• We need firms based outside of Houston who have opened law offices here to become more committed to providing pro bono legal services to our neighbors. We also need them to increase their financial support of our local pro bono providers, like HVLP. This is beginning to happen. Dallas?]based firms have increased their support of the Harvest Party, which helps fund HVLP. But we have a ways to go.

• We need our lawyers who have retired from full-time practice to become more involved in providing legal services to the poor. Think Jim Sales, who took on the leadership of the Texas Access to Justice Commission after he became Of Counsel at Fulbright & Jaworski. My observation is that many lawyers, when they retire or cut down on their billable hours, check out from the practice of law. Yet, they are among the ones who are in the best position to give something back to the community. Because of their years of practice, they are among the greatest beneficiaries of a law license. In order to get more involvement from our senior lawyers, we need to develop programs that better tap into this pool of talent.

• Major Houston law firms make about twice as much money as they did five years ago. We need them to increase their financial support of pro bono legal services programs, especially if they are unable to handle a regular docket of pro bono matters. This is also beginning to happen—we are working on increasing the major underwriting levels of the Harvest Party.

• We need in-house corporate law departments to give the same attention to the pro bono programs as they do to the diversity of their outside firms. Nothing makes law firms change faster than their clients. If clients required that their law firm donate three percent of billable hours toward pro bono legal services and count pro bono hours the same as chargeable hours for things like associate bonuses, the number of hours of pro bono legal services would increase dramatically. The good news is that companies like Shell, Exxon, and Pfizer are becoming more active in promoting pro bono legal services.

• We need plaintiffs’ firms to become more active in the pro bono programs of the Houston Bar. Think Williams Bailey and Abraham Watkins Nichols Sorrels Matthews & Friend. I am sure there is some history between the two camps, but we need to turn a page and get both sides of the bar working together to solve these problems. Otherwise, we have the sound of one hand clapping.

The good news is this: I think Houston law firms and lawyers do care about these issues, especially in the wakes of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Now is the time to turn good thoughts into positive action.
Thanks for letting me serve this year. It was a pleasure.

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