Client secondments offer excellent learning opportunities. Our associates build skills and relationships and gain a better understanding of client needs, perspectives and priorities. This is as true for pro bono secondments as it is for commercial ones.

Our pro bono secondment program is open to high-performing associates across all practice groups. Associates embrace the opportunity to devote 100 percent of their time to pro bono work while on secondments that last between two weeks and six months.

In 2022 we added a new secondment program with longstanding pro bono client Public International Law & Policy Group (PILPG), which focuses on public international law, drafting post-conflict constitutions and assisting with peace negotiations and prosecutions of war crimes. Our new program has three-month in-person and virtual options, allowing associates from our International Arbitration practice based anywhere in the world to participate. New York partner Ank Santens, who oversees the secondment, says, "This is a win-win for the client, for us and for our associates. We can support a pro bono client while offering our lawyers an unusual and interesting learning opportunity."

We place pro bono secondees at a range of other organizations including the Legal Aid Society, where our associates spend six months on criminal defense work, and the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Eastern District of Virginia, where secondments last for four months. Shorter-term secondments have included working with European Lawyers in Lesvos on asylum issues and, in 2022, sending UK-based associates to Warsaw to help Ukrainian refugees with legal issues including asylum.

Associates Sophia Cheng and Oliver Dean discuss their pro bono secondments with European Lawyers in Lesvos, an organization that provides legal assistance to refugees in Greece, as part of the Greece Pro Bono Collaborative.

For more than 20 years, we have placed associates in three- to four-month secondments with Her Justice, a New York City nonprofit that helps women with family law and immigration issues. Working with Her Justice and many of our other pro bono clients offers associates direct client contact and the chance to see the impact of their work firsthand.

New York partner Greg Starner, who took a pro bono secondment with Her Justice as an associate, says, "This work has a direct impact on our clients' personal lives, which is very different than the impact on a commercial client. Being able to empower individual clients by giving them access to a dedicated advocate is extremely rewarding and gives a real sense of purpose for the associates taking part."

Photo by © European Lawyers in Lesvos
Lawyers and interpreters with European Lawyers in Lesvos provide advice to refugees.