Not once during his 40 years as a trial lawyer did Robert Rosenbaum get to board a snowcoach for a private tour of Yellowstone National Park, go cross-country skiing and watch wolves chase elk. But that’s exactly what the retired Arnold & Porter litigator did to prepare for a major pro bono case he’s been working on since 2007, in which he represents the National Parks and Conservation Association in its battle to limit tourists’ use of snowmobiles at Yellowstone.
Rosenbaum, 68, has been fully retired from Arnold & Porter for four years, but continues to maintain two-thirds of the workload he shouldered as a senior partner. He handles environmental pro bono cases including litigation launched last month to restrict the use of off-road vehicles at Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve, and a major legal battle that ended earlier this year with Wal-Mart halting plans to build a supercenter near the site of a famous Civil War battle in Fredericksburg, Va.
(Jeffrey MacMillan/Capital Business) - Skadden partner Cliff Sloan and attorneys Geoffrey Wyatt and Sharon Kiel are representing Alex Blueford, a jailed Arkansas man, in a double jeopardy case heading to the U.S. Supreme Court.
(Jeffrey MacMillan/Capital Business) - Taxi driver Nathan Price is working with attorneys from the Akin Gump law firm in D.C.
Rosenbaum does most of his work in the same District office where he spent his entire career. He works with the same secretary he’s had for years, and gets research and litigation help from other Arnold & Porter partners and associates. It’s a pro bono model that once was rare among Washington law firms, many of which lack institutional paths for senior attorneys to wind down their commercial practice and pick up more pro bono projects as they head toward retirement.
Now, many law firms in Washington are rethinking how they structure retirement and compensation for senior lawyers. Eleven firms, including Arnold & Porter, are working with the D.C. Access to Justice Commission on a project called the Senior Attorney Initiative for Legal Services. The program, created by the commission, targets a generation of attorneys who have retired or are on the cusp of retirement — the type of lawyers who at many firms make up a good chunk of the rainmaking roster — to encourage them to stay at their firms, transition commercial work to younger attorneys, and take more pro bono cases in-house.
“It’s a paradigm shift,” said Jess Rosenbaum, (no relation to Robert Rosenbaum) executive director of the D.C. Access to Justice Commission, a group of local judges, lawyers and law professors tasked with helping low- and moderate-income residents access the civil justice system. “It used to be you had a handful of lawyers wanting to transition to pro bono, and they would have to go to a pro bono organization.”
Now, firms are trying to keep those lawyers by providing resources such as office space and staff to support pro bono work. A few, such as Arnold & Porter and Arent Fox, already have “phase-down” programs for senior lawyers to ease into to retirement over several years as they ratchet down chargeable commercial work and ratchet up pro bono involvement. Several others are working to institutionalize what’s long been an informal practice of senior or retired lawyers doing pro bono work. Those processes vary firm to firm, which have different retirement and pay structures, but the same questions remain at almost all firms navigating these changes: Do the lawyers get paid, and how? Do they get administrative support, and how much? Are they covered by the firm’s malpractice insurance?
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