Pro bono work, services or cash donated to legal aid,
and charitable contributions by law firms in general have
received scant attention at "Adam Smith, Esq.", a shortcoming
I hereby resolve to remedy, if for no other reason than that
the actual Adam Smith was found only upon his death to have
donated a substantial proportion of his income to charity. (And
you thought capitalism has no place for eleemosynary activities—think
again. Capitalism is about how one generates wealth,
not so much about how one spends it. But that is a
topic for another day.)
Comes word that Allen
& Overy will now be donating the "excess" interest
it earns on client’s escrowed funds to legal aid centers
in the UK that offer counseling on issues such as housing,
family law, and employment, and further that it has written
a letter to Tony Blair encouraging the government to increase
legal aid funding. Needless to add, A&O is encouraging
other Magic Circle firms to do the same, and even going
so far as to say that "any firm with more than 20 partners"
should do the same.
Back up for a second: What is this "excess" interest,
again? We all know law firms hold clients’ funds for
different periods of time and for a variety of purposes; A&O,
like any firm that has graduated beyond doing its accounts
at the kitchen table, aggregates all those funds and holds
them in a single bank account, on which it has negotiated
a higher interest rate than any one of the clients alone
could obtain by virtue of the size of the account. The
"excess" interest, then, is the margin A&O earns over what
each client alone could earn; the client’s share is obviously
returned to the client, but in the past A&O (and everyone
else) had simply pocketed the excess—estimated to total
around £200,000 over three years. Now that
amount will be going to legal aid.
So what? Editorial time, people: It is occasionally
a proper role for MSM and bloggers alike to champion good
citizenship among their readers, and this is such an occasion. (Don’t
worry; they will remain few and far between on "Adam Smith,
Esq."!) Just as The American Lawyer tries
to do with its "A-List" giving ranked firms credit for their
commitment to pro bono work, I want to urge AmLaw 100 firms
to take a page from A&O’s book and contribute comparable
funds to legal aid on this side of the Atlantic. £200,000
is estimated to be about four months’ profits for a single
A&O partner. Is that honestly too much to ask,
from those to whom so munificently much has been given?
