Critical Reflections of Pro Bono in Corporate Legal Practice

This project aims to critically explore Pro Bono in large UK corporate law firms. It considers how its emergence and growth relates to the legal profession’s need to re-establish its foundational claims centring its ethical character and service ethos, key principles legitimising its elite social position and mystifying its contribution to capitalist structures. Adopting a neo-Marxist lens, it examines the nature of Pro Bono seeking to capture the contradictions embedded within large firm practice including how Pro Bono’s, increasingly visible commercial function, significantly undermines the profession’s traditional public service ideology. The instrumental function of Pro Bono highlights how it is grounded in several paradoxes, while symbolising the profession’s attempt to cling onto its claimed service-ethic, it very clearly illustrates the tensions between the profession’s historically claimed values and the explicit, calculative logic underpinning its current reality. By drawing on the public disclosures of large corporate law firms, this thesis aims to explain how the growth of neo-liberal capitalism has strongly shaped the construction of Pro Bono services, reinforcing the profession’s relation to macrolevel, socio-political structures. Overall, this thesis seeks to contribute to theoretical discussions of Pro Bono and the legal profession in the UK, aiming to conceptualise the logic underpinning the expansion of Pro Bono services and challenge the justice-centred claims made by many large UK corporate law firms.