Pro Business

If you’ve ever doubted the legal community’s positive influence on Twin Cities business development, take a look at Manny’s Tortas, an immigrant-run restaurant with three Twin Cities–area locations. The eponymous Manny Gonzalez is a chef, originally from Mexico, who needed help incorporating his first business. He sought help from Minneapolis-based law firm Fredrikson & Byron, PA, whose attorneys gave him pro bono legal aid.

“We helped him incorporate a small restaurant at the Mercado Central,” recalls pro bono/community service coordinator Pam Wandzel. “We helped him bring his sister from Mexico and get her her green card. He then opened a second location, and we helped him with the lease. When he opened his third location at the Midtown Global Market, we assisted with that, too.”

Nevin Harwood, an attorney in the Minneapolis office of law firm Gray Plant Mooty, leads a team of lawyers who provide pro bono legal assistance to a Minneapolis organization called The Jeremiah Program. The Jeremiah Program assists single mothers and children by providing affordable housing, life skills education, empowerment training, and early childhood education. Its mission is to “transform families from poverty to prosperity.”

“[Our team] has provided pro bono legal advice for about eight years,” Harwood says, “including advice to the board and president relating to employment law, real estate, nonprofit law, intellectual property, governance, contracts, and general legal counsel.”

These are just two examples of the free legal services provided by law firms. In fact, pro bono (or pro bono publico, a phrase derived from Latin meaning “for the public good”) work is a basic tenet of the legal community’s best practices.

Minnesota’s Rules of Professional Conduct for attorneys state that all practicing lawyers should aspire to render at least 50 hours of pro bono legal services each year, either to people of limited means or to organizations designed to meet the needs of people with limited means. The rule states that lawyers should strive, in particular, to help groups that seek to protect civil rights or to do charitable work in the community, especially in cases where paying legal fees would significantly deplete the organizations’ resources.

“There has been increased enthusiasm over the last 10 years or so for lawyers to do pro bono,” says Michael Vitt, executive director of the Minneapolis-based pro bono service organization LegalCorps. “There was even a national challenge [issued in 1993 by the Pro Bono Institute at Georgetown University Law Center], especially to the big law firms around the country, to devote 3 percent of their billable hours each year to volunteer legal work. It’s sort of bragging rights. And a number of Twin Cities law firms have taken up that challenge.”