By Pamela Shime, Pro Bono Students Canada, National Director

“…Noble pro bono tradition in our (legal) profession”

In the fall of 1996, Pro Bono Students Canada was established at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. The goal of the program is to engage law students from early on in the noble pro bono tradition in our profession, with an eye to ensuring that each new generation of lawyers enters the profession already schooled in and committed to pro bono philosophy and practice. The program, from the first, uniquely combined education and access to justice. The format was simple – match pro bono law students with public interest and community organizations that are ineligible for legal aid but often desperately in need of legal and law-related services that will have a significant impact on people in need. Every student project is supervised by a lawyer. That first fall the program involved approximately 50 students and a handful of organizations at one school. After the success of the first phase of the program, the founders of Pro Bono Students Canada (PBSC) set about achieving their goal of expanding this innovative program across the province, and later throughout the country.

Today, the program is in 21 law faculties across Canada. The central office of what is now a national program is at the University of Toronto, which has, since 1996, generously provided essential office space and administrative support. Since its inception, the program has involved approximately 6000 students from across Ontario and Canada. Currently over 2000 students volunteer close to 10,000 hours each week – which does not include the many students who attend events and learn about the importance and values of pro bono service through the presence of the program and its impressive impact on law school culture over the past seven years. These numbers increase annually. This innovative, unique program contributes significantly to access to justice in our country.

In each law school we hire Student Coordinators who run the program at that school. Our foundation program is our Community Placement Program, through which we match law students with international, national, and local public interest and community organizations as well as with lawyers doing pro bono work. The students in this program conduct legal research, engage in legal drafting, provide public legal education, and advocate on behalf of communities in need. Among other tasks, the students research pending legislation, legal issues and current policy questions; draft policies for organizations and manuals for their clients; and help organizations provide legal information and assistance to their clients. As above, every project is overseen by a lawyer supervisor.

Pro Bono Participants from Coast to Coast

The organizations we have assisted include the West Coast Domestic Workers Association, the BC Tenant Rights Action Coalition, Sierra Legal Defence Fund, AIDS Calgary Awareness, Children’s Legal and Education Resource Centre (Calgary), Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, Halifax Refugee Clinic, Association Cooperative d’economie Familiale de Quebec, Heritage Winnipeg, B’Nai Brith (Montreal), Black Youth in Action (Montreal), Centre de Prevention de la Violence Familiale de Kent (Moncton), New Brunswick Environmental Network, Literacy New Brunswick, Refugee Law Office (Toronto), Toronto Child Abuse Centre, Urban Alliance on Race Relations, Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation, Democracy Watch (Ottawa), Alzheimer Society of Saskatchewan, Breast Cancer Action Saskatchewan, Foundation for Equal Families (London), Hospice of London, Council for the Prevention of Child Abuse (Windsor), and the Windsor Symphony.

The hundreds of law students across the country who participate in PBSC each year have a range of dynamic opportunities developed over the past seven years. In addition to the Placement Program, we established the PBSC Court & Tribunal Program, through which we train upper year students and place them in courthouses to assist unrepresented litigants under the supervision of duty counsel. Initiated by students who heard Justice Harvey Brownstone, a PBSC speaker at the University of Toronto law faculty, this program was created to address the crisis of increasing numbers of unrepresented parties in the legal system—a situation that puts an immeasurable strain on not only the parties themselves, but also the courts, judges, duty and advice counsel, and the administration of justice in general. Through this program, in five years we have served almost 5000 unrepresented people in family law disputes and have been asked by Legal Aid Ontario to expand the program to criminal courts. Our Court Program Family Law Project student manual has been requested by lawyers, organizations and clinics for their use in client service and family law disputes across Ontario. Since 2001, on the basis of urgent requests from the courts, we have obtained funding from Legal Aid Ontario to support students who continue the work of this critical program during the summer months. We are currently expanding this program across the country.

In a December 2001 letter about the program, Justice Brian Weagant wrote about this program, “Pro Bono Students Canada, through its Family Law Project, has made an important difference in ensuring that many of the unrepresented people at the Court receive critical help in completing the required, challenging forms and making their way through the often confusing legal process…The Project has been enthusiastically received by the Judges, court managers, and court staff, including duty counsel…This contribution by the students alleviates considerably the burden on court staff and duty and advice counsel… The Family Law Project has become a vital aspect of the critical services we offer at the Court…The assistance provided by the students…allows the litigants to participate in the legal process at a much higher level than their situations would otherwise allow.”

Pro Bono Education

In 2000, PBSC initiated a cross-country On-campus Awareness & Education Program that is an integral aspect of law student experience in Canada today. Law students in our programs, among others, now attend regular skills trainings; annual launches with inspiring speakers (such as Hurricane Ruben Carter, Six Nations Chief Roberta Jamieson, and last year, Justice Maryka Omatsu); regular “meetings of the minds” where they share their pro bono experiences; and a new annual student-organized national public interest law conference that takes place in February each year, which is in part coordinated by MAPIL (Mandate for Public Interest Law), a national network of law students organizing around pro bono and public interest law issues that was established by PBSC in the fall of 2000.

We have discovered that PBSC is uniquely positioned to be a powerful leadership training tool. PBSC is transforming the profession by developing leaders committed to pro bono and public interest law in each group of lawyers graduating from law school. To develop leaders who will determine the direction of the profession in the next century is an exciting prospect—to do this through a pro bono and public interest law program is especially compelling. Through our Student Leadership Program, a significant component of the next generation of leaders in the legal profession will emerge from a pro bono and public interest law program. This will be a boon to the capacity of the profession to confront many of the major challenges before it in the next century. Students who have experience in law school with pro bono and public interest law, and who have been educated as leaders, will have a significant impact on the profession’s decisions about access to justice in Canada, influencing public policy and strengthening the voices of the disenfranchised.

We cultivate these leaders in two ways: first, we work with the Student Coordinators, teaching them through participatory and active learning how to develop innovative solutions to seemingly intractable problems. We then bring them together once a year at our National Coordinator Conference to meet, learn, and teach each other. In our training sessions at the conferences, and in our supervision program generally, we teach a problem-solving approach that will equip these future leaders so that they may enhance the profession’s ability to meet its greatest challenges with creative and practical solutions. Second, through the Student Coordinators, who are the core of our Student Leadership Program, we identify potential leaders in our programs and bring them into leadership positions, through which we educate them in innovative problem-solving approaches, training them to be leaders as well.

PBSC has also been a key resource for the pro bono lawyer organizations being established across the country, and each year sends a new wave of lawyers committed to pro bono into the profession. With the generous support of the Law Foundation of Ontario and McCarthy Tétrault, PBSC is making an important impact on legal education, voluntary service in the profession, and access to the legal system in Canada.