CBA Record September-October 2024

CELEBRATING

OF PRO BONO WEEK

YEARS

Pro Bono Week: 20 Years Later By Margaret Benson T wenty years ago, our legal commu nity was introduced to Chicago’s first-ever Pro Bono Week. It was

wide-ranging ideas. Twenty years later, a few elements of that first pro bono week remain popular features of this now annual event. The week still includes free CLE opportunities, testimonials by attorneys and judges speaking about the value of pro bono in their professional lives, a pro bono fair featuring great food, and tables staffed by Chicago’s legal aid organizations promoting their pro bono offerings to a crowd of attorneys and law students looking to volunteer their services. Subsequent years added other features that have become traditions of the week, including my favorite, a Jus tice Story Slam open to everyone who likes to get up and tell a brief, true story about justice. Legal aid lawyers are amaz ing storytellers with incredible stories about their cases and clients. The event absolutely sparkles with energy, pathos, redemption, and humor. A lot of humor.

Pro Bono Week illustrates the unique vitality that pro bono brings to our pro fession. For most attorneys, work is… work. Financially rewarding yet some times tedious. But pro bono is work that is different: spiritually rewarding and rarely tedious. Pro Bono Week introduces a glimpse of that vitality to people who don’t know about it yet, or who might be craving more of it. Pro Bono Week reflects the good that our profession offers, and our shared vision of a better future. Thank you to Justice Michael B. Hyman, Bob Glaves, the CBF, and the CBA for bringing us Pro Bono Week. Chicago is a better place for it.

new. It was fun. And, until then, it was unheard of. Although pro bono weeks are now celebrated around the country, ours was the first, thanks to the creative minds and determination of folks at the CBA and The Chicago Bar Foundation. Illinois Appellate Court Justice Michael B. Hyman, then a law firm part ner and the CBA’s President, broached the idea to Bob Glaves, CBF Executive Director. The idea was to showcase the wide range of pro bono opportunities in Chicago’s legal community, while also highlighting the good pro bono work that many lawyers were already performing. The rest is history. That first year was an experiment, bolstered by a large committee of legal community members with energetic and

Margaret Benson is the Executive Director of Chicago Volunteer Legal Services.

2024 Pro Bono in Motion

2023 Getting Personal with Pro Bono

2022 Empowering People, Empowering Communities

2021 Pro Bono: Making Our World a Better Place

20 YEARS OF PRO BONO WEEK

24 September/October 2024