Nashville at law: Bar group seeks to broaden free legal help

Groups offering free legal help to Tennesseans in need have often struggled to find enough lawyers for all of their potential clients. In today's economic environment, that struggle is getting no easier.

That's why the Tennessee Bar Association has asked the state's Supreme Court, which has jurisdiction over the practice of law in Tennessee, to implement four changes in the rules under which lawyers here operate. The intent is to make "pro bono" service — unpaid legal aid by volunteering attorneys — more widespread.

One area where the TBA would like to see changes involves free legal-aid programs that offer limited services, such as legal advice hotlines. Ethics rules currently require a lawyer to check carefully for any conflicts of representation before aiding a client. The association says imposing that standard even when the interaction involves "brief advice and no ongoing representation" tends to discourage attorneys from taking part in such programs.

Another change would make it explicit that companies' in-house attorneys can take part in legal aid and bar association pro bono programs, regardless of whether they have passed the Tennessee bar. A recent TBA initiative has increased the involvement of corporate counsel in free legal services, but those who are licensed in another state have sometimes been unsure whether their bar status allowed them to take part in pro bono programs.

A third measure that the TBA recommends is adopting an "aspirational standard" of 50 hours per year of pro bono service. The association wants the high court to encourage law firms to enable and encourage their attorneys to reach that mark. It cautions that this proposal is "not an effort to head down the path to mandatory pro bono service" but simply a way to educate lawyers as to "best practices in fulfilling their ethical responsibility."

And finally, the association would like the court to ask attorneys to report how many hours they have put into pro bono service on the registration form they submit to the Board of Professional Responsibility each year. Any lawyer would be free to decline to answer, and statistics gathered from the forms would be kept anonymous. But it may be in the interest of the legal industry as a whole to have reliable figures on how much pro bono work members of Tennessee's bar do each year.

Submitting the petition were Baker Donelson attorney George T. "Buck" Lewis of Memphis, the current president of the TBA; William L. Harbison of Sherrard & Roe in Nashville, the association's general counsel; Legal Aid of East Tennessee counsel Debra L. House; Memphis-based Adams & Reese lawyer Lucian T. Pera and TBA Executive Director Allan F. Ramsaur.

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