Pro Business

Sometimes lawyers at the firm spot a small business that needs help. And sometimes individual attorneys receive referrals from Michael Vitt’s staff at LegalCorps, which helps connect low-income businesses and small nonprofits with volunteer legal services. The organization was founded in 2004 in response to recommendations from a Minnesota State Bar Association task force. It partners with Volunteer Lawyers Network, a Minneapolis-based organization that provides civil legal services, to screen eligible clients and to match them with the attorneys who can best help them. It also operates drop-in business law clinics.

“Most pro bono work is personal in nature, like family law, immigration issues, and landlord-and-tenant issues,” Vitt says. “Some of it, of course, will be criminal. But what we do here is business pro bono—transactional things. A lot of lawyers want to devote time to community service, but they want to devote it in an area they’re well versed in, so that they can be confident they’re doing a good job. This gives them that opportunity.”

Winthrop & Weinstine is one of the many area firms that uses LegalCorps to make pro bono connections. Diehm is enthusiastic about the organization’s influence. “It really has raised awareness within the legal community of the Twin Cities that there is an organized way you can be involved in corporate pro bono work,” she says. “We have attorneys, including myself, who participate in the legal clinics that they have. That was probably one of my first exposures to the fact there are a lot of new and emerging businesses that have a need for legal assistance.”

Other organizations also connect businesses with free legal services. Since 1991, Fredrikson & Byron has worked with Neighborhood Development Center, a St. Paul organization that helps micro-entrepreneurs to develop their businesses. Wandzel says the center has served as a funnel for microentrepreneurs’ requests for legal assistance. The challenge, then, is choosing the worthiest applicants.

“On the civil side, it’s very easy to choose [clients] when you are talking about landlord-tenant or litigation-based cases,” she says. “They are individual people, so you use the poverty guideline. It’s harder when you are talking about nonprofits or microbusinesses, because what assets do you count? Are you talking about the struggling business, or the nonexistent business? So we work on establishing guidelines. On the nonprofit side, we have to be a little bit flexible. If the organization has a budget of $200,000 or less, we will usually qualify them. If they are larger, but their mission is to assist people who are disadvantaged, economically or socially, it’s more than likely that we will assist.”

In Demand

Business lawyers are eager to do community service in their areas of expertise. But some legal specialties are more in demand than others. The top need, without a doubt, is help with incorporation. What type of entity should new organizations incorporate as?

“Many [clients] require counseling to help them decide whether they are better off organizing as a partnership or a corporation,” Heins explains. “On the nonprofit side, one of the more common [needs] is to get set up as a corporation and then to secure 501-c3 nonprofit status. Those are the most common demands. But as an entity matures, the circumstances under which they need legal services change. So we offer the full range of services. Contracts are common, as is development of HR policies. We also do a review of internal procedures.”