The pro bono hustle.

• Author: Mundy, Liza
• Position: Legal work performed without charge for a worthy cause

Law firms need to pretend that their over-paid young lawyers aren't really buying into boring lives. Here's how they do it.

Some time or other you've probably heard a lawyer friend speak in glowing terms about a pro bono case he's taken on as part of the work he does for his firm. In a fit of pride and excitement, that lawyer may even have used the full Latin phrase-pro bono publico-which means "for the good of the public." It refers to legal work performed without charge for a worthy individual or cause, in order to guarantee everybody fair and equal access to the courts. Over the past several decades, large law firms have been using the opportunity to do such work as a lure to attract and keep the thousands of bright young men and women they need to protect corporate America from the legal consequences of its misdeeds. There is of course some good in this approach, and worthy cases do get taken on. But along with the good there is also a generous portion of hot air, not to mention deliberate self-deception on the part of both firms and attorneys. First, though, why do these big firms have to use a lure at all? Because a sample of their paving work is the last thing that would bring young lawyers to a big finn. Here. See for yourself. Imagine for a moment that you're a first-year associate at one of the biggest law firms in Washington. You already make more money than your father,

more than most businessmen. But imagine, too, that it's a hot Wednesday in August and that, feeling a little drowsy after lunch, you're reading through a motion you drafted yesterday. By now the motion has been red-lined by three different partners and returned to you, to re-draft, in barely recognizable form.

At this precise moment-pen in one hand, coffee mug in the other, diplomas from Berkeley and Yale hanging neatly on the wall- you're flipping idly through the Uniform System of Citation to solve the pressing and momentous and socially useful question of whether you should introduce a new footnote with See," or "See Generally."

For this, you're being billed out at $150 per hour.

Suddenly your phone rings. You jump five inches out of your chair, awakened from a stupor in which you dreamed you were practicing domestic relations law out of a storefront office in Little Havana. Without warning, the Tap has come from above. Billy Bluechip-one of the most important partners, the kind you never even see, never meet; the kind whose existence has been confirmed to you only by rumor-has declared a red alert. Emergency. All hands on deck. He wants you, Teresa Mudd let's give you a name), second in your class, editor of the law review, to meet with him right away.

Along with another nervous first-year and the

obnoxious, obsessively driven fifth-year associate who works directly under Bluechip, you herd into a nearby conference room. There you hear that Bluechip's client, Company X, which owns a set of cotton mills in the Southeast, has decided to do a "line sale"- that is, to sell its operations in one state. This is not public news yet. Nor is the fact that they've drawn up a contract without ensuring that the purchaser, Company Y, which is non-union, will continue to employ the men and women who already work there. Since this is illegal, it's expected that tomorrow the union will file a motion to enjoin the sale. Your job, Teresa, is to find out whether the union will be able to demand only damages for breach of contract; or whether they will, in fact, be able to enjoin the sale. This is resting on your shoulders, your thin shoulders alone. Bluechip wants your memo to him first thing tomorrow morning. So, as the sun sinks behind the skyscraper across the street, you spend the evening researching in the dark-literally and figuratively. Bluechip did not reveal the state in which the sale was taking place, and the fifth-year associate doesn't know either. Boldly you take a chance and guess that it's North Carolina. This means researching cases in the North Carolina State Reporters; however, your firm's library only carries the Maryland volumes. Georgetown is closed by now. So, yawning already, you log onto the Lexis machine, which you hate because it spits out hundred of pages of computer printouts and doesn't give you citations in the right form.

Working on the machine beside the other associate, who is chewing aspirin to chase away a headache that he's had ever since he started at the finn, you ask Lexis to look for any cases containing the word line sale." But since Lexis inputters tend to be enemies of the English language, you try "lien sale" and "ling sale, too." You also type in "union" and employer," just in case. Lexis obligingly regurgitates its maximum of one thousand cases. By midnight you've plowed through two hundred cases, each one more boring than the last. Bleary-eyed and depressed, desperately trying to prop open your eyelids, you search for those that are on point and arrange them in something resembling an order of relevance. Four hours later you've eaten a corned beef sandwich and written a draft in longhand. You give it to the night-shift word-processors. Too...