Legal departments eager to beef up their pro bono programs can learn a lot from Discover Financial Services. The Riverwoods, Illinois-based credit card giant doesn’t mandate that its in-house lawyers do pro bono work. But 97 percent of them do.
One key to Discover’s pro bono success is the partnerships it’s forged. In 2012, at the suggestion of in-house lawyer Gary Wachtel, the legal department began participating in the Woodlawn Legal Clinic. Founded three years earlier by DLA Piper and the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, the clinic serves low-income individuals in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, where more than 30 percent of households in the neighborhood fall below the poverty line and 20 percent of residents over the age of 16 are unemployed. Lawyers at Hyatt Hotels Corp., Verizon Wireless and McDonald’s also participate in the clinic.
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