The former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini has launched pro bono week by urging solicitors and advocates to undertake 10 hours pro bono work per year, prompting a furious reaction across the board from practitioners. Kerry Underwood, Solicitor and Chairman of Law Abroad offers a perspective from south of the border.

Just as I was quietly fuming about the pious and patronising imprecations of English Judges and others about pro bono work, news reached me from Scotland that former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini had called for Scottish lawyers to undertake 10 hours of pro bono work per YEAR!

Now I would not dream of telling Scottish lawyers what to do but I can reassure them that solicitors in England and Wales are really angry about the same patronising rubbish that we get South of the border.

Any solicitor in a small or medium sized practice does 10 hours a WEEK, and on a bad, or good day, depending on how you look at it, we will do it in one day. 10 hours a year is under one hour a month, or less than 15 minutes a week, or 2-3 minutes a day.

So, that phone call when you tell a potential new client that they can’t bring an unfair dismissal claim because they have not been employed for a year – that’s your week’s pro bono done. Advise a client about funding - for which you cannot recover costs from the other side - that’s a whole month’s pro bono.

The whole point about pro bono, charitable work in English, is that if you have to put a tail on it and give it a name, then it is not worth doing. Real lawyers do it all the time. Big firms do it because their PR firms tell them to, so little Johnny, who really isn’t very good but has got a training contract because of someone Daddy knows in the City, is sent somewhere out of harm’s way to achieve Magic Circle Inc's pro bono quota. In England, and to quote our beloved Home Secretary, I am not making this up, there is a National Pro Bono Centre! (I really am not making this up). The Attorney General’s pro bono envoy (I am not making this up either) asked last night at an ILEX pro bono function whether the regulator should say to Alternative Business Structures that they would not get a license unless they carried out an appropriate amount of pro bono work.

Apart from breaking just about every European Union law, and the Minimum Wage Regulations, and the Slavery Act, it does raise interesting possibilities: All pubs to give away free beer or no license? All casinos to allow free gambling or no license? You get my drift.

In fairness Mike Napier, the aforesaid envoy, may have been making a point about the free work done by lawyers, which is unlikely to be done by non-lawyers now allowed to practise law under the Legal Services Act. There are more serious issues involved. For all the statutory statements about pro bono being no substitute for a properly funded legal aid system, that is precisely what its very vocal advocates want it to be, so that they can carry on making a fortune but feel less bad about it.

If there is to be compulsion in relation to pro bono – and of course there should not be – then let the regulatory bodies make it a dsiciplinary offence to do any pro bono work until all legal aid cuts are reversed.

Let’s have snoopers going round checking that lawyers are not doing free work that should be carried out under the famous “ properly funded legal aid system”. In England and Wales, and I suspect in Scotland, lawyers have been under constant attack from the chattering classes - not from our clients mind - if we are that crap, then why do you want us to do even free work? Why not ask the bankers, insurers and accountants to do it?

Few things get me more annoyed than people who clearly don’t have enough work of their own telling us to do pro bono work. So my message to former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini is “ Come and work in my office – pro bono – for a month and find out what pro bono really is.”

Until then, to quote Clement Attlee, “ A period of silence on your part would be welcome”.

Kerry Underwood is an Senior Partner at Underwoods Solicitors, broadcaster, writer, blogger and Chairman of LAW ABROAD
(@kerry_underwood)