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Written by Aaron Lewis

A recent article in the June 6, 2011, Daily Journal reported that “Just Four Percent of Lawyers Give to Legal Aid Groups Fund.” 

“It’s embarrassing,” Richard W. Odgers of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP is quoted as saying of the only 4.4 percent of California attorneys give to the “Justice Gap Fund.”  The Fund was created by the Legislature five years ago as a way to offset the depressing lack of access to legal services that so many Californians face.   The collected funds are then disbursed to roughly 100 legal aid organizations in the state.   When an attorney in California pays their $410 bar dues, they are asked to give $100 to “help close the justice gap for needy Californians.” 

Odgers chairs the committee that oversees the Fund, so he is clearly invested in rectifying this situation. But Odgers’ sense of embarrassment clearly does not seem to extend to his colleagues.  The Fund brought in $809,000 this year.  According to the California State Bar website, there are nearly 172,000 active lawyers in the state.   If each of them were to heed the call of the California Bar, at $100 each, this would represent over 17 million dollars.  This is clearly a high aspirational goal, but it shows what could be accomplished if attorneys in California took this obligation seriously. 

The Article quotes Jeffery S. Davidson, a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, who believes that the giving rate “should be 100 percent, or close to it.”  The Article also notes that “although the bar declined to give a firm-by-firm breakdown of contributions, the statistics showed there were eight unnamed large firms whose attorneys made no donations to the fund.”