As law firms come under pressure to increase their pro bono offering, A&O's Angeline Welsh outlines how pro bono can enhance lawyers' fee-earning work

I was recently honoured to receive the International Bar Association (IBA) annual Pro Bono and Access to Justice Committee Award and was asked by the IBA to provide my pro bono biography. Most lawyers I should imagine do not have a pro bono biography; pro bono work is often undertaken ad hoc. I was no exception.

When putting this together, I was genuinely surprised by the large number of pro bono projects I have been involved with over my nine years at Allen & Overy (A&O). There has been no great plan behind this. My pro bono commitments have been rather opportunistic in a sense.

From time to time some great opportunities have presented themselves. I think it is only proper to describe them as opportunities because they have allowed me to develop certain areas of expertise, build on relationships with existing clients, cultivate new contacts and make a wider social contribution.

Helping Liberty to 'become a Starbucks in City firms'

As a trainee, in 2003 I spent three months on secondment to Liberty, the leading human rights and civil liberties organisation in the UK. Towards the end of my secondment, I was sitting with Shami Chakrabarti, now the director of Liberty, waiting for a consultation with counsel and she told me about her ambitions for Liberty to link up with City law firms. She wanted a partnership that was so prolific it would be as if Liberty was a Starbucks in every City firm.

At the same time, the advice and information function of Liberty was struggling to cope with the rising number of requests it was receiving for legal advice from members of the public. It seemed to me that this was perhaps something which A&O could help with. So when I returned to A&O, I set up a scheme whereby trainee and associate volunteers answer the public queries. This scheme is now in its seventh year with 82 volunteers and has answered close to 1,400 queries.

Of course, this success cannot be achieved without a lot of hard work and I'm afraid I can't take credit for that. One of my former PAs, Terri Wipperman, adopted the scheme and made it her own. By refusing to take no for an answer when recruiting and through the deployment of her excellent organisational skills, the scheme runs like clockwork. With the support of Liberty, a large number of young lawyers have given their time to educate themselves and the public about human rights issues.

The scheme is also now used by other firms and law schools and I think it can safely be said that we have achieved the ambition of Liberty becoming a Starbucks in this firm. The scheme is so successful that it is one easily run in-house. The queries are discrete and often not time critical, so lawyers from A&O can do the work from their desks and fit it around their fee-earning work without difficulty.

Ensuring the court has the benefit of an important perspective

A&O has now assisted Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID), a charity challenging UK immigration detention, with five court interventions at different court levels, three of which I have been involved in. One was before the Court of Appeal intervening in a judicial review of the decision not to set up an independent public inquiry into disturbances at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre in November 2006.

The second was before the Supreme Court in a landmark case concerning whether or not the Secretary of State's failure to comply with its own policy of periodic reviews of detention renders the detention unlawful. Finally, the third was before the European Court of Human Rights over whether a detainee's detention was unlawful on account of its length.

The interventions worked well as pro bono projects because an intervener often grapples with issues of great legal importance as well as performing a limited, although important, role in a case. Although immigration issues may seem a far cry from what we would traditionally do in a City firm, we have recently been instructed to act on intervention to the Supreme Court within my practice area of international arbitration and the experience I have gained through these BID cases has been useful.

Stepping in to assist appeals to the Privy Council in London

A lot of my public law experience comes not from the English jurisdiction but the Caribbean, and the path to the Privy Council in London as the final Court of Appeal is becoming a well-trodden one. Through this we have been asked to assist with an appeal to the Privy Council from the Caribbean against a decision to grant an extradition request from the US. This is an important test case, and given the costs involved in instructing English solicitors to act on such an appeal, the appellant would have struggled to access his final court of appeal.

Sharing the expertise – legal training in Rwanda

Some of my colleagues developed an innovative project working with leading Rwandan legal institutions and Supreme Court judges on training schemes to equip Rwanda's commercial lawyers for the transition from a civil to a common law system.

In May 2010 I took part in a two-week training scheme along with nine other colleagues. I delivered training in my area of expertise – arbitration law, investment treaty law and alternative dispute resolution – to the judiciary, the Kigali Bar Association and the Ministry of Justice. It was a hugely rewarding experience.

The legal system in Rwanda is still in transition. While there have been important developments since the 1994 genocide – such as the establishment of a strong judicial infrastructure and the implementation of much-needed reforms – commercial law remains a largely unfamiliar area for Rwanda's lawyers and judges. The training we delivered was designed to equip Rwanda to participate in the global market.

Rwanda has great aspirations and it was an honour working to support them. It was also good for personal development. Teaching a subject focuses your learning and the bright and enthusiastic recipients challenged my own understanding of a subject to bring a new perspective.

Themes drawn from these experiences

While pro bono work is for the greater good, you do not need to have purely altruistic motivations for taking it on. Every pro bono project I have undertaken has contributed to my own professional development, in many cases building up legal expertise which can be exploited for fee-earning matters.

While for the majority of people who undertake pro bono work it is not a second-class task, juggling it with client work can be demanding. Pro bono projects have therefore worked best when they lend themselves to the nature of the work that you do, are limited to a manageable level and can be shared among a team of volunteers. I have been assisted tremendously by the enthusiasm and commitment of my colleagues.

It is also important to recognise the social contribution that can be made by lawyers acting pro bono. My interest and dedication to pro bono work comes from my early experience of the law. I read history at university and was introduced to the legal world through the one-year intensive conversion course.

The more I learned about the law, the more the world around me made sense – the news was more accessible and I knew what my basic rights were, whether that was with my part-time student employer or when I bought something from a shop. And if I didn't know, I knew where to find out.

It has always seemed to me that as lawyers, we can help translate for non-lawyers the language of legal rights – something that becomes part of the every day language for us, but remains inaccessible for others. For this reason, lawyers should never underestimate the importance of their contribution. Even if sometimes it seems a small one for us lawyers, it is often much more than that.

Angeline Welsh is a senior associate in the international arbitration group in Allen & Overy's London office.