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In-house lawyers who want to do pro bono work face several unique hurdles, including ethical challenges, malpractice insurance concerns and operating without support from the types of established pro bono programs commonly found at sizeable law firms. 

"At law firms they all have a program up and running. If you go in-house and don't have a program, you sort of have to start from scratch," said Simon Auerbach, director and senior counsel at Discover Financial Services Inc. 

While somewhat daunting, the barriers to in-house pro bono work are surmountable with the right approach, and the payoff is worth the effort. 

"You get to explore all these wonderful opportunities that are out there for you to make a difference," said Auerbach, who co-chairs Discover's pro bono committee within the firm's legal department.

Recalling his time at a pro bono clinic for domestic violence survivors, he said, "It was just, it was really just indescribable. The amount of help you're providing … the external and internal benefits are tremendous." 

Unsurprisingly, company leaders who set the firm's cultural tone also play a critical role in creating a successful pro bono program, according to Auerbach and Microsoft Corp. pro bono lead Beth Henderson. Both are speakers at Davis Wright Tremaine's in-house pro bono summit in Seattle on Tuesday. 

"With Dev Stahlkopf becoming our general counsel last year, she made it her mission to make an even deeper investment in pro bono," Henderson said. She added Microsoft chief legal officer Brad Smith also "believes strongly" in the company's pro bono work. The tech giant's pro bono program is considered by some to be the gold standard.  

"Communicating that pro bono is a priority for the legal department and a business imperative, that message cascades down throughout the organization," Henderson said. "I think that is a starting point, to have that buy-in from leadership." 

Stahlkopf hired Henderson, who is one of the only full-time pro bono leads embedded in a legal department in the country. Stahlkopf also set a goal for in-house lawyers to do at least 30 hours of pro bono work annually—a metric that is included in the employee performance review process. 

To make it easier for in-house lawyers to volunteer, Microsoft hosts monthly pro bono clinics at its campus. The company also provides malpractice insurance to cover any claims that might arise from pro bono work. 

Most corporate umbrella policies do not include malpractice coverage for in-house lawyers, but it's not an issue if the attorney does pro bono work through a qualified legal services provider that has a malpractice policy that covers volunteers, which is common. 

"They [in-house lawyers] have to really proceed with caution when taking on pro bono, because they want to make sure they're covered," said Joanna Boisen, pro bono counsel at Davis Wright Tremaine. She also noted that in-house lawyers "need to complete required or recommended training to have the requisite competence to do their very best for their pro bono client."

But the training doesn't have to be overly time-consuming or onerous, according to Auerbach of Discover.

"It can be an hour or two. Very bite-sized training to prepare you for the situation," he said.

Many legal service providers offer training to lawyers before they launch into pro bono work, which might encourage corporate counsel to consider stepping outside their comfort zones in the pro bono realm. 

"The profile of the average in-house attorney tends to be more transactional-based, more business-oriented. And so the opportunity for domestic violence or immigration, anything that's considered more personal client service in nature, tends to ward people off," said Monica Reinmiller, managing corporate counsel at T-Mobile USA Inc.

"But it shouldn't," she added. "The level of expertise that in-house counsel bring to the table both from a client interaction perspective on a personal level in addition and combined with the training provided by the legal services provider, enables someone very ably to perform pro bono services, even outside the scope of someone's day-to-day substantive legal role or job as an in-house attorney."

After properly training for pro bono work, in-house lawyers should make it clear to their pro bono clients that the company is not providing the representation.

"It's me, the individual attorney. It's not the company. As part of that we ask that folks don't use Microsoft letterhead," said Henderson of Microsoft. "It's things like that that we've had to think through as well and memorialize in our policy." 

Now, Microsoft is building a process to check for potential conflicts of interest with pro bono activities, and it's also working on a system to track the pro bono work of the company's legal staff, according to Henderson.

"We don't bill our time like law firms do," she said. "If you want to get good data around how much time your attorneys and legal staff are doing on pro bono you're going to have to build out a mechanism to do that. And if you have a large in-house team that can be really challenging, which is what we found. 

"We're still trying to figure out a workable solution, because metrics are important for us to be assessing the health of our pro bono program," she added.