Pro Bono Spotlight: Chapman and Cutler LLP

Chapman and Cutler is a law firm focused on finance, representing the most sophisticated financial companies and institutional investors in the world. We recently had the opportunity to hear from Sara Ghadiri, Chapman’s Pro Bono Counsel, who shared insights into the firm’s incredible pro bono program.

Fostering a Culture of Pro Bono Service

Pro bono work is critical, but it is not always easy to connect the people who need help to the people who can help them. At Chapman, our three pronged approach—client partnerships, process innovation, and equity advocacy—allows us to connect our attorneys and our resources to help more people. From practice leaders to governing policy committee members, pro bono engagement touches the highest levels of the firm.

Client partnerships. We like to collaborate with our client colleagues—attorneys working in the legal departments of our client organizations—on pro bono matters that can boost our impact on critical issues. We organize clinics that pair our clients’ pro bono priorities with our firm’s connections, partnering with legal aid organizations and their experts to train our attorneys and clients. Then, we work through cases together in one collaborative session. In this way, we show both our attorneys and our clients that pro bono is part of our culture.

Process innovation. We have learned first-hand that legal aid organizations can help more people when they have access to the same technologies and process innovations law firms use in everyday practice. We leverage our Chapman Practice Innovations team to create scalable technology solutions for our corporate clients, so it wasn’t hard to apply the same thinking for pro bono clients. These innovations empower our attorneys to help and makes it faster and easier to volunteer to help more people.

Access for all. We use our legal skills and access to the justice system to effect real and lasting change. Our work is guided by our commitment to eliminate racism, discrimination, and injustice in all their forms. As part of this commitment, Chapman is a proud member of the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance and participates in the United Nations Global Compact, both of which center on work to advance and advocate for human rights and justice and guides our pro bono work.

Measuring the Growth and Impact of Pro Bono

As lawyers, we use the legal system to help tell a person’s story, and the judges, legislators, and administrative officials who hear these stories can change sentences, laws, and lives. Whether we are representing clients directly, filing amicus briefs on their behalf, or helping to reform legislation, we believe that everyone deserves to be heard.

We are passionate about using our legal skills and knowledge to help change and improve people’s lives, one story at a time."

To maximize the impact of our pro bono initiatives, Chapman created a dedicated role in January 2021 to oversee the firm’s pro bono platform. Sara Ghadiri serves as Chapman’s Pro Bono Counsel and has led the expansion of the firm’s pro bono engagement, increasing the number of legal aid partnerships, client collaboration clinics, and individual pro bono opportunities.

Most Valuable Aspects of Paladin

What is great about the Paladin platform is that our attorneys can see pro bono opportunities across organizations that they can assist in real time."

Additionally, while engaging on individual pro bono projects is very rewarding, we also encourage our attorneys to collaborate with each other and with clients on pro bono projects to further develop relationships. These collaborations are also marketed on Paladin and help us recruit more people to help out.

Partnering with Legal Aid Organizations

Chapman partners with legal aid organizations to help vulnerable individuals access the US legal system. We host pro bono clinics throughout the year in partnership with legal aid groups to train on specific areas of need and help guide us while we work together during a clinic. Our work supports diverse needs including applications for humanitarian protection under US immigration law, criminal records expungement for low income individuals, and estate planning documents for first responders who risk their lives in service to others, among other projects. To highlight a few initiatives:

Afghan Asylum Applications. In 2022, Chapman signed onto the Afghan Pro Se+ Project, a partnership between the American Bar Association (ABA) Commission on Immigration and HIAS, providing legal information and limited scope (Pro Se+) representation to people from Afghanistan seeking asylum. When thousands of Afghans were evacuated after the Taliban takeover in August 2021, many arrived in the United States with no pathway to stay permanently. As Chapman became a leading firm in this project, we expanded to take cases in partnership with the NIJC, where we helped host a clinic for Afghans re-settled in areas with insufficient legal resources to complete asylum applications, and with Welcome.US, as part of the Welcome Legal Alliance. Through this work, we provided asylum application assistance to over 90 evacuated Afghans, including ethnic and religious minorities, journalists, former government employees, former members of the Afghan military, and those who helped US Special Forces. For many of these clients, Chapman attorneys are expanding the scope of their representations to help them apply for green cards and file applications to have their families follow to join them in the United States.

Refugee Adjustment of Status Applications. In partnership with HIAS, Chapman has continued to assist individuals who fled their countries as refugees. Chapman, in partnership with financial services clients, has worked with refugees from around the globe, including most recently from Ukraine, Yemen, Kyrgyzstan, and Honduras file applications to receive green cards, which puts them on a pathway to becoming US citizens.

App Development. Chapman supports legal aid organizations by helping them scale with technology. Our Chapman Practice Innovations (CPI) team of both attorneys and computer programmers creates apps that first translate complex legal issues into form-fillable questionnaires, then generate completed documents automatically. Our first app was developed for the Center for Disability and Elder Law (CDEL) to automate both court guardianship documents and estate planning documents for low income, disabled, and/or elderly clients, increasing the number of cases CDEL attorneys could undertake and helping more people. We developed a second app for Legal Aid Chicago (LAC) to automate criminal records expungement and sealing documents. The app had an immediate impact and was so successful in increasing the volume of cases LAC could handle that we worked with LAC to expand the app to include juvenile cases, allowing LAC to provide holistic support and help even more clients with a fresh start. In the last year, the app has allowed LAC to file over 5,000 applications for sealing and expungement in Illinois.

Pro Bono Mentorship

Our internal mentoring circles promote the pairing of senior and junior attorneys to engage in a pro bono project together, fostering learning, collaboration, and connection. We also participate in the Lawyer-to-Lawyer (L2L) mentoring program, where we pair new attorneys with more senior attorneys to help them succeed early in their careers.

One big part of the L2L program is our annual American Bar Association (ABA) Free Legal Answers Program, which has active projects in five of our six footprint states. During the L2L meetup, new attorneys and their mentors come to a virtual meeting where each team takes on a question from the platform, the junior associate drafts a response to the question, the more senior attorney reviews, edits, and approves the response, and then submits the answer to the person in need of assistance.

This activity directly supports mentoring and learning and instills the idea that pro bono is a great way to build skills as a young lawyer.