WASHINGTON, DC, July 10, 2018: Morgan Lewis has earned high marks in The American Lawyer’s 2018 Pro Bono Scorecard, surpassing its former rankings in key categories of the annual survey, which measures pro bono efforts by US-based and non-US-based lawyers at 200 law firms.
The Scorecard ranks firms based on the average number of pro bono hours worked by their lawyers and the percentage of their lawyers who performed more than 20 hours of pro bono work in the previous year. US-based Morgan Lewis lawyers earned the firm the #8 spot in the “breadth of commitment” category as a result of their commitment to pro bono work, boosting the firm’s ranking in that category overall by 18 spots from 2017. Outside the United States, Morgan Lewis lawyers secured the firm the number #3 spot among US firms in the international survey.
The firm has long encouraged its lawyers to undertake pro bono work, and gives full credit for that work. In 2017, 97% of Morgan Lewis’s global lawyers met the firm’s goal of devoting a minimum of 20 hours to pro bono representations and, for the first time, 100% of lawyers billed at least some pro bono time. In total, lawyers in Morgan Lewis offices around the world contributed more than 115,000 hours to pro bono representations in 2017, an average of more than 62 hours per lawyer. Morgan Lewis is a signatory to the Pro Bono Institute’s Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge, pledging to spend at least 3% of its billable hours each year on pro bono matters.