Last week, Holland & Knight announced it would be deploying a platform developed by legal tech startup Paladin geared towards facilitating smoother and more proactive connections between people in need of pro bono legal services and the lawyers qualified to help them.

The law firm will also be using the platform as something of a weather vane, detecting shifts in the pro bono landscape sparked by politics or even a natural disaster, and training their talent accordingly.

The tool, therefore, essentially serves as a database of all the pro bono matters available, making it easier to detect patterns of need. Meg Hely Walsh, corporate responsibility partner at Holland & Knight, used the example of families being separated at the border between the U.S. and Mexico last spring.

“That came up quickly and intensely, and we were able to identify need and train people up to meet those needs,” she said.

Hence, Holland & Knight has been providing input to Paladin on the development of its cloud-based platform for nearly two years—and they aren't the only firm tossing its two cents into the mix. Last August, international law firm Dentons announced that it would be working Paladin on the platform as well.

Benjamin Weinberg, a partner at Dentons, told Legaltech News that he was looking for a solution that could create easier access to pro bono work for attorneys, which in broad strokes is exactly what the platform does. But what's wrong with email?

According to Hely Walsh, legal aid associations typically send out an email blast to multiple firms once a pro bono opportunity becomes available. By the time a law office gets that email into the hands of the right lawyer, the matter may have been picked up by a different firm or settled altogether.

The Paladin platform allows lawyers to approach pro bono work more proactively, starting with a questionnaire accessed via a computer or phone that gauges areas of interest and experience, which can help focus the list of pro bono options sourced from a live database. Instead of trying to squeeze pro bono opportunities into their schedules, attorneys can organically seek things out as time allows.

“That's a very practical way to deal with it because what happens is that someone might think that they are tied up for the next six months and all of the sudden a case settles and they've got some time,” Hely Walsh said.

Felicity Conrad, co-founder and CEO of Paladin, said one of the benefits of bringing onboard a firm like Holland & Knight—which has 28 offices located throughout the U.S.—is that it expands the scope of the startup's pro bono network as a whole, allowing them to continue pairing local legal aid organizations across the country with lawyers in their area.

“By bringing on Holland & Knight and all of the amazing legal service partners they work with, we're actually able to continue to build out our pro bono network in both existing geographies and new geographies,” Conrad said. 

The startup's other aspirations for the platform are still in early stages, but Conrad said that they are in the process of reimagining ways that data points like hours or participation are tracked in addition to looking at new metrics like impact.