Pro Bono

Video transcript:
Pro Bono

David Hillard, Partner

I think it's important for all large businesses to be good corporate citizens but a law firm needs to go beyond that. As lawyers we've got special powers, we understand how the legal process works and we have an inherent professional responsibility to make sure that the legal system is accessible to everyone.

I think it is a really big part of how we see ourselves. The pro bono practice in particular is the largest pro bono program that has ever been run in Australia - probably the largest ever run by any law firm outside of the United States. In the last 12 months or so we have performed 36,000 hours of pro bono work. It's about 3% of our legal practice now.

We have concentrated our efforts in trying to improve access to justice for people who are outside of our major cities who are in regional and rural Australia. In the last 12 months we acted for clients in more than 40 regional communities and in a number of remote indigenous communities as well. It's really something that we've concentrated a lot of effort on. In addition, the firm supports two Clayton Utz Foundation Fellowships to provide lawyers for two years at the beginning of their career in a regional community legal centre.

I think one of the things that really sets our people apart is the commitment that we have developed to making community legal practice and work in the community a genuine part of the way this firm operates and the fact that it is embraced so enthusiastically by the people here I think is a really stand out thing about working at Clayton Utz.

There isn't a particular Clayton Utz mould that someone needs to fit and I like it that we are a firm that doesn't have a lot of pretension about us. We employ ordinary, normal, knockabout people, lovely people like myself.

I guess when people think about the program and that fact that it is headed by a partner it really speaks volumes about the level of resources and the level of commitment which this firm has made to ensuring that the pro bono practice is real. It's not a token effort, it's a genuine part of who we are and what we do.

For me, being client focussed means that we have to treat our pro bono clients with the same degree of attention and care that we treat our commercial clients and that certainly happens here at Clayton Utz.

I think it's certainly the case that people are surprised to find that a large corporate law firm is so heavily involved in community legal work. They are not necessarily two things that you would think of as matching. But I think that genuinely our clients appreciate the level of service that they are given and the way in which we treat them and as a result, perhaps embarrassingly, we get lots of thank you letters, we get lots of emails, we get gifts from clients where we've really just simply done our job, but the impact that we have had for them on their particular circumstances has been really tremendous.