Pro Bono 2012: For Two DLA Piper Associates, Zero Billable Hours Is a Good Thing

Shanai Watson hasn’t billed a single hour during her first eight months as an associate at DLA Piper. And that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.

Watson, a Stanford Law School graduate who joined DLA’s New York office in January, is one of two associates being paid to do pro bono work full time in their first year with the firm as part of a new fellowship program launched last fall.

Named for retired DLA partner and pro bono advocate Sheldon Krantz, the DLA Piper/ Krantz Fellowship Program is open to U.S.–based associates who are already preparing to join the firm in the regular incoming class. Those taking the positions earn the same salaries as other DLA associates (between $145,00 and $160,000, depending on the region), go through the same training sessions, and shoulder the same workload (a minimum of 1,500 hours a year), albeit for nonpaying clients.

After a competitive application process that saw several of the firm’s 50 incoming associates apply, Watson and Chicago-based associate Katie Jahnke Dale became the inaugural fellows. Both will return to regular associate work at the start of 2013 and two new fellows will take their place. (For more on the program’s background, see The Am Law Daily‘s previous coverage.)

Watson knows her second year at the firm won’t be quite like her first, but it’s a change she’s looking forward to. “I think I’ll be going in well prepared,” she says, citing the number of cases she has had a chance to work on from start to finish. Though the cases are more modest than those she would take on for paying clients, Watson says the perspective she has gained along the way will undoubtedly prove useful. “Going into a more complex case, I have a better idea of the big picture,” she says. “I can get excited about my small part, because I know what it looks like in the end.”

By contrast, Watson says she suspects that as a typical first-year, “You’re so busy trying to make sure you can just handle the workload, you try not to think about much else than getting the work done.”

The pro bono assignments she and Dale have taken on have varied. For Watson, they have included an asylum case in which she represented a victim of political and gender violence, an appeal of possible wrongful criminal conviction, a tort case in which the client was a woman who had been sued by her low-income housing provider, and several cases representing students with disabilities seeking money from the U.S. Department of Education in order to ensure them an adequate education.

Dale, meanwhile, has spent time with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, where she attends monthly clinics in a low-income neighborhood to help with housing, public benefits, and family law issues. She has also worked on education-related assignments and done research for projects DLA Piper has in the works around the world.

Dale says that getting direct feedback from her clients has been one of the most rewarding parts of the experience: “Pro bono clients are the only ones who will ever hug you or tell you they’re proud of you.”

Dennericka Brooks, a senior attorney at the Legal Assistance Foundation who has worked closely with Dale, says her “bubbly” personality endears her to clients. “I think a lot of times we dismiss people who are generally happy all the time,” says Brooks. “But clients that meet with Katie appreciate that.”

In a fitting connection, Watson and Dale say they were attracted to DLA Piper to begin with because of its pro bono programs, even though the fellowship wasn’t even created when the two spent a summer with the firm in 2010.

As a first-year at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Dale emailed a mentor from her time at the University of Kansas to ask for career advice. He told Dale about New Perimeter, a now-seven-year-old pro bono affiliate of DLA’s that does work in developing nations. “I forwarded the email to my mom and said, ‘Look at this firm, isn’t that cool?’ ” Dale recalls.

Watson—who has an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, a public policy master’s from Stanford, and has studied and done work related to juvenile justice—became interested in DLA during on-campus interviews after hearing a partner talk about how much pro bono work she does.