Pro Bono Partnerships in Action

How Law Firms and In-House Legal Departments Can Expand Access to Justice

BY KAITLYN E. FALLON

Access to justice is a team effort. No single law firm, legal department, or nonprofit can meet the overwhelming need for legal services on its own. But when these players combine their expertise, resources, and volunteer capacity, they create powerful partnerships that make pro bono work accessible to underserved communities with urgent, unmet needs.

That is why at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP (DWT), corporate collaborations have become an important, highly effective part of the firm’s pro bono practice. By regularly partnering with in-house legal departments on community-focused efforts, DWT has built a model for turning shared commitment into practical opportunities for service that expand and scale access to justice. The examples that follow show how law firms and in-house legal departments can move from good intentions to coordinated, practical service where it is needed most.

The Power of Pro Bono Partnerships

Law firms and in-house legal departments each bring unique strengths to pro bono work.

While law firms provide broad subject-matter expertise, training resources, administrative support, and established relationships with legal services organizations, in-house legal departments bring deep community ties, operational insight, business-driven volunteer culture, and lawyers eager to contribute their time and talent. Together, their impact is far greater than what they could have achieved independently.

This approach is especially important in Washington, where many communities, particularly rural communities and underserved populations, face significant barriers to accessing legal assistance. Geographic distance, limited legal infrastructure, economic disparities, and language access issues can all make it difficult for individuals and families to obtain help with critical legal issues involving housing, education, immigration, family stability, or youth advocacy.

By partnering together on in-person and virtual clinics, coordinated trainings, and community-based outreach, DWT and in-house legal departments have effectively bridged some of these access to justice gaps, extending services into communities where legal support is limited or unavailable.

In 2025, DWT partnered with 47 different companies on 42 pro bono and social impact clinics. Across these opportunities, volunteers completed veteran discharge upgrade reviews, helped asylum seekers apply for work authorization, conducted research that helped formerly incarcerated individuals reunite with their families, mapped racially restrictive covenants, assisted with the sealing or expunging of criminal records, and educated clients on accessing vital benefits.

The same corporate partnership model also supports more targeted, local work. For example, DWT lawyers and in-house counsel collaborated with Legal Counsel for Youth and Children to assist parents with immigrant safety plans, which provide care directives in the event a parent or caregiver suddenly becomes unavailable.

While no single organization can meet every need, collaborative partnerships between law firms, in-house legal departments, and legal service organizations are powerful agents of impact.

On a practical level, specific volunteer roles differ depending on the setting. In a legal clinic, a DWT volunteer and an in-house volunteer might serve as a pair of attorney volunteers, advising a client on a certain issue or preparing a certain legal document. A volunteer could also serve as an interpreter for a session if they have special language expertise. The legal services organization involved serves as the resident subject matter expert—training the volunteer pool, supervising the clinic, and being available for questions as they arise. In these types of partnerships, the legal services organization is also responsible for sourcing clients that are good fits for a clinic, whereas the firm and in-house teams recruit volunteers to meet each client’s needs.

What makes these partnerships powerful is not just the number of volunteers involved, but the way each participant’s strengths are leveraged to benefit underserved communities. The model works because no one partner has to carry the whole effort alone; each contributes something distinct, and together those contributions become coordinated legal support where it is needed most.

Making Participation Possible

The promise of the corporate pro bono model is not simply that it reaches more people, but that it makes pro bono work easier to organize, scale, and repeat. Rather than relying on one-off volunteer events, law firms and in-house legal departments can build standing opportunities that are easier for volunteers to engage in, easier for legal service organizations to count on, and easier for communities to reliably access.

The Protecting Journalists Pro Bono Program (ProJourn) is an example of this sustained and collaborative model. Launched in 2020 by Microsoft and DWT, ProJourn aims to support local newsrooms and journalists by increasing the supply of pro bono attorneys trained in pre-publication review and access to public records—two of the most critical editorial legal needs of journalists. Over the past five years, ProJourn has supported more than 300 clients through 585 matters with the help of over 300 volunteer attorneys from law firms and in-house legal teams.

Scam Justice Legal Clinic (SJLC), created by DWT, Amazon, Better Business Bureau Institute for Marketplace Trust, and the Pro Bono Institute, offers another example of how these partnerships can solve for a gap in legal services and make engagement for all easier and more accessible. Through its limited scope legal clinic, SJLC’s volunteer attorneys provide legal advice, practical recovery plans, reporting guidance, and referrals to victims of online scams, helping them understand their rights and take action to further protect themselves. Since launching in March 2025, the clinic has hosted more than 58 clinics, serving more than 154 clients from over 40 states as of Sept. 15, 2026.

Technology also plays a critical role in both finding and engaging in opportunities to provide legal services. For example, DWT’s Pro Bono & Social Impact Department and DWT’s De Novo innovation team collaborated to create the In-House Gateway to Good (G2G), a pro bono platform that helps lawyers and business professionals easily find pro bono, social impact, and DEI educational opportunities and events, while reducing the administrative burdens of operating a pro bono program. G2G is also offered to DWT’s corporate clients, allowing users to identify opportunities by jurisdiction, practice area, malpractice insurance availability, and the communities or causes served.

For in-house legal teams, that accessibility matters. Companies that have onboarded to G2G report that pro bono opportunities are far more visible across their legal departments and easier to access for lawyers and staff spread across offices, cities, and time zones. That increased visibility does more than help volunteers find projects. It makes pro bono easier to weave into the ordinary life of a legal department, which is where the benefits of these partnerships begin to extend beyond any single clinic or matter.

These collaborative pro bono projects allow attorneys across sectors to work together toward shared goals, fostering professional connections while reinforcing a collective commitment to public service. Meanwhile, for newer attorneys and legal professionals, these experiences can also provide meaningful opportunities for mentorship, skill development, and deeper engagement with community needs.

Looking Ahead

The legal profession has an important role to play in addressing access to justice challenges. While no single organization can meet every need, collaborative partnerships between law firms, in-house legal departments, and legal service organizations are powerful agents of impact.

Ultimately, pro bono partnerships are about more than legal services alone. They reflect a shared understanding that the legal profession carries both the privilege and responsibility of contributing to stronger, more equitable communities, and that access to justice is achieved not in silos but together, through a team effort.

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